Google Discontinues Hangouts on Air - <AUTHOR> https://joelx.com/google-discontinues-hangouts-on-air/15177/ <comment><USER2> I wish google would provide an idea of product supported lifetimes similar to the LTS releases we see from Ubuntu. Give us a product and tell it will be supported until at least XX/XX/XX date.

I simply do not use google products beyond search and maps because I can't trust they'll be around without significant changes (gmail) or discontinuation.

<comment><USER3> What's the recommended gmail alternative for personal email?

<comment><USER4> Your mail is probably the single most important service you have on the internet. Pay for something, or host it yourself.

<comment><USER5> Hosting yourself is a good way to have half your sent emails never arrive.

Own the domain name, but let one of the big players handle deliverability for you.

<comment><USER6> This. I use my own domain names with gsuite and protonmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used Hangouts on Air to live stream several weddings. It was great because you could set it up ahead of time, send out the private link to whoever you want, and the link would work both during the event and after - no need to upload the recorded video. Oh well, time to look for something else now.

</comment><comment><USER8> There was a Hangouts on Air ? Its funny that some of these discontinued Google products seem to get more attention at their ending then at their start.

<comment><USER9> Theres an entire site dedicated to listing products killed by google: [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/) tons of products there that I didn't know existed.

<comment><USER10> I am betting Stadia is on that list within 24 months of launch

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hangouts on Air has a bit of functionality which a lot of streamers value highly: The picture will automatically change to the speaker.

Is there any other software that does this as well as Hangouts on Air does?

<comment><USER12> Zoom

<comment><USER11> Zoom has a lot of UI/UX problems

<comment><USER13> Compared to what?

<comment><USER14> Compared to any app that does not secretly install insecure spyware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there anything comparable? I watch multiple "shows" that use Hangouts on Air (Adafruit Show & Tell, Makercast, etc), I wonder what they'll use now.

<comment><USER16> From [https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7083786?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7083786?hl=en):

[https://youtube.com/webcam](https://youtube.com/webcam)

<comment><USER15> Gives a 404 for me, but my understanding is that YouTube Webcam is streaming of your own webcam and that's it.

The feature that made Hangouts Live so good was that groups of people could instantly stream together from anywhere in the world, and the focus shifted to whoever was talking. It made multi-person casts incredibly simple and didn't require having someone running OBS and managing the stream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think hangout meet live streaming is supposed to be the replacement for hangouts on air[1].

[1]: [https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9055488](https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9055488)

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html](https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html)

Sadly this more than doubles the price of the per user package and doesn't match on features.

<comment><USER18> Bad news for you: prices on new products don't ever go down.

The good news is (bad for retailers/providers) prices on old products never go up.

<comment><USER10> Both of these statements are objectively false

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just can't consider Google Products for any production use cases anymore.

</comment><comment><USER20> I guess this opens up a market opportunity for an easy to use video group chat with a youtube integration.

</comment><comment><USER13> OP, what evidence did you view/receive/etc that led you to post this?

<comment><USER21> [https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7083786?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7083786?hl=en)

Discontinued August 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why can't you use Google Meet and stream it to YouTube?

</comment><comment><USER23> As an aside, that is a refreshingly simple blog theme.

<comment><USER24> WordPress Twenty Fifteen [https://wordpress.org/themes/twentyfifteen/](https://wordpress.org/themes/twentyfifteen/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Was this a paid product? Was it heavily used?

<comment><USER26> Not a paid product, and "heavily used" maybe not, but was the only native(ish) way to live stream a group call to YouTube. You could live stream a podcast style show w/ no extra hardware or software, just your youtube/google account. It was was birthed out of Google+ so its not altogether surprising it got killed, but I was watching a live stream just last week that was using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's just Gross misconduct.</comment>


These are the 25 most popular mobile apps in America - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/253527/these-are-the-25-most-popular-mobile-apps-in-america/?utm_medium=Anuj+Adhiya&utm_source=HackerNews&utm_campaign=Follow+@anujadhiya

<comment><USER2> Apple Maps would never have such high engagement if they weren't impossible to delete from iPhones. Their interface pales in comparison to Google Maps</comment>


Land of milk and start-ups - <AUTHOR> http://www.isrealli.org/land-of-milk-and-start-ups/ <comment><USER2> >the world's second most important technology cluster, called Silicon Wadi ("canyon" or "gorge" in Hebrew)

Is that really true? Seems to me like Boston and NYC beat Tel Aviv. What's the #2 city for startups outside of the USA? London is the only one that comes to mind but I also know that it has an anti-startup culture. Maybe it really is Tel Aviv, at least until India catches up...</comment>


Managing your Amazon Redshift performance: How Plaid uses Periscope Data - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plaid.com/managing-your-amazon-redshift-performance-how-plaid-uses-periscope-data <comment><USER2> Lars here, the guy who gets the honorable mention at the end of the post "for brainstorming Redshift performance" with Austin (the author of the post) :-)

If you care to dig a little deeper into the things we discussed, we've written them up in a longer blog post:

[https://www.intermix.io/blog/top-14-performance-tuning- techn...](https://www.intermix.io/blog/top-14-performance-tuning-techniques- for-amazon-redshift/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post. Check out dbt ([https://www.getdbt.com/](https://www.getdbt.com/)) for materializing your views, lots of great features and a great community.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just wish Plaid would change the color for TD Canada Trust in Canada to the color that resembles the logo.

TD Logo: [https://i.gyazo.com/aa0d5f97954bd497b2f8b3a515752b34.png](https://i.gyazo.com/aa0d5f97954bd497b2f8b3a515752b34.png)

Plaids iframe for TD: [https://i.gyazo.com/41fd14755c25d83642359a054f9525d6.png](https://i.gyazo.com/41fd14755c25d83642359a054f9525d6.png)

Users have complained about the mismatch, iv tried contacting plaid but it hasn't gone anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER5> Query structures have a huge impact on performance, this problem can be managed by scheduling SQL based ETL for your data warehouse. We abstracted this into a simple feature on Holistics, you can take a look at how the guys at Rezdy use it [https://medium.com/rezdy-engineering/an-introduction-to- data...](https://medium.com/rezdy-engineering/an-introduction-to-data-at- rezdy-53b12d9935f5) Data Transforms SQL scheduler: [https://www.holistics.io/features/data- transforms/](https://www.holistics.io/features/data-transforms/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I would be interested to know what their monthly Redshift bill is. The work they've done is really impressive, I'm just wondering if the cost savings justify all the time they've invested. Sometimes the right answer in these situations is just to throw more CPUs at the problem.

<comment><USER7> Or Snowflake

<comment><USER3> Yep, we had similar Redshift issues and ended up switching to Snowflake.</comment></comment></comment>


How can philosophy make itself more relevant? - <AUTHOR> https://ideas.aeon.co/viewpoints/nancy-bauer-on-how-can-philosophy-make-itself-more-relevant

<comment><USER2> Truth is most academic philosophy is irredeemable garbage of the first order. Philosophy was transmitted from the Greek to the Latin, from the Germanic to the French, and presumably it was also extended to the English. There is in fact a clear line of descent in terms of the reasoning and discoveries made which can be traced from the Pre-Socratics to the critical romantic enlightenment strains of Kantian and Post-Hegelian philosophy, ending ultimately in a series of complex distortions wrought by the Marxist school.

After the second World War, however, a rupture occurred in the English language tradition that broke ties with this movement. This is why we have a "Continental" / "Analytic" divide. The former attempted to stay consistent with the philosophy passed down to the Germans and French, whereas the latter severed most of its relations to these systems of thought. It did this by largely cherry-picking the parts it liked from the Renaissance scientific thinkers along with certain Irish and British figures like Hobbes, Locke, and Mill but without ever confronting the Germanic philosophy at the peak of its development (the only notable exception being British idealism, which was shortly replaced by the logical positivists). Although it later made some amends with Kantianism, what the analytic tradition has ended up with is a one-sided formal empirical philosophy grounded more in ideological posturing than the rational discourses that characterized all preceding philosophy.

What people call British-American philosophy today then is dangerously out of step with itself. It's retracing the same errors that were worked out centuries earlier by their predecessors. There are countless examples of this, which I simply don't have the patience to enumerate. That's not to say the Continentals are without blame. They've created their own share of mistakes. But that, in effect, is a very large part of the answer about why philosophy is mostly irrelevant today in North-America. It was lead down a blind alley by ideologues and has yet to recover.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the great historical overview. I encounter a lot of these terms and ideas as independent concepts throughout my experiences but I don't have a great overall sense of their evolution and relationships to each other. Do you havd any concise overviews you could recommend? Wikipedia tends to delve right in for audiences largely familiar with the names and contexts. Id love to find a phylogeny of philisophical evolution.</comment></comment>


Giving every IPv6 address a name - <AUTHOR> https://has-a.name <comment><USER2> This is cool, but keep in mind that the operator can also get SSL certs for your site (they just point the domain somewhere else and use Lets Encrypt or similar to get a certificate). So from a security perspective, you are putting a ton of trust if you use this for anything real.

<comment><USER3> Also don't use for anything real, because you should not be teaching users that [https://1234-5678-9adc-def0-1234-5678-9abc- def0.has-a.name](https://1234-5678-9adc-def0-1234-5678-9abc-def0.has-a.name) is the proper, trusted domain for your service. Because it was supposed to be [https://1234-5678-9abc-def0-1234-5678-9abc- def0.has-a.name](https://1234-5678-9abc-def0-1234-5678-9abc-def0.has-a.name) and I just tricked _you_.

<comment><USER4> The fundamental problem with this whole scheme is that it is still just trying to memorize the entire IP address. The point of a name is to make it something that feels natural for actual people.

Maybe it would make more sense to choose the 65,536 most common English words (or whatever language you want) and break the address up into 8 words to form a crazy looking phrase. This is still difficult to memorize but not as bad as just stuffing 128 bits of hex down your throat. You could even allow for the collapsing 0s by making entry 0 be "and" and adding a bit of logic that does the collapse.

For fun I wrote a tiny script that does this and tried it with their example domain:

1234:5678:9abc:def0:1234:5678:9abc:def0 -> balcony gaining pawn toothill balcony gaining pawn toothill

Or Google's address from that page:

2a00:1450:4009:811::200e -> chinker bauchle dorter amor and bromidic

So maybe this wasn't the best idea, but at least they're a bit more amusing than the hex noise in the article.

Anyway, if anybody else wants to play around with it I have a tiny demo: [http://jubei.ceyah.org/cgi-bin/ipv6toenglish](http://jubei.ceyah.org/cgi- bin/ipv6toenglish)

<comment><USER5> One of the biggest things that keeps me using IPv4 is that I can memorize all the IPv4 addresses for most of my servers. That alone is a huge mental hurdle.

<comment><USER6> That just proves you haven't understood IPv6 yet. ULA addresses make it much easier, e.g. fd00::1 or fd00:2 (though this is bad practice, should be fdxy:zvwx:xyzw, xyvwz being random).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice! I run a similar service at [https://ip6.name/](https://ip6.name/). The service also supports empty groups, e.g. 2001.db8.8000.x.1.ip6.name resolves to 2001:db8:8000::1, as well as 2001.db8.8000.0.0.0.0.1.ip6.name.

A neat one is x.ip6.name, which resolves to ::, e.g. localhost...

</comment><comment><USER8> Why you need this? You can get SSL certificates IP addresses Anything that is 'common name'.

[https://1234:5678:9abc:def0:1234:5678:9abc:def0](https://1234:5678:9abc:def0:1234:5678:9abc:def0). should work just as well as [https://1234-5678-9abc-def0-1234-5678-9abc- def0.has-a.name](https://1234-5678-9abc-def0-1234-5678-9abc-def0.has-a.name).

Right?

<comment><USER9> Letsencrypt won't issue certificates to IP addresses - but will to domain names (including those assigned by dynamic DNS providers, but most dynamic DNS providers need manual sign-up with username and password)

Of course, has-a.name will be rate-limited to 50 certificate a week by Letsencrypt until they get themselves onto the public suffix list. And whether it's a good idea to bypass LE's no-certs-for-ip-addresses policy is another matter...

<comment><USER10> Couldn't they just get a wildcard cert for "*.has-a.name"?

<comment><USER11> And give it to everyone?

<comment><USER12> not sure what you mean by give it to everyone. who are they giving it to?

<comment><USER13> Anyone who then wants their site accessible through this. It's not a proxy, they're just returning your IPv6 address based on what subdomain you type.

In order for a wildcard to work, every single user of the service needs the private key for that wildcard certificate.

<comment><USER12> I feel like I'm missing something. How is this different than AWS providing a wildcard certificate for every S3 bucket via [https://<bucket>.s3.amazonaws.com](https://<bucket>.s3.amazonaws.com). Is it the same thing?

<comment><USER6> Yes, you are missing something: S3 bucket resolves to Amazon's servers. <ipv6>.has-a.name resolves to the ip address specified in <ipv6>. You will have to install the certificate on the actual server that serves the webpage. For S3 bucket this is Amazon, so they can put their certificate. For your own IP, you need to install the certificate yourself, so they would have to hand you their private key as well, which is not allowed.

<comment><USER14> Yup. This is one thing I hate about AWS. Oh sure make it nice and easy to use the wildcard cert on any AWS infrastructure. But what if you want to use that wild card cert somewhere else? Too bad. AWS holds the private key for your wildcard cert, and they don't give it to you. They hold it hostage on their server.

<comment><USER15> Considering the domain is amazonaws.com, it is only fair they keep it with themselves. They can't be in the business of providing arbitrary subdomains under their parent domain just to have it point to some other external IP.

<comment><USER14> I'm talking about custom domains. You can setup AWS to manage certs for mycompany.com (for example). When you do that they ought to give you a copy of the private key to *.mycompany.com. I am not talking about the amazonaws.com certs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shouldn't this been appropriately named has-aaaa.name?

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh, I was hoping this was going to be like the What 3 Words of IP addresses. Like "fourteen-mangled-yellow-squirrels.has-a.name".

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh boy, this is dangerous. A lot of things are tied to DNS name, so you're giving a lot of power if you point a routable address to it.

<comment><USER11> Not sure what you mean by "point a routable address to it"... you don't point an address at a domain, you point a domain at an address. And you can point your domain at any address, whether you own it or not.

<comment><USER18> It was brain shortcut, I meant point your reverse DNS of a routable IP to that name.

<comment><USER6> How is that dangerous? If you don't "own" the IP, you can't add PTR for it.

<comment><USER18> Exactly, but if you own it and add `PTR` to `has-a.name` then in turn you give them power. They can request a new certificate under that name and point that host to another IP. I'm sure there are other ways to abuse it as well.

<comment><USER6> But if they point to a new IP, the other IP's PTR is useless.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but what's your point? You seem to understand DNS enough and at the same time you don't seem to see the obvious security implication, are you affiliated with that domain?

<comment><USER6> No, I am not affiliated with them (though we follow each other on Twitter). My point is, I don't see any security implication involved with a wrong PTR record in relation to this service. If I set the PTR of my IP to this domain, but the domain itself resolves to some other IP. Or are you implying they can only request a cert if the PTR matches the domain? At least for LetsEncrypt this is not true, otherwise home owners with dynamic IPs wouldn't be able to request certificates.

<comment><USER18> If you provide PTR that points back to that name, configure web server to handle requests to that name, you basically makes the domain an official one.

As your users start using it, the owner of the name can now point the AAAA record to another server that will act as a proxy, request a new certificate (he owns the domain) and see all the encrypted communication.

<comment><USER6> But you don't need PTR in any of these steps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would be interesting to combine this with something like the PGP word list [0] to get human readable names for an IP address.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list)

<comment><USER20> Omg. That is super cool. I want to turn this as a phone interview question. Sounds like fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice! I had been thinking for a while on building something like this but that provided reverse PTR records, too.

Some providers like Tunnelbroker easily allow you to change the delegation for the reverse records for your delegated range: if you have the 1234:5678:9abc:def0::/64 subnet, they let you change the delegation of the *.0.f.e.d.c.b.a.22.214.171.124.184.108.40.206.1.ip6.arpa DNS zone or add records to it as you please.

So having a public service that responded to those (following the example, all you would need is the server to respond to 0.f.e.d.c.b.a.184.108.40.206.188.8.131.52.1.0.f.e.d.c.b.a.126.96.36.199.126.96.36.199.1.ip6.arpa with a PTR record to 1234-5678-9abc-def0-1234-5678-9abc-def0.has-a.name) would enable you to also make reverse DNS work for all your network easily, as long as you delegate your reverse zone to that server.

Unfortunately probably only Tunnelbroker and hosting providers allow you to do this - I don't expect any residential ISP would (they would also probably provide their own reverse DNS, though).

</comment><comment><USER22> TLS concerns aside, there appears to be no business model here, so it's not clear how this would become reliable

<comment><USER23> There is no business model behind has-a.name. It's main motivation came from our customers, who are using the IPv6VPN quite intensive.

Many of our customers are app developers (ruby, python, clojure, you name it) and they develop on their notebooks that are IPv6 enabled (usually a /64 or /48 per device).

To be able to share in-development state with other remote developers, the common thing to do would be to pass around a [http://[2a0a:e5c0:...]](http://\[2a0a:e5c0:...\]) url that was http only.

This is not only cumbersome (no one likes to type square brackets), but also potentially risky, as there is no MITM protection whatsoever.

To fix this problem we created has-a.name, because customers/developers now go ahead and just create a docker container and share it as [https://2a0a-e5c0-...has-a.name](https://2a0a-e5c0-...has-a.name) with their co-developers.

Because our whole company consists of a bunch of Open Source Hackers we decided to make it public to allow others work around the same problem.

Even though we promise to never change the automatic resolution (that's work, doesn't make sense to do that for us), you don't have to trust has-a.name. You can register your own domain and replicate our setup and use your domain instead.

I hope that clarifies a bit the business model question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is this accomplished by ip6.arpa?

[https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and- asns/db/support/document...](https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and- asns/db/support/documentation/glossary/ip6.arpa)

<comment><USER25> No, ip6.arpa is for reverse DNS; this is forward DNS.

<comment><USER26> If you are able to have the reverse zone for your subnet delegated to nameservers under your control, you can use it as a "forward" zone too.

DNS doesn't technically have the concept of forward and reverse - it's just record types and an agreed format that the PTR records should be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My ISP doesn't seem to support ipv6 If I check on [https://test- ipv6.com/](https://test-ipv6.com/) I geta bunch of blue dot warnings. Like: "You appear to be able to browse the IPv4 Internet only. You will not be able to reach IPv6-only sites." Is this common or is my ISP behind the times and could this become a problem? I have done some development with CoAP and ipv6 so it has been an issue for me. On the name issue I think its a great idea, even if its a name that resolves to native ipv6 addresses it would be very useful to me

<comment><USER6> Yes, it seems like it is behind the times. It doesn't matter much at the moment, as there are no real IPv6-only services of relevance (unless you need to connect to the private IPv6-only NAS of a friend or sth like that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Curious why the rfc didn't choose base64 as the representation format. It won't change what it looks like on the wire but will result in shorter addresses that can in part have some meaning. Matter of fact has there even been such a proposal.

I naively think '2001:ALN:LabNet01::' or somethig of the like is not only better but displaces some of the need to use dns (at least in a lan). I am so curious about this, I hope someone more knowledgeable can explain.

<comment><USER29> Or base58

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What would the value of this be? Why does it even matter? I am struggling to decide if this is even valuable.

<comment><USER31> With this you can refer to a machine in the IP6 space without setting up any DNS yourself. In some situations a hostname works where an IP-Address doesn't. They gave one such example: Getting SSL certs.

Clearly it's not a good idea to rely on this for anything serious so the value is mainly convenience during prototyping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is nice:

> With has-a.name you can now also use SSL certificates on any IPv6 address. > Even better: any docker container can now have an official, valid > certificate!

</comment><comment><USER33> Meanwhile, we're still waiting for VZ to put Fios on IPv6...

</comment><comment><USER34> Note that xip.io does this for IPv4

<comment><USER18> the xip.io is primarily used by private addresses (I hope no one uses it for public ones) there are no real private ipv6 addresses so by using the original service it's risky.

<comment><USER31> I was sure there is a similar concept in IP6 to the IP4 private ranges. And indeed: Unique local address[0] serves the same purpose.

And you can use them with has-a.name: The domain fde4-8dba-82e1-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000.has-a.name is translated to address fde4:8dba:82e1:: just as expected.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What is a IPv6 application?

</comment><comment><USER36> This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

Also, it's dangerous.

<comment><USER37> Can you elaborate on #2?

<comment><USER38> you're trusting the operator to return the right ip address, and not returning something nefarious. it's definitely not as secure as using the raw address, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is all well and good and all.

I always see these ingenious developments with IPv6. But we kind of forget that deployment is a nightmare.

I think we need forget that we're putting the cart before the horse.

I don't see a future for IPv6 while there's no officially endorsed transition plan that has an actual incentive.

IPv6 only makes sense for mobile since carriers use it to shed load off CGNAT. In turn this incentivises large traffic sites that cater to mobile (e.g. Youtube, Google, etc.) to also help out by operating over IPv6. The only reason carriers can do this is because they usually have full control to configure the IP stack connecting to the network.

Penetrating the residential is a pipe dream.

Let's not forget in the early to mid 90s IPv6 was decided on to mitigate the address exhaustion issue. Its use has basically made a scratch.

So many other technologies have come and gone and a few paradigm shifts (e.g. cloud everything).

And IPv6 continue to sits idle.

<comment><USER40> Mobile networks typically use 464XLAT. Deployment is not hard. The main hold up for resi networks is CPE vendors don't typically support CLAT, but most established players can do dual stack for now.

IPv6 is at about 30% of traffic now.

<comment><USER39> Yep, any day now.</comment></comment></comment>


Of Amazon and eBooks - <AUTHOR> http://nikgregory.com/2010/02/of-amazon-and-ebooks/

<comment><USER2> The problem that I have with his analysis is that it assumes that we continue with the all huge costs of publishing (including marketing).

At some point many of these costs may be significantly wiped out, e.g., by cutting out much of marketing (as well as shipping, wholesalers, etc.). What if writing/"publishing"/marketing of "books" (fiction & nonfiction) became a mutant of current blogging: with the public voting/marketing through the digital social media.

An ebook _revolution_ is not going to happen IMHO through supporting the existing overheads of the 20th century publishing model.

<comment><USER3> Exactly.

The concept of "publisher as angel investor" only works if you assume the old publishing model of printing, storing, and distributing physical objects.

Electronic publishing is a completely different cost paradigm.

<comment><USER4> Not as much as you think: writers still need editors. They still need someone to help them market their books, since every minute not spent writing is a minute not spent honing their craft. Merely saying "get a blog" isn't enough. They still need to be able to eat. And so on. A lot of these analyses have been busily pointing out physical costs account for a relatively small proportion of the overall cost of a book.

In addition, you, the reader, still needs someone to help you sort through the vast amount of stuff out there that you could read. Publishers, for all their other ills, help do this to some extent, despite all the false positives and false negatives that get through (or don't).

Electronic publishing might _eventually_ become "a completely different cost paradigm," but it sure isn't there yet.

<comment><USER5> What you say is correct but doesn't even go far enough. What authors need is _an insurance company_.

What risk is being insured against? The risk of spending six months to a year per book to construct books, and then discovering that the books can't make enough money to feed you. The scariest cost of producing a book has nothing to do with paper, or even with marketing or editing. It is _opportunity cost_ : When you're writing a book, you're not doing anything else, and you may be very well throwing your time away.

Software startups reduce this kind of risk by taking money from angels or VCs. (a.k.a. "publishers"). Or they try to gauge product/market fit as quickly as possible by doing things like shipping early, charging money, listening to customers, A/B testing, etc. However, this doesn't work well for books. Books have a smaller market than software, are _harder_ to prototype, are much harder for customers to try out (it takes a lot of effort to thoroughly evaluate a novel), are much less valuable if they fail [1], and have a much more mature, undifferentiated, and well-saturated market: Your software has to compete against about fifty years' worth of earlier software products, most of which suck, and 95% of which won't even run on the machines your customers own. Your book has to compete against _William Shakespeare_. Literally.

How does the insurance work? A publisher reads your first book (or the first three chapters and an outline, which I'm told is a fairly standard way to submit a book proposal) and then offers immediate, free feedback: Either they accept it, which means pledging to stake a bunch of money and reputation to bring it to market, or they reject it. If your first book doesn't get accepted, it's a very valuable sign: You need to keep your day job, and you need to either become a better writer, try writing something different, try a different hobby, or learn to live without actually selling any of your work.

\---

[1] Everyone on HN knows that having worked at a failed startup is no big deal. It teaches you a lot. You get a lot of resume-enhancing experience. And your failed software experiment may have valuable pieces that can be extracted. But bad novels are literally a dime a dozen, and an unpublished novelist with three failed novels is not worth any more on the job market than one with no failed novels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish the author had provided citations for his costs, because I know at least one of his number - book printing cost, is just plain wrong, which causes me to suspect the rest.

"The Printing process costs, on average, 10% ($4) of the cover price of a book, "

So, "Printing Process" is not a function of the cover price of the book. It is a function of what size of book, spine design, what type of binding, what type of covers, whether there is printing on the inside of the cover, whether there is color, what type of paper, and how many pages, and how many books you will be printing.

For example, sitting on my bed right now are two softcover books:

"Maps in a mirror, short fiction of Orson Scott Card", 671 pages, $23.95 list.

"Advanced Unix Programming, Second Edition", 717 pages, $64.99 list.

Both Black and White, perfect Binding, color cover, no printing on inside of covers.

<http://www.instantpublisher.com/Price-quote.aspx> sugests that the cost of each should be $4.72 - which is 19% of the Orson Scott Card, and 7.2% of Advanced Unix Printing.

In addition, this is what it would cost _me_ - I have to believe that large publishers are able to print their books for less that what I would pay.

<comment><USER5> So, the author's back-of-the-envelope calculation is 10%, yours is 13% (the average of 19% and 7.2%), and your conclusion is that "the author is just plain wrong"?

What would the author's rough estimates look like if they were "in excellent agreement" with yours? Would "11%" be close enough for you, or are you holding out for "12.8% to 13.3%"?

Can I suggest that you read the Wikipedia article on "orders of approximation"? Or, better yet, "Fermi problem"?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_approximation>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem>

<comment><AUTHOR> Of a few sources for the clearest figures, most appeared to be quoting from this, and not self-pub figures like the OP of this thread.

Here's the best written I could find: [http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book- cost...](http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html)

List price = MSRP/Cover Price.

If John Grisham has 10% printing costs, I think everyone else is likely to. The problem with extrapolating from self-pub figures is that these companies make money off of printing. Publishers don't make a penny off of printing, they make their money once pre-production and marketing has been paid off.

Of course every book is unique, some writers are awful and need more editing, others are brilliant and need none. Colour pages drive up prices ridiculously and non-fiction books _are not_ priced like fiction, which is the major debate piece on the eBook front, discussing non-fiction is rather irrelevant as prices are based on work regardless of cost, plus they need to pay off expenses _fast_ due to far lower sale volumes.

<comment><USER7> But _do_ the publishers really not make a penny off of printing? In the music business, the labels often own the manufacturing plants as well...is that not the case in print publishing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Net loss: $10 per eBook."

Why are we equating a published singular book with an ebook? Net loss per ebook can only be calculated based on the number of ebooks _sold_ , not on the number of ebooks _produced_. One ebook is equivalent to thousands of ebooks, there is no difference.

People, it's digital.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. I think people tend to underestimate the cost of actually printing stuff, as well as shipping it, storing it, returning it when it doesn't sell, etc. It all adds up, and required a lot of capital machinery, buildings, employees, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Printing is 10% of cover price, distribution is 10% of cover price (this I believe includes the cost of returning too). For a hardcover this can total $8, for a mass market paperback this can be $1. Amazon, lik

I didn't get into a discussion of benefits of eBooks, especially when colour e-ink readers arrive. Specifically comics and graphic novels would likely fare excellently, low editing costs (almost all the work is done by the author art, inking, and minor amounts of writing), virtually no marketing or advertising costs make printing (higher than a simple black-ink book) and distribution the major costs. It could literally be back to $0.99 comic books. Printing in comics can be up to 40% of cover price, distribution taking 30%, which compared to a book is killer.

I have no intention to say eBooks aren't going to become huge one day, but many of the costs in book making are from well before the ink hits paper. Unless you're willing to sacrifice quality, the prices are going to remain very close.

<comment><USER9> Could you cite your sources? Are those industry averages, or just for one publisher you are familiar with?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the best explained I've found: [http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book- cost...](http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html)

Other breakdowns always seem to hit close. All numbers are averages, but printing generally hit between 8% and 12% for fiction. However all prices vary, some writers need no editing so figures for printing will be artificially raised, whilst a poor writer with great ideas will cost a small fortune to edit and printing will be tiny in comparison.

Colour pages and anything else always cost more (I once read 20 colour pages in a book can cost as much to print as the other 230 pages), same with non- colour artwork and everything else.

Non-fiction is always priced differently from fiction due to extra steps in the editing process. Sources have to be reviewed and evaluated, plus the author can have an advance before they've finished the second chapter.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Options for giving math talks and lectures online - <AUTHOR> https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/03/10/options-for-giving-math-talks-and-lectures-online/ <comment><USER2> There's a respondent on the page suggesting OBS, the Open Broadcaster Software. I think that's the way to go. If you need to feed it in to Zoom or Skype or something, you should be able to use OBS-VirtualCam (haven't tried it myself, yet) [https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs- virtualcam.539/](https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.539/)

one camera aimed at you, and another one aimed at your desk, with some different scenes set up in OBS for focusing on you, the desk, or some powerpoint slides.

then let students use the textual chat feature. (just plain superior to taking audio from 20+ students simultaneously. that'll never turn out well.)

<comment><USER2> i wasn't aware these were a thing:

[https://www.amazon.com/IPEVO-Definition-Document- Camera-5-88...](https://www.amazon.com/IPEVO-Definition-Document- Camera-5-880-4-01-00/dp/B079DLTG9F/)

might be a nice way to aim a camera at your desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Flipped class example [https://youtu.be/zec5cq6WiAk](https://youtu.be/zec5cq6WiAk) the students participate in live chat and sign into some software (Canvas and Gradescope) to answer exercises. Twitch stream/Youtube works fine though MIT has some kind of video software that automatically follows the lecturer with numerous angles for blackboards [https://video.odl.mit.edu/collections/99c40d462fcf457e961185...](https://video.odl.mit.edu/collections/99c40d462fcf457e96118521cbc0ee62/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I know the world is going to change because of COVID-19. I'm just not sure how much, or for how long. If one good thing comes out of this, forcing every college teacher in the US to teach remotely for the rest of the semester might lead to some interesting innovation!

</comment><comment><USER5> Twitch do streaming really well and you can use Discord to chat.

Half the students will already be on Discord and probably on Twitch too.

For a blackboard, why? With a computer you have infinite space as long as you're using some kind of note taking software. I know that I've abused OneNote's live editing feature to draw on my laptop screen via my tablet + pen. Plus everything electronic can be exported and shared.

<comment><USER6> What are the advantages of Twitch over something more business-y like Zoom?

<comment><USER5> I've had better experience with the consumer/gaming tools than I have with "Business" tools. It's probably because they stay more focussed whilst the business tools morph into hydras as part of their data lock-in strategies (here's looking at you, Slack).

<comment><USER7> discord voice chat is miles beyond nicer than slack or zoom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just went out and bought a drawing tablet peripheral for about $60. I share the screen with slides on one side and onenote on the other, and write on onenote with the tablet like a whiteboard. I've already done a couple lectures and in some ways it's better than the real thing since you just continually scroll the notes you are producing and all is in one field of view.

On the other hand I've been trying to use google forms with little quizzes for periodic feedback and that's been terrible. No matter how basic a question you ask, some students will take 100x too long trying to research the answer on google or just hiding or who knows what. And you just have to cut half the class off with no responses if you want to move on in a reasonable time. Putting students on the spot by walking over to them in person is the only way to get some students to participate.

</comment><comment><USER9> Last week, I tried teaching half of the university class in person, and the other half watched online. I sat at the desk in the classroom and streamed with Microsoft Teams

1) a video of me (using the selfie-camera on the iPhone) and

2) the screen content of my iPad, where I used the Pencil to write on PowerPoint slides.

What was my experience? I missed a live feedback, both during lecturing, and while answering questions. I sort of talked into the void. Luckily there were still students in the same room, so I got a visual response here. However I think the feedback could be improved very much if each of the remote students would also stream their video (all at once, without audio). I hope this allows to have a more 'class-roomy' experience, also among the students themselves. Is there anyone with a similar setup and experience?

<comment><USER10> > I missed a live feedback, both during lecturing, and while answering > questions.

Perhaps you could integrate some sort of chat for this?

<comment><USER9> There is a live chat functionality, yes, thank you for the idea. In terms of feedback, I miss fine detail, just in the moment: For example, if the students appear overwhelmed by an explanation, or if they like a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since a lot of people are or will be administering exams, I want to put in a plug for the wonderful Gradescope (with which I have no association other than as a former user, and they sent me a t-shirt). I used it in my classes a couple years ago when I was a graduate student. It _massively_ streamlines the process of grading. Relevant to the current outbreak is the ability to easily return graded items to the students through the service. You can even handle regrade requests, should you choose to enable them. They also now seem to have some test-administration capabilities, but I've never used that.

The process for using it goes like this:

1\. Upload a blank exam and mark where names and answers are (so, e.g., they'll know where on each exam to expect the student's answer to 2(b)).

2\. Scan and upload the finished exams. Most copying machines can handle this pretty easily.

3\. Use an OCR-assisted process to match exams to names or student ID numbers. Without ID numbers, this took me under 2 minutes for 40-50 students.

4\. As you grade each problem, you make notes and deductions as you go. e.g. "You forgot the +C, -1 point". If you see the same error again, you can use a hotkey to affix the same note and deduction to subsequent exams. You can also grade additively, if you prefer. And you don't have to deal with stacks of paper exams.

5\. If you decide to alter a note, or that you were to harsh or lenient on a particular error, the changes are applied to all exams with that mark. This takes a lot of pressure off of your initial grading decisions ("Oh, shit, it looks like getting that was harder than I thought. Should I go through all the exams and lower their deductions?"). The notes support LaTeX math symbols.

6\. Once you're finished grading, you don't have to tally and enter the grades. No more worrying about final-grade-altering addition errors. You can export the results as a spreadsheet. You get granular, question-level data on how everyone did. You can publish the results to students. If you choose to accept regrade requests, you can do so without worrying about post-return alterations of answers.

This is all without their upgraded AI-assisted service. It slashed about 75% off of the time I spent on grading and 90% off the stress of grading fairly and consistently. And it gets even better if you have multiple graders with their team service; no more coordinating the passing around of exams! Everyone can work at the same time.

It's an absolute _godsend_ if you have a lot of grading to do. I can't recommend it highly enough.

</comment><comment><USER12> One option: screencast development of a Jupyter notebook.

Jupyter Notebook supports LaTeX (MathTeX) and inline charts. You can create graded notebooks with nbgrader and/or with CoCalc (which records all (optionally multi-user) input such that you can replay it with a time slider).

Jupyter notebooks can be saved to HTML slides with reveal.js, but if you want to execute code cells within a slide, you'll need to install RISE: [https://rise.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://rise.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)

Here are the docs for CoCalc Course Management; Handouts, Assignments, nbgrader: [https://doc.cocalc.com/teaching-course- management.html](https://doc.cocalc.com/teaching-course-management.html)

Here are the docs for nbgrader: [https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)

You can also grade Jupyter notebooks in Open edX:

> _Auto-grade a student assignment created as a Jupyter notebook, using the > nbgrader Jupyter extension, and write the score in the Open edX gradebook_

[https://github.com/ibleducation/jupyter-edx-grader- xblock](https://github.com/ibleducation/jupyter-edx-grader-xblock)

Or just show the Jupyter notebook within an edX course: [https://github.com/ibleducation/jupyter-edx-viewer- xblock](https://github.com/ibleducation/jupyter-edx-viewer-xblock)

There are also ways to integrate Jupyter notebooks with various LMS / LRS systems (like Canvas, Blackboard, etc) "nbgrader and LMS / LRS; LTI, xAPI" on the "Teaching with Jupyter Notebooks" mailing list: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jupyter- education/_U...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jupyter- education/_UP-VjBYXJE)

"Teaching and Learning with Jupyter" ("An open book about Jupyter and its use in teaching and learning.") [https://jupyter4edu.github.io/jupyter-edu- book/](https://jupyter4edu.github.io/jupyter-edu-book/)

<comment><USER12> > _TLJH: "The Littlest JupyterHub" describes how to setup multi-user > JupyterHub with e.g. Docker spawners that isolate workloads running with > shared resources like GPUs and TPUs: > [http://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/](http://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/) _

> _" Zero to BinderHub" describes how to setup BinderHub on a k8s cluster: > [https://binderhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/zero-to- > binderhub...](https://binderhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/zero-to-binderhub/) > _

If you create a git repository with REES-compatible dependency specification file(s), students can generate a container with all of the same software at home with repo2docker or with BinderHub.

> _REES is one solution to reproducibility of the computational environment._

>> _BinderHub ([https://mybinder.org/](https://mybinder.org/) ) creates docker containers from {git repos, Zenodo, FigShare,} and launches them in free cloud instances also running JupyterLab by building containers with repo2docker (with REES (Reproducible Execution Environment Specification)). This means that all I have to do is add an environment.yml to my git repo in order to get Binder support so that people can just click on the badge in the README to launch JupyterLab with all of the dependencies installed._

>> _REES supports a number of dependency specifications: requirements.txt, Pipfile.lock, environment.yml, aptSources, postBuild. With an environment.yml, I can install the necessary CPython /PyPy version and everything else._

> > _REES:[https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/specification.h...](https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/specification.html) > _

> _REES configuration > files:[https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config_files.ht...](https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config_files.html) > _

> _Storing a container built with repo2docker in a container registry is one > way to increase the likelihood that it 'll be possible to run the same > analysis pipeline with the same data and get the same results years later._

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I were faced with switching to this mode quickly, and not futzing with a lot of technology, I'd think about rigging up a web cam to look down on a pad of paper.</comment>


Paid to Eat Pancakes: The Truth about "Passions" - <AUTHOR> http://nerdgap.com/paid-to-eat-pancakes-the-truth-about-passions/

<comment><USER2> I think it's sometimes easy for (passionate) programmers to forget that they happen to be obsessed with something that is also a highly marketable skill. From our little group of elementary school computer enthusiasts only one other guy and I were into programming. It's only the two of us who still make a living working with our passion, the "traders" and "swappers" did not turn out to have hobbies that extended into multi-decade long careers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Beyond the retro-definition of the word "passion", I agree that "doing what you love" is a pretty naive view of the work world. When I get asked "What would you want to do all day," I answer "drink, play video games, and look at naked girls." Nobody wants to pay me to do that, trust me. I do, on the other hand enjoy programming. I also get sick of it.

tl;dr: A career is ruining an activity you enjoy in the name of money.

<comment><USER4> Yep, it's easier to be "passionate" about something when you don't do it 40+ hours per week.

Also, I enjoy programming, I have a programming job. I wish my job had more actual programming in it. When it's a job you can't just get to do the fun parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of great points raised, but there's still something to be said for working in a field you enjoy. Forget the semantic dance around the meaning of the word "passion" for a minute.

Let's take the author's hypothetical example of the person who's really into composting. Maybe this person isn't "passionate" about composting to the point of stark-raving obsession, but pretty much anywhere just shy of that mark is feasible. This person is probably better served working in the gardening industry -- maybe as a landscape designer, or an executive at a home & garden brand, or starting up a community or zine or product line around gardening, etc. -- than in, say, the auto industry.

What determines whether or not this person should _actually_ pursue his "passion" for composting in the professional arena? The degree of love for the subject, certainly, but also risk tolerance and perseverence. Those are the two critical, but oft-overlooked factors that the "follow your passion!" self- help gurus gloss over.

The hard truth is that not everyone's cut out for following his or her passion. Some have the drive, the obsession, the work ethic, the aptitude, and the right mix of circumstances to make it happen. Some don't. The real trick isn't testing how strong your passion is; it's testing how strong _you_ are.

<comment><USER6> There's a huge difference about being "into" composting... and enjoying talking about composting, teaching composting, selling people on composting equipment/techniques, writing about composting, etc.

This is an important distinction. If you're "into" composting but those other things above disinterest you, it's easy to try to get yourself stuck in a situation that you hate. Where you eventually even stop enjoying composting.

I wrote about this exact scenario: <http://unicornfree.com/2011/dont-follow- your-passion/>

<comment><USER5> I don't deny that it's an extremely important distinction, and perhaps I should have gone to greater lengths to clarify as much.

At the same time, I feel that the article set up a bit of a false dichotomy by focusing too heavily on the extreme end of the "passion" spectrum. It's not a black-and-white choice between "mildly interested in" and "slaveringly obsessed with." There is a pretty broad spectrum in between those points. "Into" was probably a casually bad word choice on my part, but again, I'd really suggest that we stay away from a semantics debate here.

To re-clarify: I agree, more or less, with a great deal of the article and its broad analysis. At times, however, the author gets too bogged down in a dissection of the semantics and usage of the word "passion," leading him astray.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Worth noting: the word "amateur" means "lover of" or "love doing".

Someone who is "professional", on the other hand, is a person who gets consistently the same result from doing the same work. This is generally what people pay for.

Now would you rather want to be someone who loves what they're doing or someone who's basically a working machine?

Going from passionate amateur to passionate professional is extremely difficult.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think there's a difference between making a living and making a life. I bet, if I was passionate enough about eating pancakes, I could find some way to make a living. That living might be substandard and only provide cheap room and board plus bad nutritional intake from consuming nothing but pancakes. However, I bet I could do it. I could not make a life, e.g. one where I could provide for my family, buy a new car, travel to France, learn to scuba dive, etc, etc.

If you're truly passionate enough about something, you can make a living at it. It just may not be a very good one.

<comment><USER9> Relevantly, I have a friend who makes a living drinking Scotch.

Quite literally; his job title is "Master of Whiskey," and that's what he does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I once heard a good definition of "passion" that fits this context - it's when something gets you up in the morning and keeps you up at night.

<comment><USER11> But this guy calls that an enthusiasm. That was his point, that passion requires out-of-control emotion.

<comment><USER12> I think in this day and age, that's just splitting hairs though. Most people would love to have something that makes them spring out of bed in the morning and keeps them so engaged that they can't sleep at night. Well, they'd love it until they hate it. And of course there are some people who are wired in such a way that they could never feel that way about anything and to them, the grass is always greener on the other side. That's ok. In the immortal words of Ted Knight, "The world needs ditch diggers too."

<comment><USER13> (Author of the post being discussed here - hi there, how you ya doin').

My point in writing that post was to give the reality-based side of the story because, as I mentioned, there is a frickton of people out there who would have you believe that you can make a whole lot of dough doing, almost literally, anything if you really love it enough. Naturally, this is true of some people (like programmers and writers), but the problem I have is that the message being sent by these people is that absolutely anybody can have this particular part of your life unearthed if you just pay them $297 for a couple of hours on the phone. They'll tell you to start a blog about [thing], then write and sell an ebook about [thing] or offer coaching on [thing] - rinse and repeat until you have time to pick out your yacht. It's horseshit.

Ahem.

<comment><USER14> You've pretty much summarized 130 pages of Gary Vaynerchuk's "Crush It" in three sentences!

<comment><USER13> In that case, that'll be $18.95 ;)

<comment><USER14> you're not getting my money _again_ mister!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Which programming language you should use for a web backend - robert-zaremba http://rz.scale-it.pl/2013/03/08/which_programming_language_should_you_use_for_a_web_backend.html#.UTlo9BaNYGc.hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> _Lot of banks use them because they have a lot of money and choose expensive products. Java is expensive because it was built around Enterprise model_

WTF? That doesn't even begin to make sense. What exactly is expensive about Java?

The basic runtime? No, binary JREs are distributed gratis by Oracle and the JDK is F/OSS and you can always use OpenJDK.

Application server? No, JBoss, Glassfish, Geronimo and JOnAS are all OSS and freely available.

Development tools? No, popular text editors like Emacs and Vim work fine for Java, and there are IDEs like Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEA are OSS and freely available. Popular build tools like Ant, Ivy and Maven are OSS and freely available.

Web frameworks? No, there are something like 60 web frameworks for Java: Struts, Play, Webwork, Tapestry, Wicket, Spring MVC, ZK, etc., etc., etc. Most are OSS and freely available.

Libraries? I can't even name a "for pay" Java library, but there are freely available, OSS libraries available in Java for almost any task you can think of.

Developers? OK, you got me. Since Java is still pretty popular in the enterprise, there's pretty good demand for skilled Java developers, so they don't come cheap. But guess what.. NO skilled developers come cheap!

Databases? Either "no" or "irrelevant" depending on how you look at it. Java works fine with almost any database, including both "really fucking expensive" ones like Oracle and DB2, as well as the standard assortment of F/OSS databases: MySQL, Firebird, PostgreSQL, etc. And then there's the specialized stuff like HBase...

I dunno, I'll admit there are plenty of reasons to criticize Java, but I can't see how "expensive" is anywhere near being a valid (much less major) criticism.

<comment> robert-zaremba You missed the context: Enterprise model. The costs come with overcomplicated solutions. I admit my expression wasn't clear. I've just fix it. Thanks for comment.

Of course there are a lot of great F/OSS projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm still not seeing it. If a startup chooses Java (or some other JVM language for that matter) they aren't bound to adopt any of the stereotypically "enterprisey" stuff that more established companies might use.

It's also important to note that not all complicated solutions are actually "overcomplicated". Some problems, by their nature, do demand complicated solutions. Just to play Devil's Advocate and all...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> >PHP frameworks (I don't want to talk about the last one)

In an article about web programming languages.. really?

<comment> robert-zaremba As I mentioned in the article, I only wanted to _discuss some of them_</comment></comment>


The iCloud homepage drops "developer beta" tag ahead of launch - <AUTHOR> http://www.icloud.com/

<comment><USER2> The rotation of the metallic highlights with mouse movement is just gorgeous when you don't quite notice it. But having figured out that it's responding to me, and having played with it for far too long, now it's just visually distracting.

I can't wait to see what the inside of the site looks like.

<comment><USER3> A little like the spotlight effect on Chrome's tabs. It took a while for me to notice it at all, but now I find myself idly playing with it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think it's my bad and let's not blame Apple for it. _They_ haven't launched it publicly yet. I just noticed they have taken away the developer beta tag and since I have a developer account and used to work for me (and now works for my old mobile me account) I assumed it works for everyone. I didn't have a way to test this on my own. But seems from comments you can log in and it asks you to have Lion or iOS 5. Lets wait for iOS 5.

Edit: Fixed title to reflect the same.

<comment><USER4> Let's _

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It says it's available to Lion users, but my system still has all the MobileMe sync stuff and no iCloud connectivity. Rumor has it that we have to wait for OS X 10.7.2 before getting access to iCloud. :/

<comment><USER6> It's not a rumor; it's a fact. iCloud requires iOS 5 and Mac OS X 10.7.2.

<http://help.apple.com/icloud/index.html?lang=en#mmfc0efea4>

The actual rumor is that 10.7.2 will be released tomorrow alongside the confirmed releases of iOS 5 and iCloud, and I imagine that bet's fairly safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like it's using jQuery and SproutCore

</comment><comment><USER8> iTunes 10.5 is now available[1]; it's probably a good idea to download it if you're waiting to update to iOS5.

[1]: <http://www.apple.com/itunes/>

</comment><comment><USER9> I logged in and it tells me to setup my devices by going to this url which can't be found: <http://www.apple.com/icloud/setup>

</comment><comment><USER10> I have a developer license, and I was expecting to see a few more Apple apps in the iCloud homepage. Specifically Reminders, Notes, & Photos.

<comment><USER11> Reminders are part of Calendar; Notes are part of Mail. (And "Photos" probably won't be a standalone app, since they're taking great pains to distinguish that what iCloud syncs is "your photo _stream_ ", not "your photos.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm able to login with my Apple ID but have no way of turning it on in OS X Lion yet as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER12> Wait until they roll everything out. You should get a Lion update, an iOS update, an iWork update and an iPhoto update sometime today. iTunes was already updated yesterday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hmm.., it looks like they don't support FF3.6, this will have to wait until I get home.

<comment><USER14> Or, you know, stop using a browser that's 3 years old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> serious issue: didn't let me login with my apple id, wanted me to update my profile to have my email as my id. i had half a mind to give but still thought would give it a try. when i went to the the apple id site to associate my email to my id, the thing didn't work. just didn't work.

did they not test?

</comment><comment><USER16> man.. thats one beautiful website

</comment><comment><USER17> what timezone picker is that?

</comment><comment><USER4> I liked the part where the instructions sucked and the "Learn More" link was broken.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like the part where the setup link goes to the 404 page

</comment><comment><USER19> Pathetic. Should earn negative credibility. If that no-op page stole my password, poster should be killed.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production? (Update) - <AUTHOR> This was asked almost a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8470206), but a year is a long time in thsi space. Would love to get some updated answers. <comment><USER2> Link to previous: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8470206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8470206)</comment>


How a Rogue Geologist Discovered a Diamond Trove in the Canadian Arctic - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-12/ff_diamonds?currentPage=all <comment><USER2> What an amazing story.. The last paragraph pretty much sums everything up.</comment>


Feed Your Head: Foods That Target Depression and Anxiety - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/feed-your-head-foods-that-target-depression-and-anxiety-1532629120 <comment><USER2> paywalled.</comment>


Here is the RadiumOne CEO Firing Statement - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/04/27/here-is-the-radiumone-ceo-firing-statement/

<comment><USER2> It's amazing the amount of damage just an accusation can do in a world where drama = page clicks and page clicks = money.

<comment><USER3> "Just an accusation"? If you refer to the domestic incident, he pleaded guilty to two charges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well done</comment>


Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies - <AUTHOR> https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z29hLZHiVt7W2uss2uMpSZquAX5T6vaeSF6Cy <comment><USER2> The reason I use hierarchical models is because they provide more powerful abstraction than purely associative ontologies. I do use ontologies for defining logical objects in an organization (people, document types, costs, risks, etc) but I don't trust end users to invent their own because unless you have a background in it, they just re-create the same narrow taxonomies they use in spreadsheets.

An example would be how a corporate wiki/confluence and sharepoint sites are basically documentation landfills that support labour intensive ad hoc processes without a lot of intelligence. In contrast, a library of functions, microservices directory, data dictionaries, tool kits and categories of processes are an abstraction layer over those landfill elements that enables clarity and scale.

The skill and intuition to aggregate things into abstractions isn't common, so most people don't rely on it, but when you have it, it's really valuable. A rule I use in building ontologies is that a thing without a type is just a poor design decision that leads to conceptual debt, and a type without a thing is just a thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hierarchies scale well, though, and are often found in complex systems, both natural and manmade, where this is an issue.

This classic paper (The Architecture of Complexity, by Herbert Simon, Nobel prize winner) explores hierarchy as an organizing principle in complex systems:

[https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-440/READINGS/simon- arch...](https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-440/READINGS/simon-architecture- of-complexity-1962.pdf)

<comment><USER4> >Hierarchies [...] are often found in [natural] systems

Nah they aren't. The 'tree' of life is more of a full-fledged graph and the whole kingdom-order-genus-species thing is muddy and ill-defined. Most of the 'hierarchy' we find in natural systems is just our own projected deformation of much more complex relationships.

<comment><USER5> Once you get complexity past the ability to do horizontal transission, and past the point where divergent species can no longer interbreed, it pretty much becomes a tree I think. If not, please show me where 2 branches rejoin where there's no H transmission nor mutual fertility.

> the whole kingdom-order-genus-species thing is muddy and ill-defined

Well yes, it's somewhat an arbitrary construct for human convenience, but isn't much of the muddiness down to our limited understanding of the true relationships?

Regarding "cadherin/catenin or how epithelia are formed to see how a tissue is much more than a bundle of cells." could you give a link cos this is so far outside my area I really don't know what to look for (wiki article on Catenin wasn't very revealing of your point, sorry if I missed it)

<comment><USER6> > If not, please show me where 2 branches rejoin where there's no H > transmission nor mutual fertility.

Viral infections modify host DNA, and can also incorporate host DNA -- this is a mechanism by which lateral gene transfer can occur between macroscopic organisms. The platypus has mammal, reptile and avian DNA, and they seem to have come about long after those branches diverged -- evidence that lateral gene transfers occur between macroscopic organisms.

<comment><USER5> WTF horizontal gene transfer = platypus!?!?

Show me some paper on this. I mean an actual scientific paper, not a paper used to roll a yard-long spliff.

<comment><USER6> Google is free and your aggro stance doesn't encourage me to satisfy your petulant demand.

<comment><USER7> Relating to platypus and horizontal gene transfer, I found this, which seems to be not quite what you're talking about: Horizontal transfer of BovB and L1 retrotransposons in eukaryotes. Genome Biology, 19(1). doi:10.1186/s13059-018-1456-7

Regardless, horizontal gene transfer certainly does happen.

<comment><USER5> Your paper is what the article I quoted seems to have been based on. It also mentions L1 and BovB. Well, I have some serious taking back to do!

<comment><USER8> If you'd like a curated collection of _many_ papers on horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes, it comprises much of the evidence presented at [https://www.panspermia.org/archindex.htm](https://www.panspermia.org/archindex.htm) . Having followed this collection since 2010, I have gotten the sense that horizontal gene transfer to/from eukaryotes is not only common but an important mechanism of evolution.

<comment><USER4> Yeah most people think evolution is just natural selection and accidental mutations, which is a high schooler understanding's of it. I'm not being derogatory, it's literally what I learned in high school and I don't blame people for not digging further if they haven't taken classes afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get why we don't use an S3 like filesystem with tags now, folders are very limiting. Get rid of folders, tag things properly, and then make a good search interface. Then you add a yeah for each file that has its old path, "/user/bin" for example, so that legacy folder structure still exists somewhere for legacy programs.

</comment><comment><USER10> This note-keeping system is really nice, super fast navigation, would strongly prefer over Notion which is clunky and unnaturally slow.

Consider supporting him on Patreon: [https://www.patreon.com/quantumcountry](https://www.patreon.com/quantumcountry)

Apparently the note-keeping system is a work in progress:

> PS: Many people ask, so I'll just note here: no, I haven't made this system > available for others to use. It's still an early research environment, and > Premature scaling can stunt system iteration.

<comment><USER11> As a Notion user, my immediate reaction was also "where can I get this". I've never seen a UI/UX as nice as that one. If he made a business out of it, I bet people would be begging to throw money at him.

<comment><USER12> That's kind; thank you. Perhaps someday, but for now, I mostly want to understand what "notes" actually are / should be.

<comment><USER11> I understand. I think what I and perhaps many other readers are primarily interested in is the raw link-following interface that enables quick jumping around to and from interconnected things, rather than note-taking or the methodology or philosophy of note-taking.

For example, if TV Tropes switched to an interface like this, I bet way more people would get lost down rabbit holes, and they'd go deeper and last longer.

Admittedly, I'm not much of a note-taker, let alone an Evergreen note-taker, and so far I haven't been sold on the idea. Essentially, I'm just too lazy. (I've found a lot of other very insightful information in this quasi-blog, though.)

I'm more hoping for a good neural interface to come out within the next five or so decades, so that this whole process can happen with very little effort and work almost automatically. Potentially insight-generating prior thoughts are pretty lossy when they're just in your head, as you describe it, but a neural interface and associated organization system could possibly eliminate this lossiness problem. I acknowledge it may take a lot longer than five decades before such a thing is practical and seamless, but it's just a hope.

At the end of the day, what I think I personally want right now is a hybrid note-taking, list-making, bookmark/document-organizing, mindmapping, knowledge base/wiki, table/chart-making, scheduling, planning app with an interface similar to this one, where it's easy and fast to follow different nodes, see how they relate, and unwind the stack at any point. I understand such a project is probably way beyond the scope of anything you're trying to do, let alone something you want to build a whole business around.

For reference, a lot of what I do is investigative and research work (generally centered around network security). This rarely involves long-form prose, and is more like trying to map and discover connections between lots of different kinds of small entities and findings. But I'd also find this valuable for more typical business use cases, like what Notion is generally used for.

Basically, I just wish apps like Notion, Coda, and Nuclino would implement an interface that's as smooth and useful as this one. These apps are all basically just trying to clone each other and are using interfaces that could've been designed in the 90s, rather than trying to fundamentally alter the experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are 5 practical relationship roles in knowledge modeling: parent-child, associate, source-target.

Parent-child is hierarchy. Associate is undirected peer. Source-target is less useful in general, but it roughly represents a directed peer relationship (e.g. A exports this good to B, and B exports that service to A -- there's a direction).

Associative relationships are very easy. Bob is friends with Mary, and with Pete. But they are also very loose and do not convey any information around belonging/precedence/ordering, which is a major downside. Associations don't have sufficient representational power for capturing structures.

Hierarchical relationships are very useful for expressing structure. For modeling real knowledge, you also need the ability to represent _multiple hierarchies_. For example, Bob is Dan and Chloe's father (parent-child in one context), and Bob is also Beth and Joe's boss (parent-child in another context). It can also happen in reverse -- Beth is Bob's superior in a social club they both belong to (yet another context). Multi hierarchies appear everywhere yet we don't often recognize them as such.

Multiple hierarchies are sometimes captured through tags (e.g. Gmail categories) or in the UNIX file system, via symbolic links. But apart from those examples, I haven't seen any widespread recognition of _multiple hierarchies_.

Most techniques/software tend to be designed for single hierarchies (e.g. outlines). This simplicity appeals to how the human brain processes information. It also only assumes a single context at a time which may be too simplistic and underpowered in many situations.

<comment><USER7> > _There are 5 practical relationship roles in knowledge modeling: parent- > child, associate, source-target. Parent-child is hierarchy. Associate is > undirected peer. Source-target is less useful in general, but it roughly > represents a directed peer relationship (e.g. A exports this good to B, and > B exports that service to A -- there 's a direction)._

I feel like this is missing something, namely in modelling relationships where a single child can have an arbitrary number of parents _in a single context_ (or source-target without cycles.) I don't think that's adequately captured by multiple-hierarchies when you can't break the parents into discrete categories (e.g. mothers and fathers) and thereby into discrete hierarchies. If you try to model a DAG like that as multiple hierarchies by somehow imposing an order onto the set of parents, you'll get yourself into a quagmire.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure I follow completely but I'd like to explore this. To make things a bit more concrete, what is an example of what you're describing?

<comment><USER7> In a version control system, a commit might have an arbitrary number of parents. Furthermore a single commit might have an arbitrary number of relationships to another commit (e.g. parents can also be grandparents, etc) Trying to reason about such a system as multiple-hierarchies will have you reasoning about a potentially huge number of hierarchies if the graph is well connected. I think it's more straight forward to reason about the system as a single graph, rather than a huge set of spanning trees.

<comment><USER13> > I think it's more straight forward to reason about the system as a single > graph,

So I'm still not sure I totally get the objection -- please help me out here. In my mind, multiple hierarchies _are_ represented by a single graph.

When one reasons about the system, one will naturally only consider single hierarchies at a time for simplicity. The way to do this is center yourself on a node at a time, and then from that vantage point, traverse the node in different directions.

In the system, each edge belongs to only 3 categories: P ("parent", directed), A ("associate", undirected), S ("source", directed). We're only considering hierarchies, so we'll restrict ourselves to "P". Each node can have an arbitrary number of relationships with other nodes. A family and work relationship could look like this.

You -P-> your kid 1

You -P-> your kid 2

Mother -P-> You, Sister

Father -P-> You, Sister

Boss -P-> You

Boss -P-> Colleague

Company President -P-> Boss

Company -P-> Company President

Seems to me it should be easy to reason about multiple parents in different contexts -- they all belong in the same graph.

Wikipedia sort of does this with its Categories box at the bottom of every page, but Wikipedia only has one kind of relationship category: P.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Translation to MS Outlook users: don't file individual emails into different folders. Tag the messages or just search.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Things don't always fit exactly. Maybe once enough new ideas are collected, > a new category would emerge… except you can't see its shape because > everything's already been sorted.

This is so very true and precisely why PL type systems (in their common usage, which involve creating ADTs/classes/records -- taxonomies) are so bad for the necessary creative evolution that software systems must undergo to keep up with the dynamic real world.

Dynamic entities, untyped maps, allow for creative evolution; type-oriented ADTs ubiquitous in typed PLs blind you and _bind_ you in exactly the way this post describes.

<comment><USER16> As someone looking to learn Haskell, I was pondering over this from another post on the frontpage: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843181)

Just out of curiosity, do you significant experience in a statically-typed FP? What's your favourite language right now? Your comment reminds me of Rich Hikey's famous talk, so I would guess Clojure?

<comment><USER15> I have a similar take on Haskell and I do think its adherents are more clinging to a near-religious like commitment to the language and its counterproductive purity.

That said I think

> I feel learning Haskell was worthless.

is a little harsh. I suppose b/c I don't think learning (anything) is ever worthless.

Yes I'm a Clojurist, per se. I agree with even Rich Hickey who will even say that it's fundamentally not about the specific programming language.

However I do think Haskell falls into a different category. Most PLs at least make pragmatic concessions. PLs with strong static typing take a fundamentalist approach that does not give any flex and therefore I find anti- pragmatic.

But why not learn a strong static PL? Why take my or anyone else's word for it? The best way to discover the right tools is to pick them all up and wield them. If _outcome_ is your goal, if productivity is your sincere goal (as opposed to something else like intellectual curiosity or purposeful rigidity...b/c you're, say, afraid of change) then I do think you will gravitate away from static typing in many cases. Especially in the prevalant case of development of web and distributed data systems.

<comment><USER15> And to answer your question my experience in strongly typed functional FP was building a few applications in Elm, a derivative/cousin of Haskell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice to see his website has org-roam like backlinks to each note.

</comment><comment><USER18> After thinking about this issue for a long time, I came up with a solution of my own.

The solution I came up with is a personal knowledge base made up of files assigned with multiple categories. Categories form a hierarchy and the system strictly preserves this hierarchy and takes it into consideration with minimal user intervention: [https://github.com/amitnovick/catalog](https://github.com/amitnovick/catalog)

Read about my journey and thoughts on it here: [https://dev.to/amitnovick/a-catalog-of-your- files-2nd7](https://dev.to/amitnovick/a-catalog-of-your-files-2nd7)

</comment><comment><USER19> The most interesting applications of this idea lie outside software development, in my opinion.

Often, I find, hierarchical taxonomies are "the box" I need to "think outside" of.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just flatten your hierarchical paths to assiciative keys. Load your tree into a dictionary. Declare victr'y.

</comment><comment><USER21> IMHO they both have their place, and systems that support both align best to how many peoples' minds work.

</comment><comment><USER22> Predictable hierarchical taxonomies plus associative groupings like tags plus search

<comment><USER19> That is a very efficient mechanism for building cognitive structures that entrench oneself in orthodoxy, in my opinion.

<comment><USER22> What does this even mean?

<comment><USER19> the fact you're asking means you wouldn't understand the answer

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related, podcast with the author, touches on some of the topics here:

[https://www.perell.com/podcast/andy- matuschak](https://www.perell.com/podcast/andy-matuschak)

</comment><comment><USER23> It would be useful if he provided examples. What makes an "evergreen note" as opposed to a transient one?

</comment><comment><USER24> In general I agree with the sentiment expressed in TFA and generally try to follow it when building new ontologies because asserted subClassOf hierarchies create a huge impedance mismatch between how the computer interprets them and what the designer thought they meant (e.g. I've seen people use subClassOf hierarchies to represent a partonomy, but more subtle variants in what "is a" means within a single hierarchy can wreak havoc on usability). It also allows you to defer the deeper modelling until a use case presents itself and build your hierarchies from the underlying structure of the domain (with data) rather than trying to impose an almost surely incorrectly hypothesis about the structure of the domain from the top down (without data).

That said, there are a number of cases where hierarchical taxonomies are vital in building information systems. Some examples.

A use case where you need a way to guarantee that a space is completely covered without duplicates (important for accounting, or creating menus). Having a single non-overlapping reference space (like a map) is critical for clear communication.

A use case where you need to capture some semi hierarchical knowledge from domain experts, e.g. an org chart, or the parts of a car, or the parts of the brain.

Org charts are the perfect example of the tradeoff. Consider the US Department of Defense (don't actually do this you will loose your mind). The chain of command is famously a single parent hierarchy, and if it is not, it is a sign that something can go wrong due to conflicting orders. However, let's say I wanted to know which branch of the military funded a certain research project based on the office that wrote the RFP. This question is pretty much impossible to answer for an arbitrary RFP, and the time and effort needed to maintain the full associative ontology and keep it up to date is stupefying huge, AND it is not even clear that such an ontology would actually be pointing to anything that was actually meaningful in the real world (beyond ill defined social and economic relationships between arbitrary groups of primates).

Hierarchies are an effective way to collect knowledge from domain experts in a systematic way that does not require them to know that they are writing down a bunch of axioms, but instead can just draw a diagram -- multiple hierarchies are very important here, because hierarchies from different experts usually agree at a high level, and then differ in the details, often due to the use case for the knowledge or from the experimental perspective, not because there is some fundamental ontological difference. In this sense having multiple hierarchies is a way around the problem of ambiguity in the meaning of "is a".

</comment><comment><USER25> Which is just a fancy way of saying favor composition over inheritance.</comment>