Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class - <AUTHOR> https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/losing-the-narrative-the-genre-fiction-of-the-professional-class/ <comment><USER3> two key grafs:

"Professionals today would never self-identify as bureaucrats. Product managers at Google might have sleeve tattoos or purple hair. They might describe themselves as "creators" or "creatives." They might characterize their hobbies as entrepreneurial "side hustles." But their actual day-in, day- out work involves the coordination of various teams and resources across a large organization based on established administrative procedures. That's a bureaucrat. The entire professional culture is almost an attempt to invert the connotations and expectations of the word—which is what underlies this class's tension with storytelling. Conformity is draped in the dead symbols of a prior generation's counterculture."

Conclusion:

"Absolute pessimism is almost always a sign of a lazy narcissist, and narratives of inevitable decline are used by those who want to absolve themselves of the obligation to act. Possibility has opened up before us in a manner that is rare in history. We need stories which encourage action. Our leaders must rise to defeat a global plague and in the process test whether or not there still exists, in this underused husk of a nation, the capacity for vigorous action—the capacity to produce the types of heroes who will inspire future generations. Now, more than ever, we need a story."

<comment><USER4> Isnt the first paragraph basically bullshit? It made up attitudes out of thin air. I have yet to meet product manager or manager or business person that would call himself creative - including those with tatoos and other visible "crazy" visual style.

And the people I knew with tatoos did not necessary interpreted themselves as non conforming either. There were aware of raising acceptance of tatoos.

And guy explicitely explained his tatoos as "just result of being in environment where many people have it and talk about it, you kinda shift there".

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's bullshit. "Professionals today would never self-identify as bureaucrats" seems exactly right.

<comment><USER6> An internal censuses during the first dotcom times asked all employees to identify themselves as either individual contributors or a manager and the CEO reported there were far more individual contributors than was possible. Most managers considered their primary work to be as an individual contributor.. Few self identified as bureaucrats..

<comment><USER4> Most managers in these companies don't manage people. It is title slapped on roles to make them sound glorious for future cv purpose. They don't have team they would directed. I was manager for project of exactly one person, me, that took 4 months and most time I spent coding some with analysis.

I mean, we have office manager and she is mostly making sure we have enough print paper and such. In old times, she would be administration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Solo cup culture flourishes because college is simply a pay-to-play > credentialing service.

If this were the case, why do many spend grueling over hundreds of LeetCode problems? If the credential was truly enough, we wouldn't have to be grilled in interview processes.

> The university has been in crisis for almost a century, and in 1948 Richard > Weaver was already warning that universities had "turned into playgrounds > for grown-up children or centers of vocationalism and professionalism."

At one point in college, I held 3 jobs with the impossible task of trying to stay out of debt (I didn't) by working jobs that paid no more than $10/hour on a $30,000 tuition bill. Is the fault of the university that they became corporatized? There would be no crisis if folks had the time to study.

<comment><USER8> > Is the fault of the university that they became corporatized?

Yes, and specifically the kind of bureaucratic organization-man corporatized that the article discusses.

Tuition keeps skyrocketing at multiples of inflation, yet post docs and adjunct lecturers live in near-poverty. Where's the money go? "Administration".

<comment><USER9> I took a side gig teaching at a community college. I had to talk to a dean to get white board markers. And it wasn't like that dean approved and made a phone call and I went and picked them up. She physically walked me over to a locked drawer with the department name on it and handed them to me.

A dean. Absolutely laughable if it wasn't so sad.

<comment><USER10> All joking aside, what do you think deans at CCs are supposed to do?

Mundane property issues are probably handled by the dean's admin at some (most?) CCs, but property in general is often going to fall under a dean's purview.

Also, note that a dean's work at a CC is generally going to be fantastically boring administrative scut work.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough. I always equated deans with management.

<comment><USER10> Imho, most managers also do fantastically boring administrative scut work —- think various aspects of hiring, scheduling, budgets, progress reports, personnel reviews, handling administrative complaints (EEO, sexual harassment, etc.), recruiting, etc. Maybe some things are a bit different than a CC dean, but the genre of work is similar.

The specific differences in your perception may revolve around whether the manager/dean has a trusted admin, and whether that admin is around.

Just a guess...

What do you think managers do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good writing that elevates the discourse, even if it does seem a bit smart and challenging to survive long in this forum.

Bureaucracy itself has become an ideology, and we need more observations of it like this.

<comment><USER12> This idea -- late capitalist corporatism as a form of hyper-bureaucratic institutionalisation of all aspects of modern life -- has been gaining ground a lot lately. David Graeber in particular is a good source for articles and books on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article appears to be a less-well-written and less thoughtful version of the _wonderful_ Ribbonfarm article "The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial":

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium- mediocre-l...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre- life-of-maya-millennial/)

Recommended.

<comment><USER14> This was worth the rather long read. Thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The essay makes some astute observations, advances some interesting theses, and then bloviates all over the place, making judgments of questionable provenance.

More interesting is to see what aspects of it can fit the HN milieu. How does the bureaucrat and the corporate genre fit the startup scene and the tech industry?

<comment><USER16> >How does the bureaucrat and the corporate genre fit the startup scene and the tech industry?

like a glove. Tech today is dominated by basically two forms of business. The Googles and Facebooks and so on, which fit the Weberian bureaucracy that the author addresses, arguably even more than actual bureaucracy because they're rabidly trying to codify everything in software, which is in a sense more technocratic than Weber himself could have ever dreamed of, and the startup culture which is basically performative entrepreneurship, consuming a certain lifestyle to signal being part of a certain class, with the products being created performing essentially no meaningful social function and don't constitute any sort of technical progress.

<comment><USER17> There are plenty of startups providing useful functions and technical progress. They are almost universally underfunded. The money goes mostly to what you describe, especially the unicorn chasing money. Unicorns, or at least the ones that post date the coining of that word, are mostly gambling vehicles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This has to be the most incredible piece of writing I've read online all year. So many nuggets of insight, without any filler. I'll be keeping an eye on this author

<comment><USER19> You think? I had to stop after a few paragraphs because I didn't feel like they were getting to the point.

<comment><USER20> The payoffs are in the pattern overlapping. Try to read it that way and you'll see how he/she keeps aligning the parallels until it's clear.

Pretty good read, I just disagree with the conclusion (final paragraphs). One could argue the article itself is an inverting of the narrative _of_ the narrative, and thus has nothing left to say.

I'm going to confuse myself here I feel, but the article as analysis, if I'm right about itself being an inversion, has to be taken as non-analysis and just a description ultimately.

It's got nothing left to say because there's really nothing left to say.

/meta

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One thing to consider: in the wake of institutional violence (police treatment of BIPOC, US government mal-response to the pandemic) and the protests and concerns that violence engenders, this essay questions the legitimacy of those "narratives." Why? Who is speaking here? From what basis is the author able to negate the narratives of others?

</comment><comment><USER22> On the whole this essay seems to be making a deliberately slippery argument. It wants to redefine "bureaucracy" to suit its purposes while also maintaining all existing pejorative connotations of the term.

<comment><USER23> Where's the redefinition? Large organizations _are_ bureaucratic and ruled by internal politicking. It's their nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> That author is all over the place. It's a general rant about the obvious.

At the beginning, he's on to something. Fiction has a plot shortage. "Across TV, movies, and novels it is increasingly difficult to find a compelling story that doesn't rely on gimmicks." Movies are stuck in the Star [Wars|Trek|Gate] ditch, and the Marvel Overextended Universe. The 25th James Bond movie is supposed to come out this year, if anybody cares.

Some of this is simply the entertainment glut. Everyone has seen all the possible plot twists. Go back in history and read some of the Canterbury Tales from around 1400. Read a story half way through, then ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right. There are no plot twists. Back then, entertainment was so scarce that they weren't needed.

A more serious problem is that there's no shared vision of a better world. Fiction doesn't help us get to a better place. This hit science fiction first. Science fiction of the 1930s to the 1960s was quite upbeat, showing a picture of a marvelous future. It's been downhill since the 1970s. Today SF is mostly space opera. Dystopian visions used to be rare. Now most SF is dystopian. Even much non-SF is dystopian. From The Wire to Game of Thrones, the world sucks.

<comment><USER10> You seem to be reviewing this essay as though it is about entertainment narratives.

I see it being a fairly scathing critique of the disingenuous narrative of modern day middle class bureaucrats.

<comment><USER24> That essay is all over the place. I just started at the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > [A] sorting mechanism that elevates people who pay lip service to > permissiveness, but don't fully participate - a preparatory performance of > the fake counterculture.

Not where I expected to see _that_ sentiment.

I do wonder where this is going.

</comment><comment><USER10> Fair warning... this guys dumpsters on a group of people who I assume are a large part of the HN demographic, often via unflattering caricatures.

Agree or disagree with his opinions, this is a fairly high level of writing, and I recommend reading it for entertainment value if not for actual stimulating thought.

<comment><USER26> Very much from the non technical side of C P Snows two nations its a very English take with its distain for "professional".

Proper chaps are amateurs haven forfend that we listen to actual scientists - you can see this in Boris Johnson and cummings.

And you can see proper literatures disdain for "Genre" on display here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > A Harvard Business Review study of common traits among CEOs found that the > leaders who rose to that position fastest were those who had a "catapult > experience"—a bold and potentially risky career move. Perhaps the same > traits that lead to this type of bold action might also lead to very poor > outcomes on a college campus.

The next sentence calls Bay area programmers "dorks" who have never taken risk, but I'll take the first part at face value. I've been listening to the podcast "How I Built this with Guy Raz" where founders of companies talk about how they started/grew their successful business. It does seem like many of them either had a hard time with "regular work", or they were stuck in some job they didn't like so they decided to start a business. Many of them have college degrees, which goes against what this article is about though. The more I listen to these, the more I think that there is a "type" of person who would start a business and therefore become a CEO. I've met a few people in real life that gave me a similar vibe, and my company's founder/CEO is like this as well. I can't put my finger on why these people seem different to me, but they just seem to think about problems differently.

<comment><USER24> _A Harvard Business Review study of common traits among CEOs found that the leaders who rose to that position fastest were those who had a "catapult experience"—a bold and potentially risky career move._

Look for survivor bias there. You'd probably get a similar narrative by interviewing people who won big in Vegas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 1\. TFA treats universities as fungible, when it is a truth universally acknowledged that most colleges won't open any particularly interesting doors. (the ones that do are a handful to a dozen which vary depending upon one's interests)

2\. The upper class still has yachts, backyard tennis courts, and polo ponies. The $300 cotton T-shirts and $400 sweatpants are for the working class.

where: working class - needs a job / middle class - has enough property to do without a job for few years, but couldn't maintain their lifestyle without an income / upper class - their property provides their income

alternatively: working class - acquires things whose TCO doesn't involve external employment / middle class - acquires things whose TCO involves fractions of an FTE / upper class - acquires things whose TCO requires multiple FTEs

<comment><USER26> Middle class cant stop working for a few years and life of "property" \- they are effectively working class yes even you on 250k pa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I find it amazing how James McElroy manages to blame "failed" ideologies and movements from "the counterculture(tm)" for the "Corporate Borg (tm)"'s sublation/sublimitation of the same.

Yes, Levi's jeans used rock and roll and rebellion to sell jeans.

What's your point, James?

(Besides using more words than even I do to attempt to waffle his way around being WRONG, lol)

(to anyone attempting to bring me back around to the ostensible class critique nexus of this piece, I apparently didn't get it. It went over my head. I'm kinda thick I guess.)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is just a very extended rewrite of a stock right-wing trope: you can't trust educated people, because they're fakes and they don't understand real down-to-earth hard working middle class Americans.

I don't think he's wrong about tech being primarily about increasingly automated bureaucracy, and not about open innovation - certainly not in business, and even less so socially and culturally.

But ultimately this is decided by Wall St, which is controlled by money, most of which is ultimately managed by billionaires, some of whom have exotic far- right sympathies.

Note there's no criticism of right wing story-telling - propaganda - <USER2> like the Kochs or the Mercers. The targets are exclusively on the progressive side.

Trump may have won as a not-business-as-usual candidate, but that doesn't mean he was ever truly a not-business-as-usual president. It means that was the story sold to voters who felt left behind and excluded - just as Obama was sold as the black history redemption candidate, who turned out to have limited interest in doing anything too controversially concrete or transformative with the opportunity.

Instead of challenging the cynical sleight-of-message involved in the industrial manipulation of all demographics, the author chooses to slant his thesis towards praising one demographic at the expense of another.

It's a good attempt and more literate than most - but it's not nearly as incisive or even-handed as it pretends to be.

<comment><USER10> > This is just a very extended rewrite of a stock right-wing trope: you can't > trust educated people, because they're fakes and they don't understand real > down-to-earth hard working middle class Americans.

Interesting. My takeaway is about 180 degrees from this.

I think he's saying that the vast majority of college graduates are not particularly well-educated. Furthermore, this class of people is just filling the role of very middle class bureaucrats while being sold on the narrative of being something more (e.g., part of the creative class or upper / upper middle class), all while being incredibly conformist in their non-conformity.

You say that the targets are "progressives", but I would say his targets are "poseur progressives". As someone who highly values the former and is ambivalent about the masses of the latter (esp. in the Bay Area), I agree with the author's lament of the rise of faux progressives (if, in fact, that is what he is lamenting).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Unsurprisingly meandering for a moral panic piece. Lots of words about how corporations and universities have become too wishy-washy and how Trump refuses to play that game, but nothing said of his mostly successful attempt to normalize bold-faced lying.

<comment><USER32> I think the whole point is that politicians were already bold-faced lying, and everyone knew it, and politicians knew everyone knew it (see the quoted definition of a hack in the article). But we all played the game. See _Hypernormalization_ by Adam Curtis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> He's talking about you people. So many others have reached the same conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER21> American Affairs Journal is a relatively recent publication that's been somewhat pro-Trump, at least pro-Trumpism. James McElroy also often writes in American Conservative.

I don't believe this belongs on Hacker News.

<comment><USER21> Downvote to oblivion, but highfalutin essays in neocon journals keep showing up here on HN with some regularity, particularly on the weekends. I can't remember the last time I saw something from Jacobin or Mother Jones, and certainly not an essay this overtly political.

It's all too easy to nod along as you read this sort of thing, but then to become more cynical when you consider the source, the underlying motivations, and the larger body of work into which it fits and associates.

<comment><USER34> You don't seem to be paying attention. I see borderline Marxist stuff here rather regularly.

<comment><USER15> Please cite.

<comment><USER34> Sorry, I can't off the top of my head. I was reading one on Friday, though, that was... some guy's unique Marxist perspective on... the global south, if I recall correctly. That wasn't _borderline_ Marxist, that was openly, unapologetically Marxist. But again, no, I can't give you a cite. It was on "new" about 48 hours ago, plus or minus several hours.

I'm pretty sure I found that on "new", though, rather than on the front page. If front page appearances are your metric, then left stuff may be rather rare.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Powell's says it won't sell books on Amazon anymore - <AUTHOR> https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2020/08/powells-says-it-wont-sell-books-on-amazon-anymore-we-must-take-a-stand.html <comment><USER2> I'm going to take this opportunity to grind my personal axe: Amazon is extremely lazy about shipping books, throwing them into lightly-padded envelopes. Books shipped from Amazon usually arrive with at least minor cosmetic damage and sometimes much worse. For me this is reason enough to avoid buying books on Amazon.

<comment><USER3> I recently ordered an illustrated novel with a rather heavy paperweight - Amazon shipped it in weakly padded envelopes and the corners were banged up. I even bothered to contact their customer service to ship it with better packaging, to no avail on the replacement item.

I then ordered 10 of the damn things, to see what the packaging would do. 4 came in one box, 3 came in another, and 3 came in individual poorly padded envelopes. The ones in boxes had insufficiently inflated plastic bags, and only 2 books out the entire 12 ordered (original, replacement, and the 10) were what Amazon defines as 'New' upon arrival, though all were shipped as 'New'.

Definitely a frustrating experience.

Edit: I returned all but the one showing the least damage, and received a full refund after some time.

<comment><USER4> Props for going through the hassle. How bad does Amazonneed to get before the costs of negligence outweigh doing it right the first time? I would think there are dozens of actuaries doing the math, maybe I'm giving bezo too much credit though.

<comment><USER5> No one at Amazon is listening.

<comment><USER6> Keep in mind the following scenario: if all books were packed to ensure no possible damage, then you would see another set of posts lamenting how wasteful amazon is with packaging.

As a counter anecdote, in my case, all books get delivered in good enough condition where I don't feel the need to remark on it.

At amazon's scale, damned if you do/damned if you don't becomes a certainty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love Powell's. I've spent way too many hours in both of their Portland locations (and the old Technical store, RIP) over the last 20+ years. I've lived within walking and biking distance to both the whole time.

That said, these days I buy a majority of my books from Amazon, and have for a while. The simple reason is that for the books I buy most, which are technical in nature, the prices on Amazon are so much better.

For example, on Wednesday, I bought (from Amazon):

\- Programming TypeScript

\- Effective TypeScript

\- JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

\- Eloquent JavaScript

(I'm learning TypeScript/JavaScript for work...)

In order, the prices on Amazon vs Powell's:

\- $27, $50

\- $27, $40

\- $52, $70

\- $25, $40

totals: $131, $200

I can't justify spending that much more at Powell's, sorry not sorry. If the prices were similar, as in 10%-25%, I would for sure buy them from Powell's, but they rarely are.

Now - what I do buy at Powell's is every other type of book! I'll never buy a regular old paperback off Amazon, or a cookbook, or a travel book, or ... It's the categories of books that I don't spend a lot on, for which I will gladly pay an increased price. I feel this is definitely justified by the experience I get perusing the stores, finding books I never knew I wanted. (Sometimes the books at Powell's aren't more expensive or actually cheaper, especially the used ones).

<comment><USER8> I used to think this way, going with the cheapest method possible but I now try to buy directly from the publisher or local stores. Not only does it hurt the publisher buying from Amazon, it also diverts the funds to produce the next book. Some of my books have been extremely expensive but these are pennies to the value I find in them and how it improves my career.

<comment><USER9> ^^^ can't emphasize this enough. please don't buy from amazon if you have the means to afford the list price for a book. amazon isn't good for the ecosystem of books for a lot of reasons, but in this instance amazon makes publishers lose money. unfortunately publishers have no choice but to sell on amazon. you gotta vote with your dollars here to help sustain quality publishing.

<comment><USER10> Something else to be aware of is, with Powell's you're also supporting a union shop that pays its staff pretty well.

No one's pissing in bottles in the back room at Powell's, unless it's for fun.

<comment><USER11> The union fought hard for that right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kudos to Powell's, I've spent literally thousands of dollars over the years at that magnificent store and will continue to do so; spent hour upon hour there in my childhood getting lost in wonders it holds.

They don't try to undercut smaller bookstores by offering discounts on new books like B&N, Amazon, etc., their employees seem to actually enjoy working there, it's a family-friendly environment and the selection simply can't be beat. If you enjoy reading, please support this business.

<comment><USER13> I've never lived in Portland, but try to visit annually; Powell's has earned its place as a 'must go' destination every year.

I mean, it's a bookstore, with active curation, that spans a city block. Amazing!

I end up with the book I had in mind, plus half a dozen books discovered along the way...

<comment><USER14> I've yet to go to Portland, but if I ever do I intend to make a stop at Powell's assuming the world is in a place where that can happen. Thankfully we have our own good indie bookstore where I live that's a stand in until I can make it there.

<comment><USER15> Worth noting there are a few Powell's, including a lovely pair of them on the east side, one a smaller but well-curated satellite of the main store, the other specialized in gardening, cooking, and craft books. A coffee shop is sandwiched in the middle. (Assuming anything gets back to near-normal ever again.) [https://goo.gl/maps/LhYrHLLJ2UcGFmpA9](https://goo.gl/maps/LhYrHLLJ2UcGFmpA9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I visited the PNC in 2015 I peregrinated all the way from Seattle (WA) to Portland (OR) simply for the joy of visiting _Powell's_. I even chose my hotel to be as close as possible (which turned out to be the very hip ACE Hotel, which was another amazing experience).

These places may be retail businesses, but they're also basically priceless experiences that should be viewed as public goods.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately we haven't found a great way to price externalities correctly - whether the positive externalities of a local bookshop, or the negative externalities of online commerce.

Of course, there are negative externalities to local stores (people demand the right to drive there, for some odd reason, though Portland does better here than most), and positive externalities to online shopping (more efficient distribution, etc.) but regardless we do a terrible job at pricing them.

<comment><USER18> The Lello bookstore in Porto, Portugal has a _lot_ of visitors just for sightseeing (if you search for photos you'll get why), so they started to charge €3 (~$3.6) for the entrance, refundable if you purchased a book.

Still, seems like Powell's experience is all about the books themselves, so that value should be well captured in increased sales.

<comment><USER17> I have never managed to visit Powells without buying a book, which helps!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://bookshop.org/](https://bookshop.org/) is now an option to use instead of Amazon. It also raises money for local bookstores.

<comment><USER9> I'm conflicted over this business. It's ran by good people but I don't think it's the right solution for independents to compete with Amazon.

Just go straight to the local bookstore's website. A lot of the stores on bookshop also have an online store. Bookshop is a supplement and basically just plugged straight into Ingram (the distributor), so they're able to sell whatever your local indie's web store lacks.

<comment><USER20> I tried but local store really is much more expensive, like double or at least 50% - that is if they can even get it. I dont ever want to go there and browse, just buy some books. For me Amazon is sooo much easier and much cheaper as well, I wonder what the point of supporting local is for.

<comment><USER21> A site like Amazon is always going to be better than a local shop if you already know exactly what you want.

Local shops offer human curation instead of algorithmic recommendation, and create situations where you can stumble into something that you would have never even thought to search for.

If this isn't a way you like to shop that's fine of course, but it's something that a lot of other people enjoy. Personally, I loathe algorithms that recommend things to me based on what I've already consumed, and certainly hope we don't ever lose our local bookstores.

<comment><USER9> ditto this. amazon, in its current form, will never be able to emulate a brick and mortar bookstore. a dedicated staff with exceptional customer service will curate books and recommend books that an algorithm will never catch.

also, local bookstores tend be an integral part of the local, geographic community, where you can engage with likeminded folks who live nearby. amazon can't do that in 2020.

and, amazon has so much power that they force publishers to offer lower prices. that's bad for your margins if you're a publisher and causes the quality of book to go down since they're gonna want to sell more of what sells. what sells well doesn't necessarily mean better quality. i don't want the good publishers to go out of business.

and! amazon can't do readings and book signings. if you're not into that, then ok, but book signings are very important for a thriving literary culture.

keep buying on amazon if you want to save money but consider throwing a few bucks to your local independent from time to time, please

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Of the last 10 books I bought on Amazon 4 were faulty prints with miscut pages, misaligned pages, misprint pages. Two of them had misprint covers. All of them were sold as new by Amazon itself. I am done with buying books from them

<comment><USER23> Why not buy from bookdepository.com ? They even have free shipping if I remember correctly.

Honest question - I don't buy books often.

<comment><USER22> I don't know it, I live in Europe, not sure of this is a thing here

<comment><USER24> I work at Book Depository. We ship to almost every country in the world, and certainly to every country in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you love Powell's, love their employees too, and do your on-line ordering via their union's portal ([https://ilwulocal5.com/Support/](https://ilwulocal5.com/Support/)).

</comment><comment><USER26> On a side note, Amazon really only delivered the coup de grace to independent bookstores. Large chains like Borders, Barnes and Nobles and box stores like Target and Walmart weakened them so much they couldn't compete when Amazon took away their sole advantage: ordering hard-to-find books from small publishers.

Had a parent that worked in an independent bookstore. The store couldn't match box stores in price. They had selection and the willingness to order obscure books for people, but once the Internet came to homes, they weren't the only ones that did that. Eventually that bookstore got bought out by Borders. Ironically that store was one of the first customers of the distribution network Borders set up for their stores.

<comment><USER27> And even before the chains, there was a big independent bookstore near me that had the remarkable innovation of selling books at less than list price--which was probably the first real shot at the small independents in the area. They eventually shrank and then went out of business, during the Borders/B&N era I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > by siphoning business from the real world and replacing it with internet > commerce.

I've got news for you, people want to order on a whim and have it arrive at their home the next day. If you don't offer that then people won't buy from you.

In many parts of the world overgrown local busybodies have destroyed "high streets" in attempts to monetize drivers and pad their CV; driving people away.

<comment><USER16> People also want & need to explore physical spaces above and beyond what a recommendation algorithm suggests. People want to have the full experience of being immersed in a space. People want to smell the books. People want to try on clothes and see how they fit and compare them. People don't want to be drawn in by the short-term convenience of the most convenient price.

<comment><USER29> > People want to try on clothes and see how they fit and compare them

Sure, but I can't find the clothes I want at the mall, and I can on Amazon. The mall bookstores that used to exist only sold bestsellers.

The "bookstore" I like to browse these days is Goodwill. I sometimes bring home a shopping bag full of books, for only a few dollars. I've also bought many "grab bags" of books from Ebay. The Bellevue Public Library has a second hand bookstore attached, where people donate books and the store sells them. I've bought a large number of books from them, and the little old ladies who run it are always charming. Highly recommended!

There are a couple "Little Free Libraries" in my neighborhood and I regularly insert scifi in them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Powell's Technical Books used to be my favorite place to hang out. I would ride downtown in the morning and spend an entire day there, scanning every shelf in my fields of interest, reveling in periodic hits of serendipity. Since PTB closed, I've been back once. It wasn't worth it any more. I'll admit that I did like it better back before the store was spruced up to be like a Borders.

<comment><USER31> How is it like Borders? It's a warren of different rooms on different floors, half of which are more like a warehouse than a retail store, with a huge selection of used and new books shelved together.

I loved the separate technical books stores, too, although they still have a great tech section in the main location. I assume the standalone PTBs shrank then closed because people were browsing more than buying.

<comment><USER32> > I assume the standalone PTBs shrank then closed because people were browsing > more than buying

Should've charged a modest fee for the periodic hits of serendipity.

<comment><USER15> Considering the rent changes around there over the last 5 years, it'd be less "modest" and more "how much ya got"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Many people go to physical stores, look for a product they like, then search it on Amazon.

<comment><USER34> Here in Germany we have fixed book prices (at least for German books). I think the publisher sets the price and it must not be sold for less with the exception if the book is damaged.

So in this case you really have no reason to order the book from Amazon if it is available at the book store.

For other products this is however true, probably because the price difference and the sometimes cumbersome return policies of retail shops.

<comment><USER35> If the price is identical everywhere, then people will compete on other factors like the percentage of profits the bookseller donates to charity, or the speed and ease of delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I find that on March 26, I ordered a couple of books from Powell's. Powell's expected the delivery to be April 14, and as I recall it arrived a day or two earlier. And two and a half weeks was fine. I wasn't out of reading matter, and I knew that one of the books would take a couple of weeks to read. What hurry was there?

</comment><comment><USER37> It's always weird to read a story where someone's rooting for something like old bookstores to remain in-business.

The thing's that I don't mind the economic shift nor the format shift. I don't particularly care for bookstores or even old-fashion books; I think electronic media with active content is _vastly_ superior. I look forward to further advances in technology, where the line between static media and computation continues to blur into something far more beautiful.

I appreciate that a shifting economy can be tough on those in sectors that're drying up. I can sympathize with bookstore owners who feel saddened by having to close up shop.

But it feels a little weird to see folks taking a rent-seeking position, arguing that broken windows ought be allowed to keep breaking.

<comment><USER38> Bookstores offer something electronic media doesn't -- discovery.

1\. You know what you want, you search for it and order it. 2\. You know vaguely what you want, you search, read reviews and order it. 3\. You walk into a bookstore and wander around and eventually pick something out.

I just haven't seen #3 replicated in online fashion. Sure there are a million sites that will guide you to what you want, but you never quite find yourself in an odd section of the store, pulled in by something you would never have tried before.

More than anything else, I think this what people miss. They don't want bookstores to exist just because.

Depending on how old you are, there is a big difference between the big stores now, and the same stores just 20 years ago. They used to carry a much larger selection of actual books. My local Barnes & Noble has huge sections dedicated to toys and other things where books used to be. On the actual shelves that remain there are fewer books, and far fewer mass market paperbacks. The latter having been replaced by the more expensive trade paperbacks. The books they do have tend to be on the very popular end -- something which needs far less discovery. The library depth they used to have is gone.

This leads to two bad experiences that we didn't use to have in the big book stores. You want something simple that should exist -- Tom Sawyer for instance -- and you might only find the trade paperback for $13.95. But you need it for school and it's too late to order, so you get gouged. Other times I'm looking for a book that would have been in the back catalog but isn't any more. They will helpfully offer to order it for me -- at a higher price and longer wait than Amazon, other retailers, and frequently B&N online as well.

I get they want to carry less inventory. But the whole point of a bookstore (to me) is the wide inventory of books I don't know I already want. If it's a matter of just books I know I want, I don't have to go to the bookstore.

I keep going and I keep hoping, but those days appear to be gone. Good luck to Powell's if they have a better store than my local B&N.

<comment><USER39> > Bookstores offer something electronic media doesn't -- discovery.

No, electronic media provides excellent ways to discover new books.

What you seem to be missing is browsing physical books in physical bookstores, which is different and grounded mostly in nostalgia.

<comment><USER15> I like both methods of discovery, but I don't impulse buy digital books like I do when I wind up in Powell's and see a 40-year-old used small-press book with little or no digital profile. Just looked one such example up and the only copy on Amazon is priced at $332; I got it at Powell's for $7.

[https://www.amazon.com/Star-Ship-Simulation-games- no/dp/0918...](https://www.amazon.com/Star-Ship-Simulation-games- no/dp/091839810X)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Once things are better... if you like books, you have to visit Powell's at some point in your life. I used to work a few blocks away and would often spend my lunch break there. The trick was to look at books before eating, so I'd get hungry enough to remember to leave.

</comment><comment><USER41> While I recognize the convenience and price savings of shopping online at Amazon, the reality is that once charming bookstores disappear, people won't even know what they're missing to be able to ascribe a value to it. It's about wanting a world that has a distributed power scheme (healthily decentralized), a marketplace of ideas (rather than only what Amazon platforms/sells), value placed on knowledge (books), spaces for subcultures to thrive, spaces for people in communities to interact with each other, etc.

Bookshops are just one example of what we are losing to megacorps for whom anti trust action is long overdue.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's surprsing that in 2020 that a bookstore would like to walk away from where most customers would go and buy their product. I hope they find it would be able to serve their customer better with their own online bookstore and less cost to run their own infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER43> Local farm says will not sell grain in cities any more; Says agricultural "revolution" has resulted in decline of people working on farms from 83% to 8%; Working themselves, day in, day out, tilling the land by hand, and all the good honest work that pre-agricultural revolution farming required.

Some people cite that the agricultural revolution paved the way for cities, the industrial revolution, science and technology, but what is really important is jobs that involve turning the land by hand.

The facts that food is now far more available, far cheaper, and far easier to obtain (it can be delivered to your door) and at far greater variety, don't offset the fact that if we returned to pre-agricultural revolution pratices we could have 250 million americans all employed working dawn till dusk on the fields, with only the occasional famine.

(In other news, Farm admits that its only doing this because "The pandemic changed the landscape, Powell said, with Amazon prioritizing cleaning supplies and other essential goods -- slowing the shipment of books.")

</comment><comment><USER44> I support Powell's courage and I am rooting for them, but I'm afraid they have waited too long to make a stand and the only limit to Amazon's power to squash them in the marketplace is Amazon's concern about being perceived as too powerful.

<comment><USER45> Me too, been going there a long time. Though it has had its own share of public labor disputes with employees over the years.

That said, the local support really is quite good and as far as I know the company hasn't been in real dire straights.

>The pandemic changed the landscape, Powell said...its Amazon sales slowed so she decided to focus on the bookstore's own website.

I like Powell's but the site wasn't really very good. It was like so many other companies that have somehow been caught flat footed when they should have been hiring and building excellent online experiences _around_ their core value offering years ago.

This is with acknowledgment that the company built out an entire area to do online sales years back.

Powell's could have or still can build its own GoodReads or similar engagement tool but they haven't and probably won't.

So long as the company is competing like an online bookstore I don't think it will ever compete with Amazon in potential sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What's the best alternative to buy physical books for both customer and publisher?

<comment><USER47> Often you can buy direct from the author or publisher. If your goal is to avoid Amazon (although I admit I don't know how this will affect revenues to the author/publisher), you can get in touch with your local bookstores or places like [https://www.indiebound.org/](https://www.indiebound.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The problem is not Amazon, the problem is local rents. If we encourage mixed- use zoning, ie. 3-5 storey apartment blocks with the ground and first level for commercial and office use, we'll lower rents and reduce commutes.

<comment><USER49> Or would hedge funds and REITs just buy these spaces (or keep them to rent out after building them—a common practice for developers) and continue to charge high rent with more empty storefronts?

I've thought for years that the growing number of commercial vacancies, even pre-Covid, would "sort itself out." It certainly hasn't yet.

<comment><USER50> The thing you're seeing with covid is that places are empty for the same reason they became empty, and the owners are speculating that demand will rebound in the future (e.g. once there is a vaccine) so they have no reason to sell for less today.

If you change the zoning at a sufficient scale, rents would be expected to decline _permanently_ , so there would be nothing gained by holding out until tomorrow.

<comment><USER51> IIRC Vancouver taxes empty properties more than the ones in use to prevent this kind of speculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> If you've only visited the first Powell's on the south side of Chicago (Hyde Park), you'll be blown by the Portland location. It truly is a book lovers paradise.

<comment><USER53> I have been to the Portland location, and as amazing as it is the Hyde Park Powell's will always hold a special place in my heart. I spent many a day in college wasting time in the shelves of Powell's and spent a lot more money there than I should have. My interest in graphic novels was started by a book (Dash Shaw's Bodyworld) I stumbled onto there, my interest in poetry the same (Stanely Kunitz' Passing Through). Perhaps most significantly, I discovered a book on cellular automata there that really kicked off my interest in computer science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Never been to Powell's but I just ordered a book to support their stand. Good PR or not, it makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER55> > declaring that the online retail giant undermines communities by siphoning > business from the real world and replacing it with internet commerce.

Alternate Title: Powell won't sell any books at all anymore

<comment><USER53> The truly enormous lines that constantly plague the Portland location would indicate otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Not sure this is worthy of being on HN.

<comment><USER57> If you ever had the opportunity to visit Powell's technical bookstore in the past, you'd find it very worthy. It was an amazing goldmine of books, back before Amazon, and back when university campuses had actual bookstores with actual technical books.

When I worked for Rogue Wave Software in the 90's, we took an all-team field trip (rented bus) up to Powell's TB with everyone getting a spending amount to get whatever they wanted.

<comment><USER58> Reminds me of running to the PO box for the Lindsay's Technical Books catalog when I was a kid. Someday I'll build that milling machine from scratch.</comment></comment></comment>


platform: Enable support for Pi2+ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/commit/ad8608c08b122b2c228dba0ff5070d6e9519faf5 <comment><AUTHOR> It looks like a new Raspberry Pi 2+ is coming soon; maybe for industrial uses and supply chain reasons.

<comment><USER3> Then it will probably be not that cheap. I was trying to use RPi as kiosk inside of a warehouse. Even good filtered power supply was not preventing resets. So you cannot drive big electric motor close to RPi.

<comment><USER4> Try shielding it, put it in a small metal enclosure. Might not be noise on the power supply - just strong EMI so close to it will cause problems.

<comment><USER3> There is also cable from supply to Pi itself also network cable attached to it. So still current will induce in those. There was no other way for connection only to have those cables run vertically.

<comment><USER5> Have you put an RF chokes on the cables? Give that a try to add some inductance so you don't have to worry about the noise from the motors.

Also alfoil will go a long way for shielding.

How big of an electric motor is it?

<comment><USER3> Oh I have seen EMI shielding tape on some cables but I did not know what it is until I have googled for it after your comment. Seems like something to try out. Motor is 20kw driving less than 1 meter from installation. It is not standing there but it is mounted on machine, which comes at the spot from time to time, and while passing by it causes resets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A version with SATA or USB3 would be nice. That would extend potential use cases a lot since we could use faster storage.

<comment><USER7> SATA won't happen (unless they use USB-SATA bridge, like in Orange Pi - <USER2> then it will be all but fast) As far as I know, there are no modern low-cost ARM SoCs that have an integrated SATA peripheral. AllWinner was the only vendor that shipped one and they gave up on it after A20.

<comment><USER8> Built in Ethernet would be an improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm guessing/hoping it's going to be very similar to [https://getchip.com/pages/chip](https://getchip.com/pages/chip) in both connectivity (WiFi/BT) and built-in storage... and hopefully price.

</comment><comment><USER10> well I would hope there would be a new Pi coming out... eventually.</comment>


Orbital Kinetic Bombardment gets close to nuclear on damage and cost - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/11/orbital-kinetic-bombardment-gets-close-to-nuclear-on-damage-and-cost.html/amp?__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> "If it cost $100 per pound to launch a 12-ton rod then each rod would cost $2.4 million."

Just imagine how cheap and destructive it would be when payload to orbit costs reach a dollar a pound!</comment>


Show HN: Goxel, an open-source 3D voxel editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/guillaumechereau/goxel <comment><USER2> I know that this is a long shot...

Is there any chance of having the sort of features that would be needed to manually tidy up the results of segmentations of 3D images (from CT scans). The sort of things I'm thinking about are.

1\. The ability to overlay two voxel images in the same editing space (e.g. one for the original image and one for the segmentation with added alpha channels).

2\. The ability to draw arbitrary sheets of voxels by e.g. selecting 3-4 voxels as the corners of the sheet.

3\. In terms of image format one would need to handle images with e.g. float32 and int32 greyscale voxel values. Import and export of raw binary images would be nice.

Just wondering. Some of the proprietary 3D analysis suites have these editing features but as far as I know the FOSS solutions for 3D image processing don't include any editing functionality.

<comment><USER3> 3D Slicer ([http://www.slicer.org/](http://www.slicer.org/)) has most (if not all) of that, if I understood your questions. I have struggled with the learning curve, though. YouTube helps sometimes.

<comment><USER2> I haven't found the functionality to change the value of ability voxels in Slicer yet -- in particular for sheets with corners supplied by the user. Is it there and I'm just being dumb?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A friend created [https://cubeteam.io/](https://cubeteam.io/) but it failed pretty hard and fairly fast.

I pay attention to this space because I run [https://Clara.io](https://Clara.io), which is a 3D editor, but in the spirit of 3DS Max, Maya, Blender rather than focused on voxels.

<comment> david-given Incidentally, just as a piece of quick feedback for clara.io:

Registering for a service is really expensive! I have to come up with a password, then file it in my password manager, hand out my email address to some unknown stranger, etc, etc. Mostly I won't bother unless there's some compelling reason to do so; when present with a registration form I'll usually just give up.

Since you have a browser-based product, having 'Try now!' button that starts it (with no backend storage!) and let me play with it would make me way more likely to actually sign up.

<comment><USER5> Agree ! this looks like amazing app , please provide demo speed access to the app without registering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks actually pretty cool and something I might want to use. Is there any way to load .ply/.vtk with the voxel structure description?

</comment><comment><USER5> Any way to export to 3d file format ? Great work by the way ...

<comment><USER7> Yes, from the Readme:

> Export to obj and pyl</comment></comment>


Show HN: VeryAnts: Probabilistic Integer Arithmetic for Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/saghm/very-ants <comment><USER2> Compare [https://slawekk.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/probability- monad/](https://slawekk.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/probability-monad/) and [http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~erwig/papers/PFP_JFP06.pdf](http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~erwig/papers/PFP_JFP06.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the main difference between VeryAnts and these are that those are actually supposed to be useful in some way. But I could be wrong.

<comment><USER2> Haskell, useful? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not too sure why, but I find this quite clever and very funny!

Can anyone recommend other Github projects with a similar ReadMe?

</comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't find a probabilistic testing library, eh?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have any suggestions? I'm all ears</comment></comment>


Auckland NZ could move to alert level 1 without 'complete elimination' of virus - just-juan-post https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12361447 <comment><AUTHOR> Lockdowns did control the virus in NZ, life outside of auckland still seems pretty normal.

The decision to move back to level 1 wont be made for over a week when more data is in and hopefully the government will continue to focus on science not whoever is shouting the loudest

</comment><comment> just-juan-post I applaud them for taking the first steps to admitting that lockdowns cannot control this virus.</comment>


Safari in a Nutshell: A Two-Day Anniversary Sale ($0.545/day) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.safaribooksonline.com/2015/07/07/safari-in-a-nutshell-a-two-day-anniversary-sale/

<comment><USER2> This is an amazing price for the quantity of reads and vids.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds awesome!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great deal

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice!!

</comment><comment><USER6> woohoo!</comment>


Answer to Why do software engineers always focus on salary and early retirement? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-always-focus-on-salary-and-early-retirement/answer/Ram-Kumar-G-6?ch=99&share=eb4d442f&srid=uQDqk <comment><USER2> > Senior employees are not only expensive, they also are not coachable to > learn new skills/technology, technically not hands on and aren't pliant to > do the bidding of the management

Of course we're expensive. We value our time, because we know it's limited. We're not young anymore, and we were never immortal. Every minute we spend making you richer is a minute we could spend on more important things. It's only natural that we should demand as high a wage as possible.

Of course we aren't "pliant". We've been burned by management too often. Blame yourself, and blame our previous bosses. If they had treated us like human beings, we might not be so quick to regard you as a necessary evil.

Nevertheless, how dare the author assume developers like me are unwilling to learn new technologies? That's only half true. Of course I'm going to look askance at a new tech stack that's just a buggier and more complex way to do work I already know how to do, but if it's a genuine improvement I will dive in as if I were a wet-behind-the-ears CS grad.

Furthermore, what the hell is this bullshit about us oldsters not being hands- on? I'm still elbows-deep in this shit because I have no intention of letting myself get demoted to management even if it does seem to pay better and get a little more respect.

<comment><USER3> I laughed at the idea of all young engineers being more coachable. Any reasonable person has figured out that they have plenty of room to learn and grow from others.

<comment><USER2> I think the author's real agenda comes through when they talk about younger workers being more pliant. He doesn't want workers who stand up for themselves (or their fellow workers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The respondent demonstrates that he has never worked with senior developers, setting aside the false premise of the question.

How did this steaming pile of ignorant generalizations make it so high on HN?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is largely how I think about the future of my career. I'm old enough to have skill sets that are completely irrelevant now. I've also seen how I compare to interns at learning completely new stuff: many of them kick my ass!

If you don't make good bets early in your career and learn stuff that can carry you through large portions of your career, then you can find yourself stuck. Also, taking the wrong job can be a major career stumbling block.

I'm not planning on early retirement, but I'm absolutely planning for a demotion come age 45 or so. I'm just hoping that there will be something I can do circa 2030.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am not entirely convinced this is true.

From who I know, programmers can and do work well to average retirement age. Albeit, those skills are specialized in database architecture and older languages like Fortran.

Software engineers are one of the professions that make it possible to retire early, due to a higher than average household income. The majority of people today have to work until their bodies stop or their pensions kick in.

<comment><USER3> Yes, what he's talking about does happen to many engineers, but not all. Also, not all Jr engineers are more coachable, or compliant. I have 50+yo co-workers that are eager to learn from me. Many older employees have learned that it doesn't pay to argue with managers too much, whereas young engineers can be idealistic and uncompromising; they also expect to make a difference immediately, regardless of experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, ageism is a pernicious in many industries.

The key is to evaluate individuals fairly including what they bring to the team. Maybe they don't type 80 WPM or know every single cool tool but maybe they can find subtle bugs and write less code? That's valuable.</comment>


Wozad just launched in beta, looks like a valid Adsense Killer - jjfarren- http://www.wozad.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> One Suggestion:

You want people to have positive feelings about your company (you are putting a lot of work into it in order to help people, right?) so drop the negative advertising. Figure out ways to differentiate and complement others so that people who use and like other services don't feel personally threatened by your advertising.

Even if it is really obvious you are competing with someone, don't say it that out loud, since you are likely to fork into a different business model from them as you grow and find your own niche. Playing nicely with others will get you more positive buzz from the community, and you'll be perceived as a better partner by others if you play nicely.:

"Adsense for X, Wozad for Y".

Also, if you want to fight Google head on you're likely to lose. Better to find a niche, start making money and use that to improve your service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, fix your email. I just sent feedback to firstname.lastname@example.com and...

"Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist."

<comment> jjfarren- Thanks for your feedback George, the email problem is fixed. We did put a lot of efforts in this startup and our resources are very limited, both in financial and human resources terms. Perfection at the moment it's well beyond us. We mentioned the big Google with the intention to create some buzz and focus on the similarities between the two systems. Similarities that anybody can observe. Anyway your point of view makes perfect sense and your feedback has extreme value for us, again sincere Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Well adsense and wozad both do not work without Javascript...

</comment><comment><USER3> it's broken: <http://publishers.wozad.com/signup_confirm.php>, the link that the confirmation email points me to, doesn't exist.

<comment> jjfarren- I can sign up succesfully, it seems it's fixed.

<comment><USER4> It's your site. I'd imagine _you_ are able to sign up successfully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a great idea, i think we'll hear about them in the future...</comment>


Firefox OS 1.3 - <AUTHOR> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Releases/1.3 <comment><USER2> Does anyone know which is the cheapest phone that can be hacked to run Firefox OS? As in, is there a port to any of the , for example, the chinese Mediatek SoC-based phones - some of those sell for less than $50, retail. Vast majority sell for less than ~$100. They usually come with Android ICS/JB, but if even one of them has been hacked to run FFOS, i'd sure like to give it a try.

<comment><USER3> conversely, are there any expensive phones that can run it yet? i would love to try it on my rooted HTC Jewel (Sprint EVO 4G LTE). currently running CyanogenMod nightlies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Geeksphone just made the Revolution [1] that can run FFOS and/or Android.

Also according to Mozilla there are several Nexus phones that can run FFOS [2]

[1] [http://shop.geeksphone.com/es/moviles/9-revolution.html](http://shop.geeksphone.com/es/moviles/9-revolution.html)

[2] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Firefox_OS/Phones#Firefo...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Firefox_OS/Phones#Firefox_OS_phones_available)

<comment><USER3> i guess i was more interested to know which phones has it been ported to. i understand that technically it can run on every phone that currently runs android since the linux layer is identical.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't: [https://autonome.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/firefox-os- devices...](https://autonome.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/firefox-os-devices-and- dark-matter/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there anything particularly remarkable about this release? The release notes make it sound like it really offers nothing more than some bug fixes, and very minor new functionality.

<comment><USER6> This page lists changes that are useful to apps developers, so mostly new features in the web runtime itself.

New features in apps and some other big changes (like the use of async panning and zooming in the graphics stack) are not covered in this document.

I guess we'll have more user-oriented release notes soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It will be a sign of things to come to see how many releases are supported on the first-generation Firefox OS phone that I have (ZTE Open). This doesn't mention it, and a quick Googling doesn't show any positive signs... anyone know?

<comment><USER4> I am quite sure that backwards compatibility won't be an issue. As you may know Firefox OS is aimed at low-end phones, so I don't think they plan on ending support for first generation phones… ever?. The only issue is the manufacturer, which has to take care for the Firmware updates for his own handsets. ZTE doesn't look very eager to give its users constant updates.

<comment><USER8> So no different from any other mobile OS OEMs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> CardDav should be #1 priority. If I can't sync my contacts what use is a phone with FirefoxOS?

<comment><USER10> #1 [https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia](https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia) feel free to work on it. Any contribution will be appreciated.

2# this is not marketed as a substitute to iPhone or even Android. It's mean for people that can't afford high end phones. People that if the choice is a $25 phone without contacts sync or a $100 phone with sync they will take the former.

3# A lot of people are working hard on this project improving it every day. Dismissing it like that for a quite minor thing, yes minor, seems quite childish to me.

<comment><USER5> When a potential user expresses a very legitimate desire for some missing functionality, it leaves a very bad impression when that user is then told to add the functionality himself or herself.

It also doesn't help to refer to that very legitimate feature request as "childish", especially when it involves core functionality that's very critical to many users.

<comment><USER8> And one wonders themselves why GNU/Linux never got to the average joe/jane desktop.

<comment><USER11> GNU/Linux was never aimed at average people - it exists to solve some problems average people just don't have.

<comment><USER8> Funny, I use computers for almost 30 years now and that is how it was being sold since the early days.

As the alternative to the evil empire of corporations for all types of users, including average people.

<comment><USER11> It's been usable by the average user for a long time now, but first the average user needs to get it. Average users usually need a lot of help to obtain operating systems that are not sold in boxes or that don't come preinstalled. That and the selection of compatible hardware, which has not always been easy. Luckily, most hardware makers are a little better at building compatible computers these days. Worst: average users have a lot to unlearn.

My mom (she's 78) is on Linux since 2006 or so. Moved from Windows to Mac and then to Linux. Never had an issue.

The key is what the user expects. If you approach Linux wanting a seamless transition from Windows, you'll be frustrated. Everything makes sense, but it's different. Your software won't run. If you approach Linux without expecting it to be like Windows, you'll be happy. The average user overestimates how much they know about computing and bring their own baggage. That baggage holds them down. They want to download Nero to burn a CD. They want to download Firefox from the firefox.org website. The whole idea of a package manager is completely alien to the average user (or was, until the advent of the app store).

<comment><USER8> Sorry but this looks like a copy paste comment from around 1995, funny how some things never change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Did ES6 spec get approved, I thought it was still a draft spec? Why are ES6 features exposed by default and not behind a flag?

<comment><USER13> The ES6 spec draft is in its final stages of being revised. At this point there shouldn't be any substantial developer-facing changes except to a few final things that are being ironed out (mainly modules).

The features that are being shipped in Firefox are ones that are stable in the draft spec and not expected to change. At the point of spec stability, these features need to be actually tested in broader distribution to help find any potential compatibility corner cases, similar to the issues found with Array.prototype.values [1].

[1] [http://www.esdiscuss.org/topic/array-prototype-values- breaks...](http://www.esdiscuss.org/topic/array-prototype-values-breaks-the- web)

<comment><USER12> I agree with it in principle, but this isn't the first time FF has dropped in Javascript features which are still not finalized. I just think that if other browser vendors are going to be raked over the coals for not rigidly adhering to standards processes and shipping non-approved features not behind flags, everyone should be held to the same standard, a consistent policy.

<comment><USER14> If the other vendors weren't, respectively, the largest, second largest, and third largest tech companies in the world, and amongst the most valuable companies in the world this comparison would make sense. If, of the other three browser makers, we weren't discussing a company that holds a near monopoly on desktop OS's, a company that holds a near monopoly on the high-end of computing, and the third which holds a near monopoly on internet services this comparison would again make sense.

Should Mozilla have been more conservative in shipping features that are actually written up in a spec on their fledgling OS? Probably, playing strictly by the rules is generally a good thing. Is this comparable to a different vendor working to ship an enormous feature which didn't even have a spec, and which the person at the centre of the controversy asked other people to help write because they had been so busy? No, not at all.

Size, influence, and power always make a difference. I have a hard time understanding how you wouldn't see this.

<comment><USER12> Like the Geneva Conventions, they protect both big and small players, in times of war, as long as everyone agrees to abide by them. The big players, as you indicate, could really do a lot more, unimpeded, but have shown relative restraint and participated voluntarily these standards committees. I don't think granting a waiver for one particular vendor is conducive to influencing others to play by the rules.

What's the lesson? Two wrongs make a right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it possible to try out FirefoxOS as an app on another smartphone?

<comment><USER16> If you just want to see what it looks like, you can install the Firefox OS Simulator, an add-on for desktop Firefox:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Firefox_OS_Si...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Firefox_OS_Simulator)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> iOS, Android, Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS... Seems like perhaps a lot of people are trying to get VC funding on the back of iOS success, no?

<comment><USER18> A lot of people are trying to make something which gives more freedom to users than iOS.

<comment><USER5> This already exists, in the form of Android. Is it ideologically perfect? Maybe not, but it's more than good enough for most people. Android is widely adopted, it's available on many different devices, users can install their own apps from a variety of sources, and there's a fair amount of freedom for developers to choose how to implement and distribute their apps.

<comment><USER19> 2 is a low number for a global market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "New Array methods have been implemented: Array.prototype.keys"

Dafuq.

Yes I'm aware how Arrays are just objects in JS but please stop bastardizing the Array data type even further. This is also part of ES6 so I don't blame Mozilla for implementing it.

<comment><USER13> All iterable objects (Arrays, Strings, TypedArrays, Maps, and Sets) come with the same set of iterator-creating methods (keys, values, entries).

<comment><USER21> This is the most important point; it is totally consistent.</comment></comment></comment>


Nvidia prefers Windows CE over Android for netbooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9134522&intsrc=news_ts_head

<comment><USER2> It's all just FUD, sadly. They need the MS cooperation to get the sale, and MS wants something back. So the business guys cooperate on a technical-sounding press release. Boring.

I counted only two technical points in the article. The first is that Android's icons are too big (?!). The second is that "all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code", which just plain incorrect.

Edit: I should probably elaborate. Android on the G1, at least, does video decoding using the Qualcomm DSP cores on the chip. 3D work has access to an ATI-based OpenGL ES 1.1 part, with relatively good texturing performance. The media frameworks are in C++, and available to native code. Only the UI library and top-level application framework is Java/Dalvik.

<comment><USER3> _"all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code", which just plain incorrect._

NVidia is saying that _on Tegra_ the rendering is done in software _because NVidia hasn't written a Linux 3D driver_. Clearly that isn't Android's fault. I wonder how many months or years it will take to get the driver written.

<comment><USER2> The port of their windows Geforce driver to linux was reported to have taken a few months. As I understand it, they're still maintained from the same tree and share essentially all code but the minimum necessary glue (much to the annoyance of the linux kernel folks, it should be added).

Tegra is, no doubt, based on the same hardware components they're shipping in their other products; and its driver is surely similarly portable. This isn't a technical point, it's just FUD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, Nvidia's guy is really full of crap.

"The world soundly rejected the first netbooks that came out with Linux," he said. "Printers didn't work, and devices didn't get recognized. The whole thing was a mess."

So their master plan is to ship Windows CE? An OS with even fewer drivers?

I'm also not sure where he got the "soundly rejected" from. The first generation Linux-based Asus Eee were sold out for months here in the UK.

I'm also not entirely convinced on Android on a netbook. I own a G1 and absolutely adore it but while it's a great fit for the size of the screen and capabilities of the phone, i'm not sure i'd want the same thing on a 10" screen.

</comment><comment><USER5> First they ignore you...

</comment><comment><USER6> not sure how smart it is to favor a proprietary OS, that increases costs for device manufacturers, when the world economy is in a downturn

<comment><USER7> It's a good idea if it makes your competition follow what you say while you do something else.

<comment><USER6> I don't see Intel biting; they're too in love with Linux

<comment><USER7> When companies act insane like this it's usually to ward off threats. I wonder if it's that they supply their chips to Microsoft for their newer Zune thingies of because they want to sweeten any deal with Intel regarding their patent disputes.

I also wonder if it is not the same mechanism we saw in action with Asus a couple days ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand the Android netbook meme at all. Moblin seems to make much more sense since it was actually designed for netbooks.

<comment><USER7> Well... I love Ubuntu on my Aspire One.

That said, it's a dual-threading 32 bit CPU with 1.5 gigabytes of RAM and a slow, but spacious, 160 GB hard disk.

This was good for a beefy server a couple years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can understand Nvidia's position. It was either endorsing CE or losing support in future versions of Windows...

</comment><comment><USER8> Windows CE on a netbook downsides: \- No software that can work more than on 800x480, also every program thinks it's on a tiny touch-screen, full-sized, with two control buttons. \- No drivers. Maybe USB storage would work. No serial cables, no webcams, forget all of that. Irony: I doubt there's a Host ActiveSync, so no Windows CE smartphones syncing. \- Operating system sucks, therefore everybody beefs it up with proprietary "shells". \- The only descent browser, costs 30$.

upsides: \- It's Windows, so tehre should be PROFIT!</comment>


Chinese Expats Fleeing Ebola, Returning Home via Paris - <AUTHOR>

The Ebola outbreak is motivating native Han Chinese who migrated to or worked in Africa to return to China. Their path home in this instance includes a stopover in Paris.
Will Europe or Asia be the second continent to suffer the ravages of Ebola?
http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1580067/fear-ebola-palpable-air-france-flight-freetown-paris <comment><USER2> Please don't submit links this way. Rather, put the url in the url box.</comment>


Show HN: A gayer "lolcat" (CLI text colourizer) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ms-jpq/gay <comment><USER2> I have a feature request - something to keep foreground from being the same colour as the background. Otherwise there is a lot of unreadable text.

It's actually a useful utility for your Pride Month dashboard: cal |gay -c24

<comment><AUTHOR> thats actually a hardish problem to solve.

I originally had a feature like that, but I just couldn't figure out what background colours to use.

For example the asexual flag here [https://ladygeekgirl.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/asexual- fla...](https://ladygeekgirl.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/asexual-flag.png)

Its black, grey, white, and dark purple, I just don't know what kind of background colour would actually make text more legible.

I could do different background colours for each gradient, but thats probably even ugiler.

Do you have any suggestions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does this support 24-bit true color?

<comment><USER4> It appears so! [https://github.com/ms- jpq/gay/blob/95129960bc94f017648b93944...](https://github.com/ms- jpq/gay/blob/95129960bc94f017648b93944cfa65205fc646ab/gay#L215-L216)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thats a kinda insensitive stereotype

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly do not mean to cause offense to LGBT people, in fact I am one of them!

I don't see how having a CLI tool that prints our flags insensitive tho.

<comment><USER5> not all gays subscribe to being flamboyant/colourful</comment></comment></comment>


Tutorial: A faster start with backbone.js - <AUTHOR> http://thinkingonthinking.com/fast-start-with-backbonejs/

<comment><AUTHOR> IMHO the documentation of backbone.js is fragmented. This is a good writeup for getting up and running.</comment>


Anonymous Hacks Govt Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.landt.co/2014/01/anonymous-hacks-sao-paulo-government/

<comment><AUTHOR> anyone see this? know why they are doing this country's site?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a way to find why I am being shown certain ads? - <AUTHOR> I am being shown certain ads that appear targeted but I've never shown interest in the topic.
Is there any way to find out what the ad networks think my interests are and why they are showing me such ads?
Google gives hand wavy general reasons such as those found here:  https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1634057?hl=en
But I'm interested in knowing what specifically the ad networks think I am interested in and why they think that.
I found this page which gave a rather fascinating insight into what Google thinks my interests are and what my demographic profile is: https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated  It was remarkably accurate except for a few things, but it did not indicate I have any interest in the ads that Google is showing me on this topic.  So I'm puzzled as to why I'm seeing these ads - what bit of the Internet is concluding this is a topic of interest to me? <comment><USER2> If it is Google then they will tell you exactly why you were targeted...there should be 2 icons in the top right corner of the banner add, one is an X and the other is a triangle. Click on the triangle and the ad will change to have to buttons saying "stop seeing this ad" and "why this ad". Clicking on the "why this ad" button will show you the reasons. For example I saw an ad just now for a high end apartment and I clicked on it. The page explains:

This ad is based on:

      Your visit to the advertiser's website and/or app
      Google's estimation of your Household Income
      Your age group

</comment><comment><USER3> "Why the ads" is not relevant enough to justify spending my time trying to figure it out.

Just block ads and tracking in general and Google in particular. If DuckDuckGo can operate successfully without tracking, Google and their cling-ons can too. Figuring out how and why --- that's their problem, not mine.

Google is mainly an annoyance, kind of like a parasite. If Google shut down tomorrow, any significant loss of functionality could be easily overcome by the end of the day for most people.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some (most?) ad networks will let you see a list of topics they think you're interested in. They can be quite hilariously wrong sometimes though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any reason why you're seeing ads in the first place? I recommend using an adblocker, specifically uBlock Origin.</comment>


India's EVMs are Vulnerable to Fraud - <AUTHOR> http://indiaevm.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> It amazes me that in spite of the presence of such simple hacks, the largest democracy in the world uses this solution.</comment>


Why are conversations limited to about four people? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513818301491 <comment><USER2> Because otherwise you have to wait too long for your turn to speak, and you start whispering to the person next to you.

<comment><USER3> To emphasize the point, you end up needing to listen to other people instead of having other people listen to you. This is a big problem with discussions, the need to show your own worth easily overrides the value in having an actual discussion.

<comment><USER4> This is true, though not everyone is worth listening to, and not on $RANDOM subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always preferred groups of 2-6 people. Many board games are made for groups of this size.

On one side, humans can mentally cope with 4-6 objects at most - as though we have 4-6 memory slots, which is reasonable given that we have 4 limbs.

On another side, network effects of nodes on a grid become unmanageable above about 6 nodes - a group of 6 people will have 36 one-on-one interpersonal relationships to manage.

<comment><USER6> > On another side, network effects of nodes on a grid become unmanageable > above about 6 nodes - a group of 6 people will have 36 one-on-one > interpersonal relationships to manage.

Network effects grow surprisingly fast. Between 2 people there's only 1 bidirectional edge. Between 3 it's 3 and between 4 it's 6.

      | people | edges |
      |</comment></comment><comment>--|</comment><comment>-|
      | 2      | 1     |
      | 3      | 3     |
      | 4      | 6     |
      | 5      | 10    |

Intuitively, this is important because in a conversation, each member must project and rationalise each other communicator's response to a message. In other words, each member must be cognisant of every other members response to every message. Between a few people that's manageable, but the combinatorics really grows for n >= 4.

<comment><USER7> > _this is important because in a conversation, each member must project and > rationalise each other communicator 's response to a message_

Do they, though? Maybe I participate in conversations differently, but trying to unravel how A interpreted B's comment is not something I would do.

<comment><USER8> It's all I do. It's the only way I can understand if my next comment will offend or work as a joke or if I'm posing an interesting topic. It's what makes conversations so draining to an introvert I feel. The more people, the more I have to figure out what I can say to be ok with the group at hand.

<comment><USER7> As I posted below, there is a difference between observing how different people react to a particular comment (O(n)) and observing how different people react to a particular comment based on who it's from (O(n^2)). I'm mostly trying to question the idea that there's anything quadratic in the number of participants going on here. Are you sure you're saying that the work you do is quadratic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An abstract is to summarize the results of research not to tease the reader. That's why I flagged it.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, feels like the editors dropped the ball on that. Hopefully they'll fix it before the final version.

Anyway, here's a link: [https://sci- hub.tw/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.09.004](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.09.004)

<comment><USER11> thanks. was wondering how could something upvoted this high be behind a paywall without anyone asking for the paper itself. It's like people read the abstract and choose to discuss what they will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem I see with larger group discussion is that the idea permutates far enough from the original idea after 4 turns that a participant's response to the topic may no longer be valid in the new discussion context. It can be very frustrating to have to unwind the progress to an early point for the input to be valid.

<comment><USER13> This is usually my experience, where if I'm with more than 3 people I stop talking because the idea I have is no longer relevant by the time there's an opening for me to say something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always thought about this in terms of individual conversational coefficients. Each separate conversation consumes a total conversational coefficient of 1.0 from all sources. Go above 1.0, and some people don't get to have their say. Go below 1.0, and there may be uncomfortable lulls.

Each person has a range of conversational contributions that they may feel comfortable with. A good university lecturer, radio show host, or stand-up comedian, for instance, might be able to sustain a maximum of 1.0 all alone for hours at a time. Someone with an inflated ego might not feel comfortable dipping below 0.5 for any length of time, whereas an introvert might range between 0.0 (pure listener) and a peak value they cannot sustain for long outside of a narrow range of topics.

So establishing the most efficient number of conversations, and their participants, becomes a form of the backpack problem. A conversation group can only achieve its highest efficiency of some people aim to fulfill different roles. Some participants are bulky and heavy, some are spongy and flexible, and others are small and light.

There's the baseline talker. This is likely the person with the highest sustainable coefficient. They drive the conversation. Then there are responders, who need to have a wide, tunable range of coefficient. They top off the conversation to 1.0 by adjusting their output to an appropriate value. There may be interjectors, who pipe up with a witty quip or relevant factoid every now and then, aiming for high return on low coefficient. There may also be swappers, who participate at a low level in multiple conversations, flipping to whichever one seems to have a lower coefficient, but less able to sustain higher coefficients than a responder. Sometimes there is even a gestural participant, who mainly contributes to the conversation with non- competing visuals rather than interruptable speech.

So having a single conversation with more than six people is easy. You kick out the baseline talker, get two responders to drive the conversation instead, and fill up the rest of the group with interjectors. This happens all the time in tabletop gaming groups, where the game itself adds a baseline coefficient, and the typical participant has a low maximum sustainable coefficient. Some people just don't want to talk much, and the game can create a structured conversation that pulls lower-coefficient players up enough to make the group reach 1.0 .

</comment><comment><USER15> for me it is an NP-hard-like reasoning. I'm not only concerned with my effect on the 3 other participants, i'm concerned with each participant's effect on each participant.

<comment><USER16> I agree with this. I also believe this is why socially normal (i.e. not socially awkward, not shy) people can have problem talking in crowds. Needs more cognitive overhead to analyze what words may cause what on certain people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a reason why Roberts Rules, and other parliamentary procedures exist.

Once you get to ~10 people who all want to input something into the discussion, its completely and utterly impossible to move a discussion forward without a set of rules. Normally, one person who yells the loudest and ignores the most people eats up the entirety of conversation space.

As such, basic rules are invented. In Roberts Rules, its one-at-a-time, and at most contribute 2-times per any particular subject, at roughly 10-minutes maximum per person. The "Chairperson" controls the discussion to ensure the rules are applied equally to everyone, so that everyone gets a turn. If possible, the Chairperson is supposed to choose an order of people's speaking turns so that both sides of a discussion alternate back and forth (pros, then cons, then pros again. Etc. etc.).

Its slower, but it scales better. The unfortunate effect is that most people don't understand the point of Roberts Rules or Parliamentary procedure (there are many sets of rules, Roberts Rules are just the most common in the USA), so most people just see it as unnecessary set of rules that slow down a conversation.

</comment><comment><USER18> When I have a conversation, I like it to be back-and-forth: I say something, they react, I react to that, and so on, with reactions being things like asking a question, making an evaluation, saying I have had something similar happen to me, making a funny comment, and so on, so we go further and maybe deeper, a process I find rewarding.

The more people, the less often I get to react, and so it gets less enjoyable. On the other hand, with some groups we are on the same wavelength enough that a third person's reactions to the second person are enjoyable to me, too, so I am happy to just listen to their back-and-forth, at least for a while. Ditto if it is a subject being discussed that is really interesting.

</comment><comment><USER19> While yes, you have to get your turn to speak, there are sometimes situations where you don't need to speak to communicate. For example in my TS raid group while there are always speakers, I prefer to write on chat and can communicate even when somebody is speaking - while I can follow the conversation that is happening between 4 speakers I can partake in the discussion and can communicate with other verbal/nonverbal participants. While my points might get omitted in the discussion, or can have a delay to get picked up it allows people that didn't get their turn to speak to get into the "conversation". In that sense the problem is not communicating with 4 people - the problem is getting your turn.

</comment><comment><USER20> I got halfway through, which I think gets you to the answer to the money question of what's special about four. Here's my attempt to summarize:

There are bunch of possible reasons conversation size might be limited or optimal at certain numbers. They choose to focus on mentalizing -- your ability to maintain a mental model of another person. (I don't know if they have a strong claim for _why_ they chose this.) One interesting observation that HN will love is that mentalizing is recursive. When I have a mental model of your mind, that model includes why I think your mental model of _me_ is, and so on. If I say something to Fred while George and Harry listen in, I can reason about what Fred will think of what I say, what George will think of what Fred will think of what I say, and what Harry will think of what George will think of what I will think of what Harry will think of... ad infinitum.

By focusing on mentalizing, what matters more is the _pairs_ of people in a conversation more than the number of people. It's about the relation between one person and their reaction to another. Pairs grow faster than linear as the number of participants increases. There are "n(n-1)/2" pairs in a conversation with "n" people.

Then they make a distinction between "inclusive" and "exclusive" pairs. An inclusive pair is one that includes you. So in a three-person conversation, there are three pairs: you-A, you-B, A-B. So two of those pairs are inclusive.

The number of pairs increases quadratically. The number of inclusive pairs increases linearly. At larger group sizes, most pairs of people don't include you.

They claim four is the magic number because that's the largest conversation size before the exclusive pairs outnumber the inclusive ones. With four people, there are three inclusive and four exclusive pairs. With five people, there are four inclusive and six exclusive.

It's a neat observation, but they note themselves that they are basically doing a post-hoc analysis. They started with four and then tried to find some math that makes it special, and eventually found two lines that cross at that point.

I do think there might be something to it. If you assume that the most valuable interactions are ones that involve you (versus deriving value from seeing what two people say to each other), then it stands to reason that you want to avoid conversations where most utterances aren't from you or to you.

But that also presumes (1) people don't derive much value from watching others talk to each other and (2) all participants are communicating to each other equally. Neither of those is true in practice.

I think a smarter way to look at it is that people strive to maximize the total value they get from all pair-wise communications. One way to do that is in a small even-handed conversation. But you can also get that by:

1\. Giving a speech where you get to do almost all of the utterances. So even though there are many many pairs, most of those channels are silent, and most of the communication does involve you.

2\. Watching a debate where even though your aren't participating, you get a lot of value from what the other two are saying to each other.

3\. Less formal approximations of the above. All of us have probably experienced a conversation that grew to larger than four people because a minority of them had more dominant personalities so you end up with a couple of "performers" and some "audience" though people occasionally change sides.

Anyway, fun paper.

<comment><USER21> Paper seems paywalled. How are you reading this? Any mirror?

<comment><USER22> Did you try Sci-Hub? Always try Sci-Hub.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Discord engineering blog post this week has a fascinating sentence on this topic, perhaps much more interesting to me than the engineering itself:

> Every audio/video communication in Discord is multiparty. Supporting large > group channels (we have seen 1000 people taking turns speaking)

[https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-two-and- half...](https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-million- concurrent-voice-users-using-webrtc-ce01c3187429)

</comment><comment><USER24> More than 4-5 people simply gets impractical, but that's not such a big deal. With some restrictions you can have meetings with more people and e.g. at a long table it's simply a balance of distance (for voice and non verbal clues) and frustration of not being able to talk (at some point you just tell it your neighbor, splitting the group when it gets too big).

</comment><comment><USER25> We have the terms monologue and dialogue, but I'm not aware of words for 3 speakers or more specified by number. (They may exist, but presumably aren't in common usage.)

So I'm a little surprised to learn that four-way conversations are a thing, actually. Or an important thing, I guess. Not that they exist per se, but that they are an important demarcation.

<comment><USER26> Four way conversations are only relevant as a concept in this case because of the effects on what would be considered a discussion at that number (or more) of participants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not on the internet ...

</comment><comment><USER28> > we present one novel possible explanation for the four-person conversation > size constraint.

But we're not going to tell you in the abstract.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is really not rocket science - is a mathematical model required, and even reflective, of reality here?

<comment><USER30> id suggest that there is no inherent need for mathematical models at all, unless there was a specific desire in the first place to produce said models for some reason. while certainly one would hope that formal models and analysis is performed in the pursuit of some noble/practical end, sometimes it's just fun to research things for the sake of it, because there's always the possibility that in researching one concept, you get exposed to an expanding universe of other concepts that depend on that original one which you never would have considered without the context of the research being performed.

that being said, i think having a formalized way of speaking about the limits of social discourse could be highly beneficial in several different contexts, such as providing effective group therapy, the representation of social interaction in film/literature/etc, and beyond that it can also be used to reason better about the nature of that squishy device that evolved to the point of being able to even comprehend the idea of "conversations" in general, no less the concept of having multiple of them simultaneously

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> that means webRTC can be quite useful

</comment><comment><USER32> The dynamics of a good conversation are almost identical to those of a good game of hacky-sack.

</comment><comment><USER33> 6 ways from the Mythical Man Month, right?

</comment><comment><USER34> Have you ever played the game telephone?

<comment><USER35> [https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/3509/products/buy_sel...](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/3509/products/buy_sell_1024x1024.jpg?v=1426516607)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Behind a paywall :/</comment>