Plagiarism - <AUTHOR> http://notes.unwieldy.net/post/23049725899/plagiarism <comment><USER3> The old adage is you can't copyright facts and there was certainly no requirement for TNW to do any "original research" to share these findings.

However, when you copy/use facts, you wade into hot water if you also copy the structure and the way those facts were originally _expressed._ The original TNW article shown here seems to step over that line with a barely masked copy of the original paragraphs.

What bothers me more, though, is that seemingly a CEO of a media organization has failed to do any damage control based around a genuine grievance (that wasn't even aggressively delivered). Saying things like _"think it's pretty ridiculous that you're even getting the slightest bit annoyed about this"_ , _"needless to say, we'll be staying well clear of anything ur involved with in future for fear of ridiculous reaction"_ and using _"u do realise that about 50% of all publications is content sourced from other publications right?"_ as a sort of defence is a horrible PR line for a proprietor to play, even if that's his honest opinion.

<comment><USER4> I'd honestly much rather be brutally honest than go down the artificial PR route.

<comment><USER5> I upvoted you (really) because I totally agree with you: CEOs like you _should_ be completely, brutally honest. Especially when this reveals you to be oafish and unprincipled.

This policy is good for customers (so they can avoid your products) good for investors (so they can avoid investing in your company) and good for prospective employees (so they can not).

<comment><USER3> I think that could make a fascinating blog post and then discussion on HN. If you want to ride on the back of this one (you know how HN has flavors of the week), consider it! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Update: image credit added after I posted this. Still, the image should be removed, this is copyright infringement.

TheNextWeb is infamous for plagiarizing images for that section. Take this article, for example: [http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/05/23/stylish- techno...](http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/05/23/stylish-technology- entrepreneurs-sean-parker/)

The image at the top of the article is taken from this Dustin Curtis blog post: <http://www.dustincurtis.com/press_on.html> (the filename of the image is even Screen-shot-2011-07-10-at-12.08.40-PM-520x245.png). There is no reference to Dustin Curtis's blog at all on the page, either.

It is ridiculous that they find repeatedly doing this to be acceptable.

<comment><USER4> we have a strict policy in place to make sure this doesn't happen.

If it does, and it really shouldn't have beyond a year ago (when we really clamped down on it with our authors)... we fix it.

If it ever does happen, I assure you that all it takes is one email to firstname.lastname@example.com and we'll have it resolved.

But I assure you that this "care free" image you might have of us when it comes to posting other peoples images just isn't reality.

<comment><USER7> Strange that this has been greyed out? Not condoning the act of plagiarism but seems fairer to allow all parties to say their bits?

<comment><USER8> I do wish this wasn't downvoted to grey. This is content I think most of us will find interesting and relevant to the discussion.

I understand that HN allows downvotes of disagreement, even though in this case it buries the most relevant information.

<comment><USER9> I actually think the grey has the opposite effect, makes the post really stand out and i go out of my way to high-light and read it, if only to see why the person was downvoted so much.

To stay on topic I can't believe the guy still hasn't apologized. Judging by his attitude and replies he's probably too busy self-rationalizing about how he's right and if everyone else wasn't an idiot we would all agree with him.

<comment><USER8> Mentioned elsewhere: I'm not complaining about the specific text contrast. My concern is with downvotes being misused (albeit for my own definition of misused).

Downvoting also has the effect of lowering the comment's position relative to other replies. No matter the color, the comment will appear below someone who gets a higher score, even though I can't imagine a more relevant comment than from the guy this entire thread (and post) is really centered around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, you were plagiarized. TheNextWeb was in the wrong, and they made it worse by their reaction.

But I also feel that the main insights of your posts were not your own. They were that of the NY Times reporter Michael M. Grynbaum. That is, I feel the main insight of your post were two things: the doubling of tips, and the attribution of this to the buttons on the credit-card machine. Your contribution was to look up a few other stats to get the $144 million figure.

<comment><USER11> I think you bring up a reasonable point: that the forced tipping system with no values below 20% was previously discussed in other articles such as that of Grynbaum from January 8, 2012:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/nyregion/new-nyc-livery- ca...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/nyregion/new-nyc-livery-cabs-wont- have-to-have-tvs.html)

In fact it's not a secret at all since New Yorkers and those visiting the city are quite acquainted with the system, it's no secret, so I am not sure Mr. Grynbaum is a reasonable original source of information about the system, millions who have taken a taxi are reasonable sources.

Worth mentioning is the article on the usability blog from which Mr. Gross hotlinked his image of the interface, dating back to February 2011:

<http://goodexperience.com/2011/02/how-a-taxi-button-cha.php>

Their reaction was similar to many others, that a design that forces a minimum tip of 20% is an annoying dodgy system for forcible shakedowns of hapless credit card customers, and sure to enrage many people.

GoodExperience's blog's conclusion was nearly the opposite of Mr. Gross's:

> The lesson: details matter. One change to one button in the interface > changes the experience from delightful to annoying, leaving the rider > feeling taken advantage of.

The cab customers are the victims here, they are in essence a captive audience who can not seek competition since the system has been dictated system wide by the same government that profits well from the system since it prevents drivers from underreporting tips.

Mr. Gross's original contribution was to point out that by looking at this from the viewpoint not of the customer, but of the business and the government, the system was a success as it has resulted in much profit for them.

Mr. Gross published this yesterday, on May 13, 2012. TheNextWeb published their "article" a few hours after Gross's article reached high on Hacker News. This is likely where Harrison and Zee became aware of it as it seems they are readers of HN. Harrison's article was then published today, May 14th.

None of the previous articles about the system bring up Mr. Gross's main points, that the design of the system has the advantage of increasing profits for the business.

Not stated but worth discussing is that it only works because there is a captive audience with no other choices who do not discover their tipping options are so limited until they go to pay at the end of the ride. These issues would make interesting discussions for even more articles. Perhaps TNW could have even written one. Instead they copied an article, stole it, because I have personally compared the articles word by word and found that it is a LIE to say TNW published original content or that the article was truly written by Harrison.

Under Fair Use I am now citing BOTH for comparison lest there be any doubt.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE BY JOSHUA GROSS:

> The average New York City taxi cab driver makes $90,747 in revenue per year. > There are roughly 13,267 cabs in the city. In 2007, NYC forced cab drivers > to begin taking credit cards, which involved installing a touch screen > system for payment.

> During payment, the user is presented with three default buttons for > tipping: 20%, 25%, and 30%. When cabs were cash only, the average tip was > roughly 10%. After the introduction of this system, the tip percentage > jumped to 22%.

HARRISON WEBER's ALLEGED ORIGINAL CONTENT, DEFENDED AS ORIGINAL BY ZEE KANE:

> The average New York City taxi driver makes $90,747 in gross revenue per > year (less some hefty operating expenses). In 2007, NYC required cab drivers > to begin accepting cards, which involved installing a touch screen system > for payment in all ~13,267 cars.

> During payment, users are shown three default buttons for tipping: 20%, 25% > and 30%. Back when cabs were cash-only, the average tip was around a modest > 10%. But since this system was introduced system, the average tipping > percentage jumped to 22%.

Who here will respond to this post and claim that Harrison Weber is not an unrepentant plagiarist and Zee Kane his belligerent defender? Speak now.

<comment> jack-r-abbit > _Worth mentioning is the article on the usability blog from which Mr. Gross > hotlinked his image of the interface_

Although Mr Gross did not _hotlink_ the image. Notice the images locations and file types are different.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the correction there, you're right, he actually provided a link back to GoodExperience and even set the images Title tag to state that the photo was from GoodExperience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Zee/TheNextWeb has a history of copying others' work without permission, including for one period HN comments. See:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=640492>

Note that what I was concerned about was not respectful excerpting: for a time, they were scraping _every_ HN comment related to their links back to their site, without permission/notification to authors, without threading, with NOFOLLOW.

<comment><USER13> Would be great to have a kickstarter for suing dirtbags, like in this example. Classactionstarter or something...

<comment><USER14> douchestarter.

<comment><USER15> douchestopper?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> TheNextWeb is basically a content farm whose business model is to rapidly push out rewritten posts as soon as possible and as often as possible. Your story doesn't surprise me at all because I see it every single day with many other websites, both popular and not. All you have to do is look at Techmeme to see this in action, every single post is rewritten by some TNW writer, and sadly Techmeme's human curators favor TheNextWeb as a preferred source despite their post model being 100% spinning of existing content. The best case scenario - if the original creator is lucky - is a tiny link to the original source in the footer of a TNW spun article.

To be fair, Huffington Post, Mashable, etc, do the same thing.

<comment><USER17> However, to HuffPo & TNW's credit, they do have original content that is mildly interesting. Mashable's original content is laughable at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Update: see this comment on HN. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972875>

Zee from TNW here.

Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here.

I honestly have absolutely no idea what we should have done differently here to illustrate an interesting fact with our readers and reference the original source (we did that _twice_ in the article...even with his full name (a screenshot of which he conveniently didn't include in his post))...and still he comes out guns blazing like he wrote a full-on opinion piece and we decided to just copy/paste.

We work immensely had to product original content as well as link to original sources when deserved...this case was absolutely no different.

I'm honestly amazed that this is crawling up Hacker News quite frankly.

<comment><USER18> The author should have put quotes around the paragraphs that were blatantly copy and only slightly tweaked to show it came directly from the piece and wasn't written by Harrison.

Oh, and your Twitter response was laughably immature to me.

<comment><USER4> that I can appreciate, but to come out and call it "plagiarism" publicly although we couldn't have done more to reference him...is absurd to me.

Feels like this guy is trolling every single one of us here - myself included - to get a reaction.

<comment><USER10> If I say, "This text is from John Doe," and then I proceed to quote John Doe to the point that the majority of my text is, in fact, John Doe's, then I have plagiarized John Doe.

In other words, attribution does not save you from plagiarism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for letting us know about this. Your article was obviously original research which many "mainstream" media outlets have given up on. The article referenced was clearly copied directly from your original research and article without giving proper attribution or payment. It also misrepresented the source of the material by claiming to be written by a "Harrison Weber". In addition, the exchange shown with Zee where, caught in a lie, he threatens you by saying he will punish you by "staying well clear of anything ur involved with in future", shows that he is a disreputable person. Thank you for warning us about this site. I will stay away from TheNextWeb and anything they or their present staff are involved in in the future.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think there is an overarching issue here because I've experienced it myself several times.

1) Person writes about something out of passion and posts it for free (the blog carries no ads)

2) Person who _gets paid to write_ reads it, has no record of _ever_ writing about that topic before, and then does his/her own take -- hitting _all_ the same key points (including using quotes _from others_ that were in the original post) making him/her look like a _thinker_.

3) Original person is never cited, never acknowledged, while _paid_ person merrily collects paycheck for "work."

Having experienced it firsthand, I at least know several people never to take seriously as "thinkers" ever again.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure there is an XKCD about this.

Didn't we conclude yesterday that there was a fundamental flaw in the original author's assumptions in how tips get reported and preliminary evidence suggests Taxi drivers are now making _less_?

Now that a major tech publication has picked up the story it may legitimately be cited as fact in a Wikipedia article.

Now that a major tech publication has picked up the story it will probably also go as an unquestioned anecdote in a thousand VC pitches.

<comment><USER21> The XKCD is a little different:

1) Find (false) fact on Wikipedia. 2) Include fact in your important paper (journal, etc) 3) Fact is found on wikipedia to be false, and is removed 4) Fact is later found in your journal, and is then added to Wikipedia with a reference to your important findings. 5) Fact cannot be removed because it was been referenced from a journal

<comment><USER22> The missing step:

6) Since the fact is attributed to your journal, _it is only relevant to document what your journal says._ Wikipedia article gets updated to reflect the fact _your journal is wrong._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the big sites that have been SEO'd to death (esp. HuffPo) don't have journalistic scruples; content is merely means to an end for them.

<comment><USER24> They've basically turned journalism into Demand Media - churn out SEO'd, cheap, content with the added bonus of sites like HN, Reddit etc adding SEO weight when they're lucky. It's even cheaper if someone else writes that content and they just have to reword the important bits.

It's sad to see HN starting to vote up AOL, Gawker etc crap, and it's sad to see other blogs adopting that model because it works so well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> You can't copyright facts, but The New Week article didn't have proper citation. In no work of academic writing or real journalism are you allowed to put one link at the bottom and call it a citation.

I would never allow a post at interchangeproject.org to have that sloppy of citations, nor would I allow someone to write there very long if this is what they consider proper attribution. Is it plagiarism? I don't know about that, but the attribution in that post is appalling.

The post is so close to the original that it should have just been one giant block quote. That's not journalism.

</comment><comment><USER26> TheNextWeb did this to me a while back, if you remember the Only One Cloud meme. [http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/16/apples-icloud-icon- it...](http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/16/apples-icloud-icon-its-not-as- unique-as-you-might-think/) I went back and forth with the guy on Twitter and he was nice enough and updated it, but it's still curation, not creation. They are link blogging essentially, but with too much "copy and paraphrase."

</comment><comment><USER27> I've experienced this and I sympathise with you. I don't know the specifics of this case, so my comment from here on is about the general practise of content theft and barely-there attribution.

This is unfortunately a way of life for many of the larger tech sites, and will be until they adapt or suffer their inevitable faith.

For every one person who linked up my Android vs Condom post (which went hyper-viral), 10 more stole the images and put in a tiny gray on white text link somewhere at the bottom of the post. And these weren't no name sites, they were big 200K+ reader sorta sites.

There are a small number of respectable people who link to a site with the genuine intention of sending traffic its way (Daringfireball would be one of them). The remainder do their absolute best to hide it, as you noted, some only do it when called out.

</comment><comment><USER4> Zee again. Full response: <http://bit.ly/JxoWae>

<comment><USER28> A Google doc, very interesting. The use of bit.ly is also interesting--someone may unwittingly click the link and reveal himself through his Google account. Perhaps the intention is to discover who is reading it (for what purpose I can only speculate). It isn't posted on TNW for reasons that are unclear (as others have noted). Perhaps the intention is to crowdsource the editing until the statement eventually converges to what passes for a sincere apology, which could then be posted on TNW. Of course the use of bit.ly and Google Docs could be entirely innocent.

<comment><USER29> > _innocent_

Yeah, well, after reading his responses here, I wouldn't go with that word, but rather with another one that starts with in - and ends with competent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The CEO's response amounts to the assertion that they will only plagiarize from people who won't call them out. What a nasty ungrateful insulting fellow.

</comment><comment><USER30> And people still wonder why publications like these aren't considered serious purveyors of content. The goal isn't to spread information and break stories, instead it's to get eyeballs and sell advertisements.

</comment><comment><USER31> The plagiarizer hasn't taken the care to assimilate an idea well enough so he can put it into his own words. The effort put into explaining something in one's own words has the powerful effect of spurring the imagination and intellect, which then can lead to new insights. The question is does _Action Man_ care? Clearly not. Talk about steering clear of something -- thanks for the unintended warning.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit Before I get angry about this I feel I need more info. Neither of the screenshots go down far enough to get to the bottom. The currently available article has Joshua quoted under the image of the tip screen and also has Joshua listed as a source at the bottom. Since this "plagiarized by TNW" article only mentions them adding the "here's what Joshua found" line in the middle & Zee seems to think they were pretty clear of sources, I am curious if those other 2 attributions were there the whole time or also added after the tweet. Also, the TNW article doesn't cite the source of that screen shot of the tip screen.. but then neither does Joshua's article. Where'd that come from? Is it stock imagery for anyone to use? or did Joshua take the photo himself?

Edit: oops. it appears Joshua's original article does credit the image (via subtle link "title") and links it back to the source article. However, that is a pretty subtle way to cite a source, IMO. The TNW article gives no credit for the image at all.

</comment><comment><USER32> For what it's worth, the Huffington Post once did something similar with one of my posts, though it wasn't plagiarism, they basically just took my idea and ran with it. Even then, I'd say my situation was totally fair play. And given the content, it's not entirely inconceivable that they just had the same idea.

All of that said, I tweeted them about my article [1] (nothing accusative, just a sort of "hey, check out my similar article from eight months ago for a little more insight." They tweeted back something equally civil and added a link to their article [2] within a minute.

Anyway, that's a great way to handle such a situation, in my opinion.

[1] <http://www.alfajango.com/blog/google-one-letter-suggestions/>

[2] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/08/google-instant- top-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/08/google-instant-top- results_n_709142.html#s136186&title=A_is_for)

<comment><USER7> Great example of how the majority of news sites behave. It seems that others play by different rules. I thought the foundation of any journalism is quoting your sources and writing your own material. Maybe the web has changed (for the worst).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How is some anonymous Google Doc posted on the comments section of a Hacker News item an apology????

Make it public on front page of TNW.com

</comment><comment><USER34> Tech journalism is broken. Someone fix it. Please.

<comment><USER35> Maybe we can start by not referring to a lot of tech blogs as journalism. Some are, but most aren't - including many that would like us to think they are.

<comment><USER22> Then we'd have to stop referring to a lot of what goes on TV, radio, and in the newspapers as journalism.

<comment><USER35> Agree with that too!

<comment><USER34> Here here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> HN has the readership to effect positive change in the tech journalism arena. Can HN blacklist the most egregarious plagiarists?

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting to note that exactly a month ago today, thenextweb pointed out a far less egregious or even obvious offense:

[http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/04/15/netflix-amazon- apple-...](http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/04/15/netflix-amazon-apple-its- this-weeks-media-news-in-review/)

"And finally…

Nobody likes plagiarism, but an interesting nugget emerged this week. Poynter reported on a Fast Company blogger who said that he meant to steal from someone else when he was accused of plagiarism.

Author Josh Linkner was busted for stealing the opening lines of a blog post by Chris Dixon. Now, Linkner did respond on Twitter and moves were made to amend the 'mistake', but the comment he posted to explain/justify the non- attributed use of someone else's text sounded a little…schoolboy-ish – he said a friend had sent him the excerpt. So let's assume a friend did send him the excerpt…why wasn't it attributed to him?

We'll let you decide what really happened…"

</comment><comment><USER37> Not defending this at all but I am reminded of my experience doing some freelance writing. I wrote a number of health articles. Several referenced published standard guidelines on how much exercise a person needs per week. In spite of stating the reference and altering the phrasing, I had articles come back to me for revision on the idea that I had copied and pasted some article I had never heard of which happened to also use the same source and cite the same figures.

Not the same thing as what happened here but I can relate to the situation. I think it is generally getting tough to avoid, given the sheer volume of material going up on the web.

</comment><comment><USER38> "We have a great many writers that submit articles to us. We do our best to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen, but sometimes it does anyway. We'll fix it right now with credit and a link to your blog. Sorry about that, bro."

See? Fixed. Easy.

</comment><comment><USER39> TheNextWeb could have provided substantially the same article to its readers by block quoting with attribution rather than plagiarizing with attribution.

Would that have been fair use? While a significant minority of people would say "No", I'm in the majority that would say "Yes".

But hey -- I once blogged something only to have Mashable post the same news, taking credit for it as original research (but without plagiarizing the wording). I think that behavior was worse. Pete Cashmore promised me he'd fix it, then didn't follow through.

</comment><comment><USER7> Journalism ethics and standards taken from Wikipedia [1]:

The basic codes and canons commonly appear in statements drafted by both professional journalism associations and individual print, broadcast, and _online_ news organizations.

The primary themes common to most codes of journalistic standards and ethics are the following:

-Accuracy and standards for factual reporting

-Slander and libel considerations

-Harm limitation principle

-Presentation

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards>

</comment><comment><USER40> I have just noted that plagiarism is becoming the order of the day on the Internet.Someone has just plagiarised too a post a put on my blog last: [http://edceekays.blogspot.com/2012/05/face-of-malawi- plagiar...](http://edceekays.blogspot.com/2012/05/face-of-malawi-plagiarized- my-blog-post.html). SOPA was bad but I think we need something in these lines to curb plagiarism.

</comment><comment><USER28> Slate magazine picked up the story, but exercised responsible journalistic practice and credited Joshua Gross: [http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/15/taxi_button_t...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/15/taxi_button_tipping.html)

And to think they did this without having to be told and without finding it necessary to insult the author--quite a contrast.

</comment><comment><USER41> A CEO should never respond to a situation in that way. He lost his cool; big time! I have always respected TNW, but today changes that.

</comment><comment><USER42> Sorry man, I read that article and thought it's insights were profound. I am sorry to hear that they basically just 'spun' your hard work. Doesn't seem fair that you do the hard work but they end up with the lions share of the hits...

To SEO Experts: Should they have given the original author a 'canonical' link from that page? Would that have helped matters SEO wise?

<comment><USER43> IMO giving SEO juice doesn't excuse plagiarism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Wow.....it's May 2012 and 'tech-savvy' companies still don't know how to handle basic stuff like copyright infringement by employees, bad customer service experiences and disgruntled partners (and employees) as a direct result of your own actions?

Say sorry.

Shut up.

Avert PR crisis.

Move on.

Is it that hard people?

</comment><comment><USER45> Scumbag Zee. Steals your content, uploads a non-apology to Google Docs.

</comment><comment><USER46> Where are all the people defending "piracy" on this post?

How much effort were a few paragraphs that got copied vs how much effort does it take to produce a movie, or a professionally recorded song?

<comment><USER47> The question is not whether pirating a movie is morally right or wrong but rather "how much damage to the internet and the society are we willing to accept when chasing people who copy movies?". Having to pay a fine when you're caught copying a song is fine. Having to pay inflated damage claims (tens of thousands of dollars for a single song) is not. Monitoring large portions of the internet only to support an industry that missed a crucial point is not fine either. So that's why no one defending piracy shows up here: Since pretty much no one is defending piracy as "morally right."

(edit: fixed stupid autocorrection errors.)

<comment><USER46> I think it's a complex, and nuanced subject with no easy answers, and agree with you that things are likely tilted too far in favor of content producers. Draconian solutions are not a solution I favor.

That said, I have been here a while and see an awful lot of commentary that seems indicative that the authors neither think nor care much about the fate of content producers. There are plenty of other intelligent comments too, but I really did notice a big difference on this thread compared to one about piracy.

See mikeash's comment for instance, which says that piracy just isn't as bad as plagiarism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It makes me wonder what else have they plagiarised. Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's not surprising when your articles have no byline.

<comment><USER49> Which I see you've added, and very nicely too. This is how it should be done: it tells a random visitor following a random link who you are and why to trust your words. Very minor point: if it were at the top (e.g. sub-heading), we see your bona-fides _before_ reading the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Zee has apologized.

<https://twitter.com/#!/Zee/status/202154649183203329>

<comment><USER51> A twitter reply to someone who called him out, to a Google Docs non-apology which is behind a link shortener. Pardon me if I'm unimpressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Ahhh, so TNW really /is/ the next TechCrunch.

</comment><comment><USER53> Statutory damages for copyright infringement: minimum $750, maxiumum $150,000 per offense. Sue them. <http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#504>

</comment><comment><USER54> That's the most subtly annoying font I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER55> wow. and to think people make money doing this.

</comment><comment><USER56> All these shitheel sites do the same thing. BusinessInsider often doesn't even do the work of lightly rewriting paragraphs, they just rip content off wholesale. It's a dirty game, but I dunno if much can be done to stop it.

The CEO's reaction is a disaster unto itself. Shameful.

<comment><USER57> There's a new breed of CEOs who use 'ur' in public correspondence. If that isn't a red flag, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER58> I'm not bothered much by "ur" (since it's Twitter, and you have only 140 characters) than by his tone.

<comment><USER59> I refuse to shorten words to "SMS speak", even on Twitter. I can't stand when supposedly intelligent adults do it.

<comment><USER60> I used to be like you, then I realised that the English language has been ever evolving. Being prejudiced against efficiency has rarely turned out well.

<comment><USER61> Eh, I still agree with the prejudiced guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> There needs to be some sort of standard for citing other peoples work, sort of like an updated Chicago Manual of Style (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation#Citation_styles>) for online publications. These days we have all these content mills that put out very little original work... I don't know what the proper method should be, how much work you can take etc. Also remember this - The New York Times spent weeks writing an article about how Wal-mart and Target learn your secrets and then Forbes wrote a knock-off that stole a bunch of their traffic. [http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times- art...](http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-article-and- got-all-the-traffic-2012-02/)

This also reminds me that as much as possible we should try to link to the original source on HackerNews, it's in the guidelines! (<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>)

Back in July, I spent a lot of time putting together an infographic for FeeFighters on the tech boom and bubble ([http://feefighters.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/tech-...](http://feefighters.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/tech-boom-bubble.jpg)). We got links back from tons of magazines, including Forbes, Mashable, Fast Company, etc. Many of them didn't link to either us or KissMetrics (our partner who did the design work), but most complied after sending an email or tweet. One place, Bostinno - <USER2> to link to us at all, despite multiple tweets and emails to them, for some reason deciding to credit Mashable: [http://bostinno.com/2011/07/13/are-we-in- a-tech-boom-or-bubb...](http://bostinno.com/2011/07/13/are-we-in-a-tech-boom- or-bubble-lets-look-at-the-data-infographic/) Massholes.

<comment><USER63> Former journalist here. Some years ago I attempted to create a standard called "Source Blocks" (see [http://www.ilamont.com/2008/11/my-new-journalism- experiment....](http://www.ilamont.com/2008/11/my-new-journalism- experiment.html) ). It's basically a paragraph of explanatory text that the author places at the end of the article, identifying what sources he/she used in the course of researching the article. It looked something like this.

 _Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Blog.basturea.com, American Journalism Review (ajr.org), Editorsweblog.org, Glasshouse.waggeneredstrom.com, Techmeme.com, thelongtail.com, Washingtonpost.com, Wired_

The problem was, even without linking these sources, it took discipline to keep a running list while work was being done, and/or time at the end of the writing process to do the source block writeup. And the system did not account for higher "weight" for certain sources, much less the details that came from each source. It attracted a little attention, but I was only able to keep it up for another year.

At the time, someone suggested creating some sort of browser extension to track all of the sources, which might have helped a little with other websites but would have been useless for phone or F2F interviews that occupy many journalists' time.

<comment><USER64> It's not hard. Firefox under Unix has an interesting property. When you select text, you end up with the following targets for an X Window select operation:

        TIMESTAMP
        TARGETS
        MULTIPLE
        text/html
        text/_moz_htmlcontext
        text/_moz_htmlinfo
        UTF8_STRING
        COMPOUND_TEXT
        TEXT
        STRING
        text/x-moz-url-priv

With this, I was able to add an extension to my editor to obtain the URL, pull the page, pull the title and generate an HTML BLOCKQUOTE with proper CITE attribute with the highlighted text included.

<comment><USER51> Please share!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> ohh my..reading Zee's tweets <https://twitter.com/#!/Zee> ..Amazing how little this guy cares about this. He basically tried to bully his way out of this before coming up with a meek apology. I will try to stay clear of TNW from now.

</comment><comment><USER66> omg you got plagarized? omg on the internetz?? omg serialz???

It's the internet shit for brains. Lemme ask you: Ever downloaded a torrent? Ever hotlinked an image?

The content you wrote sits on a web page, written in html and served with the http protocol. Anyone can save your webpage as file on their desktop, copy it, put it in a torrent, whatever.

Getting plagiarized sucks but man up and understand the game you're playing here though you could argue that you do know the game by bitching about it on hacker news and reddit, that's a good place to bitch about such things, the girls here like to get worked about this kinda shit.

</comment><comment><USER67> ."--'v

<comment><USER68> bfro21jg309..............

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I find it really hard to care about this. I'm amazed other people here seem to be up this in arms about it.

</comment><comment><USER70> <http://drawsomethingnaughty.com/100262>

</comment><comment><USER4> Zee from TNW again.

There's been some confusion.

Will post a follow up to this shortly to explain the mix up...but basically this HN commenter nails it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972875>

<comment><USER71> So you (tnw) posted the article without attribution, the original author sees this, he tweets about it and asks wtf and then you (tnw) fix it and then you (personally) go on a tirade about how it's how the industry works blah blah blah conveniently ignoring that he knew it was originally not attributed and you reply as if it was, now you're admitting that you did in fact post it without attribution? All you had to do was apologise when he complained to you. You were in the wrong, whether it was an accident or not isn't the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> This isn't plagiarism. It's laughable to say that it was, they cited him. I know this is an insanely simple comment that will lead people to think I didn't read this conversation or really think about this topic, but I did. And it's not. The internet is ridiculous sometimes.

<comment><USER73> > This isn't plagiarism. It's laughable to say that it was, they cited him

Yes, it is. What you see now is not how this started, there has been a lot of editing to change the situation to look different than it was initially.</comment></comment>


Critics of India's Aadhaar Say They Have Been Harassed, Put Under Surveillance - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/02/13/technology/13reuters-india-aadhaar-breach.html <comment><USER2> Aadhaar is an one billion dollar software engineering nightmare in India by Nilekani/Infosys</comment>


The iPhone X - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/2017/12/the_iphone_x <comment><USER2> If no one else has coined the phrase "innovation fatigue", I would like to call dibs on that.

I have an iPhone 7. So long as Apple doesn't slow it down to dog slow speeds, I can't see ever getting a new phone until this one literally becomes completely inoperable by an act of god. This constant push to upgrade because of "features" just gets tiresome eventually. Am I alone in this?

<comment><USER3> I have a 7 Plus and am not getting an 8 or X. I will probably upgrade in a year so that I can get a better camera and (hopefully) a smaller phone.

I got the Plus because I wanted the dual-camera setup for Portrait Mode, and this tradeoff has been worthwhile overall. But I would really like to have a smaller phone, so I'll jump ship as soon as the dual-camera setup is offered on a smaller phone — without having to pay the premium for the X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Had Gruber ever written anything negative about Apple? He might as well just be Apple's PR under a pseudonym.

Anyways, aside from my annoyance, I would highly recommend that Gruber look at tech beyond the closed microcosm that is the Apple ecosystem and to realise that a lot of what Apple is doing isn't innovating but catching-up with what the rest of the tech world has already done.</comment>


Coinbase's ETC decision raises eyebrows - <AUTHOR> https://modernconsensus.com/cryptocurrencies/ethereum/coinbase-ethereum-classic-sec/ <comment><USER2> This is interesting, wonder why noone reads it. HN crowd bought at the peak, I guess; all of HN hates Bitcoin and friends.</comment>


A self taught astronomer has become the first person to observe a supernova - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com <comment><AUTHOR> > According to a statement from the University of California at Berkeley, Buso > had captured light from the supernova's first hour. Bersten estimated the > chance of happening upon such an event at about 1 in 10 million

Wow.

</comment><comment><USER2> Generic link to WP home page.</comment>


Show HN: Hacker News iOS client using the new official API - <AUTHOR> http://hnclient.weebly.com

<comment><USER2> A few thoughts:

When on the comments page, I'd expect tapping the title to take me to the article, but it doesn't.

The child comment touch target is all the way to the far right, which is at the edge of the touch region on the new larger phones. Feels a bit awkward. Maybe make the entire comment the touch target for that?

Not a fan of the big black back arrow. I know it goes away, but as you scroll, it is right where you want to start reading, and feels a bit distracting. Maybe just tone it down a bit?

There's a little bit of stuttering as you scroll, which is surprising for a text list. I'm guessing it's a bug rather than actual performance issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback.

I thought tapping the title and going to the article in the comments page could be counter-productive if one slightly missed the back arrow. I need to give it a thought again.

It's a good idea to make the entire comment tappable instead of just the small button. I haven't tested the app on a physical iPhone 6 yet.

I'm not sure about the arrow. It still takes up less space than the navigation bar and immediately goes away.

Main and comments views are basically a table view with UITextViews displaying attributed strings. I did my best to convert HTML to attributed string in no time, so I'm surprised by the stuttering as you scroll. It doesn't occur on my iPhone 5s. I need to investigate that.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, they were just random thoughts, I'm not sure they are all good ideas. The stuttering only seems to happen on long comment pages, when I give it a push and let it scroll. It seems to just hiccup every 100 ms or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Speaking of these things, what became of the plan to launch a revamped HN with mobile-friendly markup?

"Our goal is to switch to a new rendering engine (still powered by Arc) in three weeks (Oct 28)" from the API announcement at [http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news- api](http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api).

<comment><USER4> I think they might be getting there? I noticed that the comment's section on mobile fits the width my mobile devices screen now and it is generally much more readable. I recall having to doing a lot annoying zooming in just to read comments. Before.

Granted I only access HN on mobile a few times a month, so I could just be making all of this up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually, I have had an iOS app using the client out for about 3 weeks. It was meant to be a tutorial on how to use Couchbase Lite to consume APIs. However, it's going through a complete rewrite to make it full featured. I use it to consume Hacker News. I have a version that allows me to sort and hide stories I've already read that is waiting for approval.

Github: [https://github.com/wrkstrm/HelveticaNeue](https://github.com/wrkstrm/HelveticaNeue)

App Store: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/helvetica-neue-native- open/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/helvetica-neue-native- open/id931789125?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER6> If anyone else is looking for a better iOS client (native or not), I'm using HackerWeb ([http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb](http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb)). It's pretty nice, and ironically feels more native than the native apps I've tried. Here's a bookmarklet to open the current HN page in HackerWeb:

        javascript:var%20a=/%5B0-9%5D+/.exec(location.href);var%20n=a%5Ba.length-1%5D;location.href='http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/%23/item/'+n

<comment><USER7> Seconded - it's great on tablets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The large font and design is nice but i prefer HakkaNews for being able to comment and change feeds from Top to New etc. Add the swipe right sidebar with those features and youve got a winner!

<comment><AUTHOR> Once those feature become available in the API, I'll definitely add them. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Loving it so far! Great job.

One small request, though. It'd be awesome to collapse comment threads. Any chance of that happening?

Edit: Nevermind. You have the comments setup so you only see the top level and have to tap to see the child comments. Don't think I've seen that before but I dig it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for you feedback! I'm glad you like the app.

I thought comments presented this way would be easier to read, because if child comments are indented than it's basically a waste of screen-space on a mobile device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like this new client! Good work. It's refreshing to see an HN client with a 2014 era UI. I also love that it's Open Source.

Couple of items of feedback for you.

#1 Please make the top off-white colour bar go away; it's jarring on an otherwise all-white background. The most tasteful looking iOS 7 / 8 era apps I enjoy are the ones that make the iOS info bar blend with the rest of the screen real estate.

#2 Once inside an article, the black back circle isn't very pretty, or easy to hit. This needs some work since it just looks a little overlaid and unpleasant. I don't have any meaningful suggestions, but I'd suggest this needs some rethinking.

All in all, I love it! Thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for your feedback.

#1 Do you mean the status bar? I could easily remove it, but don't you like to know what time it is? Removing the status bar could be an option in settings in the next release. #2 I will give this suggestion a thought. Now you can go back to the previous view by swiping right. So theoretically the back arrow could be hidden too.

<comment><USER10> Heh - yes - the status bar. I don't mind it being there, in fact it should be. But on my iPhone 5 it renders in some shade of eggshell when the rest of the interface is white. In my humble opinion, it should be the same colour as the rest of the UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A few weeks ago I updated my Hacker News iOS client to use the new API:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news- zero/id764890985...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news- zero/id764890985?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER12> Any Android client using the new API?

<comment><USER13> [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.dwak.holoha...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.dwak.holohackernews.app)

Shameless plug :D

This is using cheeaun's wrapper, which was just recently switched to the new api.

Additionally, I'm writing my own wrapper as well, and will be migrating to it eventually.

I didn't want to use closed source code in the application which is why I didn't include the Firebase SDK, and which is why I need to use a wrapper around the api.

<comment><USER12> Installed. Nice done! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any reason the iconic orange was omitted? It just feels odd to read Hacker News without it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Initially there was an orange navigation bar in this app, but I got rid of it completely for the sake of more screen-space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I haven't been able to comment on a HN submission from a mobile device in god knows how long. I've tried so many apps. not having an orange look just feels odd, but more to the point I constantly find either the apps are great for consumption but not commenting, or the other way aroubd. This app seems to be no exception. The news:yc app was my favourite client until commenting broke. Haven't had a response from the developer since. I'm now using Hakka News but "no orange" is very strange.

</comment><comment><USER16> Made my own (iphone/ipad) implementation(swift/open source) of firebase too: [http://portablerobot.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/hackyto- availa...](http://portablerobot.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/hackyto-available-on- app-store/)

I did wanted to support the live update, but I rather let the user decide when to spend their data.

Nice work!

<comment><USER17> Thanks for this. Learning Swift right now, and I'm going to dissect your code :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe it's better on an iPhone 6, but there's a lot more scrolling than most other iOS news apps. It's pretty and all, but I'll take a bit of ugly to be able to see more than three headlines at once.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I might include setting headlines' font size in the next update. Thanks!

<comment><USER8> >That's a good point. I might include setting headlines' font size in the next update. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any plan to support iPad also ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I plan to roll out an update that will include iPad support in a few weeks. Definetely before Christmas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't see a way to make comments.

Is that feature included?

<comment><USER20> also, how long did it take to make

i might try it as a learning project

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Its really nice! Any way to view SHOW or ASK posts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the API doesn't support viewing those posts yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thanks for sharing and making this open source!

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem. Am hoping for at least one pull request!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> iOS 8 only! :( Wish I could try it! Screens look great!

</comment><comment><USER24> No Swift? Wah

<comment><USER25> Currently Swift is a questionable choice. It adds around 5 MB size to the application archive, XCode support is buggy and standard library lacks many things it should have. I built custom keyboard with Swift and I won't use it for my next projects in the near future, until it'll become more stable. But probably in year or two it'll become much better.</comment></comment>


Safename: restricting "dangerous" file names - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/686789/ <comment><USER2> Restricting users because the software is buggy sounds like the wrong way to solve the problem.

Not to mention the error handling:

 _Any attempt to create a file name that fails the tests will be rejected with an EPERM error_

So the user will get a "permission denied" error when trying to save a file instead of "the file name contained invalid characters, which are...".

<comment><USER3> Security isn't about solving problems the right way, it's about reducing attack surface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This really ought to be table-driven so that custom tables can be loaded.

For example, what about Unicode normalization? It's enforced on OS X. Maybe I want to block anything that differs according to normalization form.

I might want to limit characters to 2 accents at most. (this covers Vietnamese)

I might want only left-to-right characters or LGC characters.

I might want to block confusing look-alike characters, particularly those the non-ASCII ones that look like ASCII.

<comment><USER5> I was thinking it would be neat if the filenames would be passed through a eBPF filter. That should cover almost all imaginable usecases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6>
       mkdir some-test
       cd some-test
       mkdir some-dir
       echo foo > some-dir/some-file
       echo bar > -Rf
       ls -l
       rm *
       ls -l

<comment><USER7> Bash script is a bad choice here.</comment></comment>


Fireside Chat: Walter Isaacson and Eric Schmidt - <AUTHOR> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngtLzsleSRo <comment><USER2> That's me at 46:14 asking a question about killer drones :)</comment>


Crazy or viable? - <AUTHOR> http://www.vistev.com/index.php

<comment><USER2> Either way, it is damn ugly.</comment>


Welding breakthrough could transform manufacturing - <AUTHOR> https://www.hw.ac.uk/about/news/2019/welding-breakthrough-could-transform.htm <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19309121](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19309121)

</comment><comment><USER3> Eyeglasses with frames welded to the lenses would be kinda cool, and may even justify current commercial price points (not that they would be sold for them).

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't it be impossible, then, to replace the lenses with new ones (in case of scratches, or with eyesight changes over time)?

<comment><USER5> I suppose but personally I have only ever heard of people changing the entire frames with the glass. What a wasteful time we live in.

<comment><USER6> I've tried to change lenses while keeping frames, most manufacturers make it pretty hard to do so. Some don't sell blank lenses without frames, and others have such fragmented and changing product lines that lenses aren't available 1-2 years after original purchase. And to be fair, frames aren't really all that durable anyways, and for something used daily it's not all that wasteful to replace them every once in a while

<comment><USER7> That's not how eyeglasses work. Lenses are supplied to opticians as a round blank, which are then cut to fit the frame. Any optician should be able to re- glaze any frame, regardless of age or manufacturer; their equipment measures the frame, then cuts the lens to fit. It's really quite impressive to watch:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCjGNUPO0WU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCjGNUPO0WU)

<comment><USER8> Things are changing again. My optician used to work as you described, but for my last set of glasses I would choose the frame and he would enter my lens specification into the manufacturers webpage. The manufacturer (a German brand) with a Singapore factory would produce then the desired frame and equip it with the fitting lenses and send off the bundle to my optician here in Germany. As I had the same lens specs as my previous glasses, I can say that the new glasses are optically superior and the whole package was even distinctively cheaper than the previous one.

<comment><USER9> Still the same concept though, just moved: the Signapore facility still starts with a round blank and grinds it to "whatever is required", so you can fit any lens to any frame still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If ever an article needed a video, this is it. There's maybe a paragraph's worth of actual information in the article.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would love to see some pictures.

<comment><USER11> [https://www.lasersystemseurope.com/news/ultrafast-laser- used...](https://www.lasersystemseurope.com/news/ultrafast-laser-used- successfully-weld-glass-metal)

[https://sci-hub.tw/10.1364/AO.56.004873](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1364/AO.56.004873)

<comment><USER12> Seems like they are working with pretty large scale objects

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds really interesting. The only potential downside I see is that metal and glass generally expand differently under heat and have different tensile strengths etc. I wonder how they plan to deal with that.

<comment><USER14> Isn't that the whole reason this is a breakthrough? It's even discussed in the article...

Professor Duncan Hand, director of the five-university EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Laser-based Production Processes based at Heriot- Watt, said: "Traditionally it has been very difficult to weld together dissimilar materials like glass and metal due to their different thermal properties - the high temperatures and highly different thermal expansions involved cause the glass to shatter.

<comment><USER13> I read that more as being about the welding process, while I'm more thinking about how it would function during its use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Link to archive while site is down:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20190410160012/https://www.hw.ac....](http://web.archive.org/web/20190410160012/https://www.hw.ac.uk/about/news/2019/welding- breakthrough-could-transform.htm)

</comment><comment><USER16> glass welded to Titanium ,Stainless steel ,Aluminum and other metals could lead to high performance enamels for all types of industrial uses.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting. I wonder if an architect/civil engineer could explain what the implications would be of the application of this technology in the field of construction?

<comment><USER18> Steel structures deflect a lot more than glass and buildings are built to relatively loose tolerances. E.g. skyscrapers have flexible neoprene gaskets between glass cladding panels to allow for a few mm of structural deflection due loads caused by wind, thermal, floor loadings and construction settlement. To give a rough idea, if you take a point on the top of a 250m skyscraper it could be anywhere within a ~300mm diameter circle due to these loads.

So while I'm not 100% sure, it sounds like this technique would be more useful for product design scale stuff like phones, nano machines, miniaturised optical systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In what use cases is this superior to traditional metal-glass seals (e.g. vacuum tubes), or metal-on-glass deposition (e.g. mirrors)?

<comment><USER20> This permits bonding a metal handle to a pyrex measuring cup. (It would only be safe up to boiling temperatures under the restrictions of the current process, assuming that the process described scales up to a measuring cup.)

This is a constructed example to demonstrate the type of thing that _could_ be done now that we've figured out a possible way to _do_ it. It's probably not a good example, but it is clearly distinct from the thin-film processes we consider common today.

EDIT: See below's multi-paragraph writeup of why my "now you can do this" example is not a good example in practice.

<comment><USER21> One of the advantages of borosilicate glass kitchenware is that you can put it in the oven, fridge, and microwave. Bonding metal to it with a joint that only works up to 90C obviates most of that utility. The only problem with borosilicate glass vessels as they are is that they don't work on inductive cooktops.

That joint is going to have to handle 300C in order to make it into my kitchen. I might go for a glass/ceramic liner in an aluminum pan, particularly if the ceramic is BAM, but that's going to get hot.

I'd actually look for this first in LED lenses bonded to aluminum heat sinks. A good bond there might allow for higher wattage through the electronic parts. An operating range between -50C and 90C encompasses the operating range of most consumer electronics, plus some margin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If materials become composites, they can become hard to recycle.

Pure aluminum or pure steel is easier.

<comment><USER23> Based on their mechanical properties I don't see why the current recycling process wouldn't work.

It's not like the metal recycling industry doesn't already deal with huge amounts impurities and other material entering the process. If you happen to have tons of metal welded glass to scrap you're not going to get as much money for it because it needs more processing so it will enter the supply chain at a lower price point. It's like the difference between scrapping a car and scrapping machine shop chips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Could this be used to make interesting optical sensors?

<comment><USER25> I could definitely see the applications when it comes to optics, even just considering the assembly of camera lenses could be improved or automated more with a process like this. Maybe it could be used for automated optical alignment to improve optical quality and consistency. Current methods for doing this are very manual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's my understanding that adhering steel to glass has not been an issue for some time. The issue is that they expand differently with heat. Which is why you have a rubber/flexible seal.

<comment><USER27> "We tested the welds at -50C to 90C and the welds remained intact, so we know they are robust enough to cope with extreme conditions."

<comment><USER23> That's a meaningless statement without knowing what kind of assembly they built, the shape of the joint between the materials was and if the test sample was heated evenly or unevenly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Jony Ive is foaming at the mouth

<comment><USER29> And that was before he read this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How is this advantageous over gluing?

<comment><USER31> From the article:

> At the moment, equipment and products that involve glass and metal are often > held together by adhesives, which are messy to apply and parts can gradually > creep, or move. Outgassing is also an issue - organic chemicals from the > adhesive can be gradually released and can lead to reduced product lifetime.

<comment><USER32> On the other hand glass has been glued to metal in e.g. optical assemblies for a long, long time and those joints rarely if ever fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Excited for Apple to finally weld the screen to the chassis and produce a Macbook that you just throw in the trash when the keyboard breaks.

<comment><USER34> Another commenter pointed to the similar implications for new iPhone models.

Unless iFixit et al releases an affordable home glass-to-aluminum welding solution, I think Apple may win the cat-and-mouse 3rd party repair game for now.

Sad, really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> So how long till transparent aluminium?

<comment><USER36> Already exists under the brand name ALON (Aluminium Oxynitride).

It's hard as hell for a transparent ceramic, obvious military applications but useful in other places as well.

<comment><USER37> Transparent aluminum exists? Wow, that's cool!</comment></comment></comment>


Put yourself on Rails with a push of a button - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lunarlogicpolska.com/2013/put-yourself-on-rails-with-a-push-of-a-button/

<comment><USER2> For Tmux/Screen users, I have used Tmuxinator[1] for a few years now to manage my different terminal workstations.

Tmuxinator allows you to specify complex terminal workstations that you can launch with one command. A typical Rails setup might have a vim window, one or two free shells, an autotest/Guard window, a rails server window and a rails console.

It doesn't replace the Rails button, but it is a more convenient way to launch your term than specifying all those gnome shells.

[1] [https://github.com/aziz/tmuxinator](https://github.com/aziz/tmuxinator)</comment>


A better approach to the art of software  - <AUTHOR> http://emilhajric.com/a-better-approach-to-the-art-of-software

<comment><USER2> Something along the lines of usage centered design?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage-centered_design>

</comment><comment> a-priori Don't forget the last step: refine and repeat.</comment>


What's the conversion rate between likes vs. comments? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering what is the relative value for a like vs. a comment on a social media post (say Twitter or LinkedIn).
Let's say that value is measured in the number of views that an extra like generates vs. a comment generates.
Does anyone have a good calculation with logic to back up the result? (You can forget about causality and just make a case based on correlation)
As for my quick research: I ran a simple linear regression on an aggregate data set for about 800 random Instagram keywords where the variables were post views, likes, comments and found that the coefficient on a like is about 60 with P-value=0.012 but comments did not seem to be correlated with a P-value=0.47.
That would indicate that comments are basically worthless.
Of course, going back to causality: do likes increase views or do post with more views get more likes? More rigorous statistical analysis needed. <comment><USER2> Well, the causality from views -> likes seems certain, whereas the causality from likes -> views is uncertain. Also, comments require that you not only approve, but also have something to add, whereas views are perhaps driven more by how often they are forwarded. So, a controversial or offensive post could gets lots of comments, few likes, and not forwarded to very many people, whereas a large number of likes is probably more often indicative of something you might want to show others.

Just an hypothesis, no proof.</comment>


How HG Wells created hobby war gaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22777029

<comment><USER2> This is amazing, I've always thought of him as sort of the father of science fiction — yet he was also a game designer!</comment>


Attract web site users - <AUTHOR>

My First post on the Y site :)<p>Just launched our beta site, suggestions on how to attract site visitors? The main goal of the beta site is to get user feedback. <comment><USER2> Adwords and content marketing (writing good blog posts & converting the readers). Your mix of each depends on if you have more money or time on your hands.</comment>


Amazon is building substations, laying fiber and keeping cloud costs down - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/11/15/how-amazon-is-building-substations-laying-fiber-and-generally-doing-everything-to-keep-cloud-costs-down/ <comment><USER2> Everything at Amazon is about creating scale.

Prime exists to get shipping volumes up far enough to pull things like trucking items daily from Vegas to Southern California, directly into the USPS system at the sorting facilities - and eventually direct deliveries.

The other thing - which lead to AWS, FBA, etc, was that each Amazon department had to make a globally usable API, even for (then!) inside facing stuff.

Combining those and you get a giant. Hopefully Bezos will stick around for a while yet - I can't see Amazon continuing to not maximize profits in exchange for volume very long after he's gone.

<comment><USER3> What happens to the kingdom once the "good king" passes away...

Edit: I was angling more at the fact that Amazon has been very dominant, and that's not going away soon. So if it starts getting bad, it's not like there will be something just as good overnight. Look at how long it took to erode MS's dominance from the 90's.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, if I'm Amazon or Google I'm in that business not really to make money. Hell, I'll run the same business at a loss frankly because I have to build that business anyway to run the business I'm already in. I need the infrastructure to run a scalable website if my competitors and others want to pay me to do that ,great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Their comments about storage cluster density are interesting. I'm still shocked that hard drive design basically hasn't changed at all.

What I'd like to see is hard-drives that don't need to be screwed in and don't need sleds. Instead they are machined with grooves on the tops, bottoms and sides to be "slide in, slide out" and have the grooves be multipurpose in the sense that they are designed for airflow. i.e. the top of one hard drive mates with the bottom of an identical hard drive to create channels through which air can be forced through and cool both drives maximally, simultaneously.

Basically take the level of machining Apple puts into designing the the Macbook Pros and apply it to hard drives. If designed correctly, you should be able to pack them together, side by side in a way that they lock (like a jigsaw puzzle or the Heineken World Bottle[0]) in a stable "lattice" of hard drives that only permit sliding out to one side and permit efficient cooling.

Screws and sleds are so yesteryear.

[0] [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672684/heineken-s-lost-plan- to-...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672684/heineken-s-lost-plan-to-build- houses-out-of-beer-bottles)

[1] I hope that HN comments like these constitute prior art in case someone decides to go out and do this and patent the idea.

<comment><USER6> since the tops are thin sheet metal, and the bottoms are circuit boards, i don't think we'll see mating surfaces there.

but they could probably make some side grooves, and little cutouts for spring loaded latches to catch on.

add some cutouts on the front that something could grab onto, and you might be able to avoid the need for the sled and screws, without building up an entire latticework out of drives.

there probably needs to be structure to hold the back plane(s) and line them up with the drives, anyways.

<comment><USER5> I get the impression that the circuit board would be best placed on one of the sides or entirely on one end. Placing it on the bottom pretty much nullifies efficient heat exchange along one of the broadest surfaces to use for cooling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how come Amazon didn't mop up the floor with his competitors (e.g. DigitalOcean, Rackspace) price-wise if AWS infrastructure is so optimized? Of course, they have more features, but that's all kinda software-related, and they say software doesn't cost them that much.

<comment><USER8> In high-end servers they blow the competition away on price. I did a comparison recently and they came out over 4x cheaper than Rackspace for two 256GB of RAM servers + heavy bandwidth.

<comment><USER9> This isn't even remotely accurate.

I could give you a dozen examples, but one will suffice.

From a hosting provider I've used for many years, WebNX. Here are two example configurations from them:

E5-1650v2, 64gb ram, 4x 450gb SAS 15,000 rpm enterprise drives and hardware raid 10 with battery backup, 20tb of bandwidth - $289 / month, no setup fee

Dual 2690v2, 256gb ram, 6x 600GB 15k sas raid 10 w/ 2x SSD Cache - $950 / month, no setup fee

The bandwidth alone would cost you $2,300 at Amazon. And 20tb is nothing these days, countless quality providers offer 100mbps standard with $150 machines.

The AWS cr1.8xlarge with just 20tb of bandwidth is $5,134 per month. A one year locked in contract gets it down to $2,815 ($7,200 up front) - three times more expensive. And there are far cheaper providers than WebNX.

AWS is almost interesting, if you never need any bandwidth.

<comment><USER8> That's also an over-simplification.

For example at AWS you can get a fully bidirectional 10gbps link, regardless of what other tenants are doing on the network. Nobody else that I'm aware of can match that. And you'll quickly find that 20TB of bandwidth at those network speeds are nothing, you can cross into petabytes without breaking a sweat (1 petabyte at 50% of bandwidth 24x7 for a month for just one server.) At that kind of network volume bandwidth costs dominate everything (about $65K for an petabyte of bandwidth at Amazon.) I challenge you to beat that anywhere.

Also if you have bursty traffic patterns, AWS comes out a lot cheaper because it's designed around quickly scaling up and down capacity.

In the end it depends on matching a provider to your particular needs because they vary wildy in strengths and weaknesses and costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Hamilton didn't talk a lot about AWS's custom-built storage, but he did > share one tidbit. The densest storage servers you can buy commercially today > come from Quanta, and a rack full of them would weigh in at about three- > quarters of a ton. "We have a far denser design — it is more than a ton," > Hamilton said.

Interesting. For reference; a Backblaze pod is 4U and weighs 145 pounds, so 10 of them in a standard 42U rack would be 1450 pounds = 0.715 (short) tons (or ~648kg).

<comment><USER11> For many colo centers, there are both weight and power limitations on a per- rack (or per-cabinet / per-row) basis. One wouldn't want a ton of disks crashing through the (often raised) floor!

For compute clusters, power is often the limiting factor; for storage clusters, weight is often the limiting factor. If you put these clusters in a general-purpose colocation facility, you'll end up with half-full racks. Density on a per-rack-unit basis is not necessarily important for most of us.

Of course, if you're Amazon's size, you build your own facilities, and you can make sure to support the weight and power requirements of whatever custom hardware you can dream up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty interesting nugget there. I've always thought Amazon cloud services were overpriced. But I thought maybe the software engineering labor is expensive. The comment that "software engineering costs rounds down to zero" was extra information I didn't have that strengthens my gut feeling.

Just my two cents. I don't expect to change anybody's mind. :)

<comment><USER13> Everyone gets a raise!

Seriously. I'm not sure how well compensated AWS engineers are, however if the price engineering is just noise, why not pay the best in the industry?

<comment><USER14> Have you looked at what Amazon stock has done over the past few years?

<comment><USER13> Sure, but realistically what's the upside? Maybe your stock doubles if Amazon gets to be as big as Microsoft, but that's unlikely given how razor thin the margins are. Sure, it could happen, but if Amazon is spending several billion on data centers and warehouses every year, that's likely to make a dent in the stock price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is all very interesting and impressive, but why doesn't anyone talk about how much pollution and environmental damage this is causing? It's terrifying to think about how much fossil fuel will be burned to keep these resources running. How many servers and cables they will be throwing away every year. How much packaging trash is being generated by Amazon every day. Do these inconvenient by-products simply disappear? No, they show up in your landfills, and in your oceans, and they get "exported" (dumped) in China and Africa.

The only metrics people are looking at is revenue, profits, growth, bandwidth and storage. But how about we start measuring pollution, waste, and environmental destruction for every company, right alongside the traditional metrics?

It's great when the stock price doubles. But does anyone think about the fact that this probably also means the amount of plastic trash in our oceans, and poisonous gas in our atmosphere doubles?

<comment><USER16> The environmental impact of cloud computing is hotly debated. To the extent that it's replacing "OldOps" kind of infrastructure it's probably more efficient. OTOH the Jevons Paradox predicts that as the cloud gets cheaper it will be used for increasingly higher volumes of lower-value tasks that previously would not have been done at all. Ultimately I favor internalizing the environmental costs and letting Amazon deal with them how they will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Back in the day, Hamilton used to lobby for just having one or two SKUs from a server vendor in order to minimize complexity, but times have changed. Once you master the process, going straight to server manufacturers with custom designs can lop 30 percent off the price right away, not to mention the improved performance and faster turnaround time."

So, they get the server manufacturer to do the work instead of building it themselves. I guess the scale goes:

      low volume: buy -> build own -> custom outsource :high volume

I wonder how long each design lasts before they move on.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I might be naïve with the following comment:

I would love to see AWS moving a bit further down the customer chain, providing one-click installations to non-savvy customers (I'm thinking on- click wordpress, magento, docker, etc.). Given the recent acquisition of MediaTemple by SlowDaddy I'm confident many GridServer customers would of moved from MT to AWS.

<comment><USER18> [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace)

tip: search for wordpress, magento

The biggest drawback of AWS is that you miss features not because they don't have them, but because they have so many of them. :)</comment></comment>


Tesla launches phase 3 of its virtual power plant, soon 4k home Powerwalls - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2020/09/07/tesla-phase-3-virtual-power-plant-powerwalls/ <comment><USER2> Some context about Australia and solar:

[https://www.energy.gov.au/households/solar-pv-and- batteries](https://www.energy.gov.au/households/solar-pv-and-batteries)

"Australia has the highest uptake of solar globally, with more than 21% of homes with rooftop solar PV. As at 30 June 2020 more than 2.46 million rooftop solar power systems have been installed across Australia."

More here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia)</comment>


Embed Python within LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brotchie/python-sty

<comment><USER2> Nice idea!

It looks that pythontex (<https://github.com/gpoore/pythontex>) is a more mature package. It seems it does not require to give shell permission to the script. It also supports syntax highlighting through pygtments and a python console output mode.</comment>


Plaxo's For Sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/02/plaxos-for-sale/ <comment><USER2> Everything is for sale at the right price.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tell that to 37signals :)

<comment><USER2> Did you offer to buy them out and they turned you down? I hate when that happens!</comment></comment></comment>


Ironically… You need to do it for you - <AUTHOR> http://jkhowland.me/post/51678719289

<comment><USER2> Well maybe fix the laws first. Not for founders, but but for regular workers.

<comment><AUTHOR> What laws are you talking about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great read. Lots of points that hit home.</comment>


Ask HN: Predict the future - <AUTHOR> I think it would interesting to hear about what very high likelihood, but still surprising, future events are. Things that you could reason are near-certain, but you mightn't have expected prior to hearing the reasoning. <comment><USER3> Health insurance as we know it shall become a thing of the past. It will be largely replaced with Direct Primary Care, lower cost wellness services (like vitamin shops, massage therapists and fitness services) and the spreading of good info online. People will learn to Google their symptoms at the early stage and do something to change the course of events rather than waiting until they need medical intervention. Health insurance will persist as mostly covering major calamities -- which is as it should be.

People will start solving large scale problems with highly informed grass roots movements spread largely by internet instead of looking to the government and mega wealthy to fix everything.

Gig work shall be our era's version of The 40 Hour Work Week. It shall put power into the hands of the little guy to live where they want and work as much or as little as they want, giving them lifestyle perks previously only available to the jet set and comfortably well off retirees.

As men and women learn to work alongside each other, birth rates will go down because having a baby will no longer be a woman's primary means to secure a comfortable life for herself.

Men will eventually get a clue and figure out that "male privilege" comes with a serious cost, not just benefits. This will be a tipping point in so-called women's rights as people begin focusing on human rights for all people, including men who currently have money but also die younger than women, die in battle routinely, are frequently estranged from their kids due to the demands of their career, etc.

I am pretty sure I had another one I wanted to list, but it escapes me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm 100% convinced self-driving vehicles will be on the road by the end of this decade. I suspect they'll be limited to a specific region (say, California?) at first, or they may even only be limited to service-based vehicles, like semi-trailer trucks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems quite likely! 2018 seems to be the year to watch; there are multiple companies (Tesla, Google, NuTonomy) with big 2018 plans. Even some of the more traditional car manufacturers (Audi, Volkswagen, GM) have had plans to release something this side of 2020.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just want to suggest a book that I think is relevant to the topic!

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction - Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner

</comment><comment><USER6> Politically correct culture will be the only thing Generation Z, and all those that come after it, know.

On the positive side, something I'd like to see is a movement where remote workers make the choice to leave the city, in search of healthier, less hectic day-to-day living. That is, to purposefully congregate in the same areas so as to create communities across the globe. As things stand, FB is analagous to the city, whereas the countryside is some FB alternative, but no one tries the latter cause all their friends are in the former.

</comment><comment><USER7> Veganism becoming mainstream, shunning people who are not vegan

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you reach that conclusion, though? Escalating price of livestock? Shortage of livestock due to climate change? Something else?

<comment><USER7> Because feeding meat to 9 billion is unsustainable and the only reason we are able to do it now is because of the huge subsidies. It has terrible environmental effects and it's morally wrong since the only reason people still eat meat is the taste and tradition. I expect a huge paradigm shift here. For more information you could watch documentaries like Cowspiracy and Earthlings.

Edit - Obligatory VSK: [http://vegansidekick.tumblr.com/image/151486277095](http://vegansidekick.tumblr.com/image/151486277095)

<comment><USER8> But people have been saying this (and even making these documentaries) since the 1970s. Has something changed?

<comment><USER7> Internet and the flood of information. Vegan population soon reaching a critical mass(every friend circle has a vegan). And then when people have someone next to them who is vegan for x+ years and healthy they will think it's a maintainable lifestyle. Also, anecdotal evidence, just a year ago a vegan post on a forum (i.e. Reddit) would get downvoted into oblivion and posts like 'bacon tho' upvoted, when today, more often than not, it's the opposite

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Self Driving cars - despite resistance will keep surging in popularity - <USER2> self-driving trucks will put yet another blue-collar sector into decline. Catering to the automated travel market will become a new thing.

Drones - expect more eyes in the sky, law enforcement, news, emergency services, etc.

Augmented Reality - totally see this happening - and more [https://vimeo.com/166807261](https://vimeo.com/166807261) . Ever read the Dream Park series? (Larry Niven/Steven Barnes) Gonna be the future of gaming/sports.

</comment><comment><USER10> And I thought that Southpark is joking about the PC vegan self driving epidemic. I was wrong.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think that we can basically use more of our bodies than is currently thought. Everything we feel has a biological correlate. Try making yourself feel good. After you get a workout high or some such, try expanding the feeling. You'll notice it's in your gut / abdomen area. This is where a your adrenals, a majority of your serotonin and a good percentage of your dopamine is located. If you can do this with some success, try checking in a mirror and you'll notice that doing this dilates your pupils.

With a few days of practice this kind of thing can get pretty intense. With years of constant use I believe that we can get very dexterous in how we make ourselves feel. I'm curious how this kind of thing can eliminate our thinking with our emotions. This is a major leap from how most of us live our lives, but I don't think it stops there.

>The eagle eye is among the strongest in the animal kingdom, with an eyesight estimated at 4 to 8 times stronger than that of the average human. An eagle is said to be able to spot a rabbit 3.2 km away

What do you think the vision of an eagle would be like if it lives its life in a 10x14 room? I'm very curious, but it's evident that it would be terrible compared to where it's at now. Conversely, what do you think a human's vision would be like if he lived a good percentage of his life in the sky?

If you have bad vision like me, try taking out your contacts and sitting where a text is just getting blurry. Now for 30 minutes try to clear your vision. You'll likely notice that at least once, you were able to do it manually (with other times it being more an accident). I've spoken to this with my optometrist and he agrees that a person can teach themselves to correct their vision without the need of corrective lenses.

When we are babies we have much more neurons and synapses than we have as an adult. It's believed that we essentially lose what we don't need. More to the point, we use what we don't use. I believe we may be able to regain these synapses with practice. Over the years, we've only been using as much of our bodies as needed to survive. I think it's evident that we can use more.

I'm curious for some input on this.

</comment><comment><USER12> World War 3 and nuclear bomb detonated in civilian area, hyperinflation of US dollar, collapse of social security system, financial destruction of 401Ks through a collapsing financial system, death of 95% of people on this board, all within the next 100 years.

</comment><comment><USER3> The future is unwritten and predictions about it are consistently wrong. Making predictions can actually change the course of events.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm asking about the things that can be reasoned. For instance, something I realised a few months ago was that there is no good short term outcome from the US election. If Trump wins, there will be a bit of panic and I suspect markets will get hit. If Clinton wins, Trump will probably cause instability by starting lawsuits, claiming it was rigged, and stirring up his supporters; it could get very nasty.

I accept that publicising a prediction could change the course of things. That's okay.

<comment><USER8> That's not what I would call solid reasoning, just guessing at some possible outcomes. You could just as easily argue positive short term outcomes for either scenario.</comment></comment></comment>


Tough Call: Handling "Difficult" Remote Conversations Like a Pro [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyM8FRIO0b0 <comment><USER2> I was laid off a few months ago over Zoom. The thing that irked me about it was I got an invite to it with a dishonest description the night before. Since this was a director I didn't ordinarily communicate with, I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about so I did a few hours of research on the fake subject that night.

<comment><USER3> Same. One manager of mine gave me a special project to work on which turned out to be busy work while they waited for HR to complete the lay-off paperwork. The meeting to share my results was remote, and had him and an HR person it it. Fuck that guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how many _" performance improvement plan"_, salary reduction, or layoff discussions are happening over chat, email, and video this week. I imagine this week's unemployment numbers will eclipse last week's record setting number.

I've had to lay people off in the past, but face-to-face. Which is, at best, a terrible experience for both parties. Can't imagine having to do it remotely.

<comment> T3OU-736 [https://mobile.twitter.com/mjnblack/status/12436416374204538...](https://mobile.twitter.com/mjnblack/status/1243641637420453889) (posted in HN as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707935)) as as a particularly bad example.

<comment><USER4> Oy. Pre-recorded video? That requires both a shit company and a shit manager. Personally, I'd have made sure to do something more than what the company decided.

<comment><USER5> \- Knock, knock. \- Who's there? \- Not you anymore, lol.

<comment><USER6> Everybody who still works here, take a step forward.

Slow down, Steve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The most efficacious way to make these conversations less "difficult" is offering a generous separation agreement.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm also curious about how remote dismissals are returning company laptops.

<comment><USER9> When it happened to me (before all this, summer 2019) they gave me a FedEx account number and asked me to FedEx it back. It was a company account so I just had to show up and make a minimal effort of stuffing it in a box. And I was across the country from HQ. I imagine even with people stuck remote even in the same city, they could just do the same and have people FedEx it back, either now or later.

<comment><USER10> I wonder what the max weight is for a Fed Ex. I would be tempted to send them the laptop wrapped in bubble packaging and foam, inside a steel safe. With the combination on a Post-It note. I really want them to get that laptop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 47min video. Presented slowly, very little of the info is about "difficult conversations". It's largely about giving presentations. A written summary of key points would be helpful.

<comment><USER12> I watch videos that don't have slides at 16x using Video Speed Controller extension[0]. A 47 minute video becomes a 3 minute video I can go through and judge information density, slides quality, topics addressed, depth of said topics, whether there's a topic that matters to me that's addressed there.

Then I decide if I'm going to watch the thing, which I note using Taskwarrior with a +watch tag, a link to the video, a description on what it's about. Then I watch it and take some notes, augment some issues with the information acquired or references, etc.

I don't really do this with great quality speakers I'm familiar with, as I'm sure I will learn things.

[0]: [https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed](https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed)

<comment><USER13> Do you keep any notes or record of the good talks/speakers online? It sounds like it would be valuable!

<comment><USER12> Sort of. Since all I think about in my waking hours is product, company, roadmap, and vision, my notes are very specific to these issues and goals and simply have become the company's knowledge base.

The notes for the talks are practically non existent and are just a subset, and a few lines at most.. Other notes are about strategy, handbook to be able to operate the company from paying taxes to hiring, onboarding, and firing to how to write issues and commit messages, to tools we use or could use, to features and roadmap, to the experience from soup to nuts of different stakeholders, to the induced demand and workers influx it hopefully will cause, to what the company should focus on for the next two months to become what it will in the next five to ten years with nth order effects. Different x maginification from the bug fix to the economic consequences on countries with poor connectivity, and how closing an issue relating to compressing static files moves us a hair.

Success is the team not missing a beat if I disappear, because everything would be in place for continuity and growth and slashing cumulative lifetimes of suck.

I've always had a proclivity for writing, but there are other reasons I'm doing it _that_ much and want to do it more. Some hard transitions and developments that almost killed the company, and we turned it around with some hard learned lessons and the earned "wisdom" not to have it happen again.</comment></comment></comment></comment>