Portugal trials use of goats to clear vegetation for reduction of wild fire risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/world/europe/portugal-wildfires-goats-climate-change.html <comment><USER2> The catalyst of Portugal forest fires is the extense eucalyptus plantations. Eucalyptus is an introduced pyrophyte species and it doesn't stay confined to the initial plantation areas, reducing endemic forest, which is generally "fire-resistant", such as Sweet chestnut Castanea sativa.

<comment><USER3> I understand what you want to say, and a better planning definitely wouldn't hurt, but blaming the tress because are flammable is like saying that the problem of school shootings is that people is shootable and wore shirts instead bullet-proof vests.

Spain has Eucalyptus also. Curiously the private plantations burn often _less_ than the public areas adjacent or the nature parks. Talk about weird statistics.

Without a hand that starts the fire, several times, in several places, in the middle of the night, in the most windy and dry day of the year, with devices specially designed for it... without this hand, there is not fire.

<comment><USER4> So are you saying there is some deliberate economic sabotage going on?

<comment><USER3> In some cases, Yes. There are several registered and solved cases of fires by revenge on natural parks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Farmers are behind a lot of fire forests that aim to replace trees in public (and private) spaces by meadows for cattle

Last years half Portugal and big chunks of Spain suffered of a big fireforest's wave in a global attack from Cadiz to the North of Spain. Fireforests started in the same weekend by what can be only called as "organised crime". We are talking about 1.485 billion in damages for Europe, 10.000 hectares burnt down intentionally and even a few people killed burnt alive. This is terrorism, in uppercase letters.

Now the area has ben cleared and the cattle has been allowed to enter again and munch the remaining tree saplings and regenerating vegetation. In this war for the public resources and territorial uses, politicians are surrendering to criminals and giving them what they wanted. Is a _humongous_ mistake.

<comment><USER5> Conspiracy theories. Please back your claims and stop propagating false stuff.

Several independent reports pointed out that the Pedrogão Grande fires (the ones that killed 64 people) started at the power lines.

[https://www.tsf.pt/sociedade/interior/pedrogao-edp-na- origem...](https://www.tsf.pt/sociedade/interior/pedrogao-edp-na-origem-das- chamas-esegundo-um-fogo-fora-dosregistos-oficiais-8848712.html)

[https://www.rtp.pt/noticias/pais/causa-do-incendio- principal...](https://www.rtp.pt/noticias/pais/causa-do-incendio-principal-de- junho-ligada-a-linha-eletrica_v1034194)

[https://www.dn.pt/sociedade/interior/incendio-causado- porlin...](https://www.dn.pt/sociedade/interior/incendio-causado-porlinha- daedp-8849137.html)

Please stop these conspiracy theories. Many other fires can be tracked down to power lines.

<comment><USER6> That year there was a second event where a lot of people died later in the year. That happened in a weekend just before rain was forecasted. I can't confirm the criminal intent but there is no doubt that all throughout the country people were burning forest and agricultural waste just before the rain. Because of the weather conditions that started fires all over the country. One thing that changed after that dark year is that the police now takes it seriously when you call in about someone burning a pile somewhere. Whereas before this was already illegal but widely tolerated even though it is very dangerous.

<comment><USER7> I was in Spain early this year, and even in semi-agricultural suburbs around Jerez I saw people burning large piles agricultural waste in their gardens.

<comment><USER3> There is a fire index published by the administration for each day of the year. It goes from 1 (low) to 5 (extreme risk) and uses probably air humidity, temperature, and expectacion of future rains and winds.

It is allowed to make a small bonfire or a barbeque in your backyard at day when the index is low or moderate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I rented a house on Martha's Vineyard one time and the owner had a company come in and fence off the backyard and put a bunch of pigs in there to clear it out. It was heavily overgrown with grass, brush, small trees, and shrubs. In a week the pigs had completely cleared the whole area out, even ripped out the roots of the shrubbery / small trees. Quite impressive.

<comment><USER9> I read an article somewhere, maybe the New Yorker, maybe the NY Times (a new found goat obsession?) which talked about some, I guess herders upstate who take in goats and then rent them out all around the North East to eat grasses.

Seemed like a neat businesses, and I guess if I'd have been lucky I might have seen them in NYC happily eating grasses in Central and Inwood parks.

Sometimes you just gotta eat away your problems before they eat away at you I suppose :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm reminded of pasturing animals plowing the soil causing it to be less dry and fertilizing it at the same time.

It was discussed here within this year, but I can't find the discussion page. One possible link: [https://returntonow.net/2017/11/30/cows-can-turn-desert- back...](https://returntonow.net/2017/11/30/cows-can-turn-desert-back- grassland-save-planet/)

<comment><USER11> The approach is called holistic management. Basically, you make sure cows stay in one place until they've grazed (or trampled, doesn't matter) the tall grasses away. Then you move the cows to another place and let nature do its job. On average, the places where tall grasses were converted to natural fertilizer, do much better vs. ungrazed places. It's all about the thickness of the humus layer and the presence of the accompanying microorganisms.

He received a lot of criticism, but the evidence shows it's working. [https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/2014/aug/19...](https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/2014/aug/19/grazing-livestock-climate-change-george-monbiot-allan- savory)

The places where it's not working are usually overgrazed or missing other elements that prevent erosion.

The problem of desertification can be solved everywhere, though it's not always easy. You need to:

      - prevent wind erosion by adding the right grasses
      - prevent wind erosion by creating terraces
      - make sure leaves, branches and other dead materials are added to the humus layer
      - protect the vegetative cover by adding trees
      - cycle nutrients through grazing
      - trap water in the humus layer, pits, ditches

Also, look up the work of John D. Liu, he did great work in the Löss plateau in China and Jadav "Molai" Payeng, who created a 300 hectare forest mostly by himself.

<comment><USER12> Here is something similar to this in Portugal even, albeit on the sourhtern parts.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/13/pigs- rad...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/13/pigs-radical- farming-system-trees-climate-crisis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the comment made some days ago in the news about meat and CO2 emissions.

This idea that animals just eat the produce of intensive farming (or that grazing pastures are planted by men specifically for that purpose) is wrong in many parts of the world.

We have the obvious example of Argentina, where free grazing cattle uses the naturally available grass to get fed.

In the case of Southern Europe, there are also goats that have been used to clean the forests for a long time in order to prevent fires, and that provides for most or even all of their feeding requirements (besides fulfilling the important role of fire prevention).

The idea going around how animals are so inefficient per Kg of food/Kg CO2, fails to take into account (basically all the time) that part of those animals, only consume naturally occurring flora that is in no way planted by men.

P.S.: As an interesting related side note, there are a lot of cooking recipes for old goat in Portugal (the meat needs to be cooked differently).

<comment><USER14> > P.S.: As an interesting related side note, there are a lot of cooking > recipes for old goat in Portugal (the meat needs to be cooked differently).

I'd love to get hold of some, it'd be good for cooking chamois and tahr in my country.

Fun fact, goat is the most widely eaten meat in the world.

<comment><USER15> 'Chanfana de Cabra' or 'Chanfana de Borrego' is probably the most famous recipe as wdata pointed out.

I am not sure there are a lot of recipes for this type of meat as it is claimed.

Mostly it is either slow roasted in an oven or slow cooked in a stew with some variations on stew ingredients.

The main difference is in the longer cooking time and in preparing the meat.

Traditionally people remove the lymph nodes from certain areas under the legs and some of the nearby fat tissue. Otherwis this tissue will give a really unpleasant taste/smell to the cooked meat.

<comment><USER13> You are right, there are only an handful of dishes using old goat meat.

I was under the impression (my personal take) that there are quite a few different ways to prepare them though, although the end result (the dish itself) is similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> CERN has sheep on the site because it's the cheapest way to get the grass cut. It was weird having meetings that were punctuated by "baaah!" every now and again.

</comment><comment><USER17> It is very common in Spain to use goats and sheeps to clean the low vegetation from forests and and reduce the wild fire risk. I heard that first time 10 years ago, I cannot imagine why the neighbour country wouldn't do the same until nowadays.

<comment><USER18> We've being doing it for years, I don't know why this is news now.

Probably some friend of a friend of a NYT journalist learned about it now.

<comment><USER19> NYC had some goats this summer to clear vegetation. There was a big launch party and lots of media attention. It probably put goats on the radar of some NYT journo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Australian (Victoria) Alpine region seems to flip flop between banning grazing [1] to protect the vulnerable high mountain fauna and the water quality as it is a source for many rivers. Then allowing grazing again as forest fires go nuts down there.

Even their bushes and trees are encouraging fires as a vector for growth. [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_National_Park#Agricultu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_National_Park#Agriculture)

[2] [https://www.livescience.com/40583-australia-wildfires- eucaly...](https://www.livescience.com/40583-australia-wildfires-eucalyptus- trees-bushfires.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> There used to be a guy in my town that had a portable electrical fence and a small heard of goats and you could have him set up on your property and clear out areas. Much cheaper + environmentally friendly than having someone come over with a gravely.

</comment><comment><USER3> Same pattern repeating again and again. 2019-Aug. Canary Islands: Three big fireforests in 2 weeks in turistic peak season. "Don't worry, Spain and Europe will inject lotta money for fix our s*t. We did the correct and we feel justified". Goats win.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-49388823](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49388823)

<comment><USER22> In English the word is forest fires.

<comment><USER23> I'm English and I rather like fireforests even though this is the first time I've seen it. To me it gives an impression of a bigger problem than forest fire. To me it works like this: a forest fire is a fire in a forest whereas a fireforest is a whole forest on fire, much scarier.

<comment><USER22> That's an interesting point, but I was confused for about 15 seconds. Maybe it's because I studied Korean instead of Spanish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> After the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), is obvious that Portugal has a problem with wildfires

[https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/static/effis_stats/](https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/static/effis_stats/)

</comment><comment><USER24> My experience with Goats: They will even eat fire if it's in front of them...

</comment><comment><USER25> This is very common in Israel. Every year my settlement actually invites local Beduins, with whom we have terrific relations, to come set up tent and graze. It is win-win for everyone, besides being a win for relations.

<comment><USER26> > my settlement actually invites local Beduins, with whom we have terrific > relations

That is a nice thing to hear. Is this common or is it an exception?

<comment><USER27> It's propaganda. The settlement is on land that belonged to the bedou in the first place - throwing them scraps and interpreting them taking those as "terrific relations" is just trying deflect from the question of why there are settlements by the occupying country on occupied land.

<comment><USER28> My only point of reference for this kind of thing would be like an American landowner in the Southwest allowing a Navajo rancher from the reservation to graze on their property. Is it basically the same thing, or is it somehow "different"?

<comment><USER25>
      > My only point of reference for this kind of thing would be
      > like an American landowner in the Southwest allowing a Navajo
      > rancher from the reservation to graze on their property. Is
      > it basically the same thing, or is it somehow "different"?

It is similar and it is different.

One difference is that Arizona was founded as a state earlier than Israel, so people feel that "it's older, so it is OK now".

Another difference is that America decided "all the land is ours", then herded the Navajo into reservations. In Israel we built in specific places and the Bedouins continued to be nomadic around us.

Note also that the Bedouins were until recently very nomadic, but today few Bedouin are nomadic. When the Bedouins were nomadic they would roam huge areas, but "occupy" only a small area at any one time. From what I understand, the idea "this land is OURS" didn't pop into anyone's mind, each family (Hamula) would roam and they pretty much did not need to bother fighting over land. Only when permanent settlements started being built, and thus land was removed from the common pool, did this become an issue.

Another issue is that today, a sort of "land war" is happening between some Bedouins and the state of Israel. I actually believe that the state stared the problem and then it escalated. In a nutshell, the state is forcing Bedouins off some settled land and in response the Bedouins are starting to claim more lands as "permanent settlements". In one particular case that I'm aware of, the Bedouins have been pushed off a parcel of land and then returned over 100 times. We're not talking about grazing land, which there is enough of for everybody to share and build on. We are talking about tents and stables and families. There is a huge difference between the state building a town on a corner of the grazing land, and the state forcefully remove people from these places. The former is the case 99% of the time, but the latter is happening and any decent person will, as I am, oppose it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We raised goats growing up. We lived in a heavily forested area of rural Texas. When it came time to build a new chicken pen, we temporarily fenced our goats in the area we wanted the pen, and in a week or three, there was no underbrush or scrub left (except for yaupon, even goats don't touch that one) - just the trees.

<comment><USER30> _we temporarily fenced our goats_

This sounds so much easier than it practically is - unless you're talking electrical fence or have something really decent you can setup temoporarily? Our goats destroy, both willingly and unwillingly, any simple fence in hours or days.

 _no underbrush or scrub left - just the trees_

We have a rather large species of goats (maybe largest, something Nubian) and they eat the bark of trees so unless you get them away from the tree or the tree has a sufficient diameter which makes it hard enough to get their teeth on it, at least 30cm or so, the trees also don't survive :)

<comment><USER29> Pine trees the primary tree we had present, they have rather resinous bark the goats did not eat. The fence was pretty robust - the only 'temporary' part of it was the actual fencing. The posts were bedded in cement with sturdy chain- link fencing. After the goats were done, my father and older brothers removed the chain-link and substituted it for chicken wire to form the basis for the new chicken pen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is not a new practice.

For one - admittedly odd - example of training goats for this purpose: [http://yogoats.org/](http://yogoats.org/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Typical NYT - they can't resist blaming warmer summers (always climate change). WRONG Portugal has been quite cool last 2 summers, I moved to Cascais 2 years ago from UK, my wife constantly complains how cold it is here especially because I promised her warm weather! eg today has been typical, only 21 degrees C in August. However has been sunny and incredibly windy, I suspect the wind contributes more to fire risk than high temperature.

<comment><USER33> _Holidaymakers in Spain and Portugal have been warned to stay out of the sun as the region approaches the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe.

Eight Portuguese regions have already smashed their local records as a warm blast of air from North Africa sweeps the continent._

August 2018

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/weather- heat...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/weather-heatwave- latest-record-temperature-europe-spain-portugal-warning-hot-met- office-a8477181.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here in San Diego, they are doing the same thing.</comment>


China revaluation would hurt US: World Bank - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/China-revaluation-would-hurt-US-World-Bank/articleshow/5935729.cms <comment><USER2> _because most of the products China exports to the United States are labor- intensive goods U.S. manufacturers stopped making years ago, the U.S. would only have two choices: buy the products from other countries or from the Chinese._

The 3rd option would be to tap America's dormant manufacturing capacity (e.g. mothballed auto plants in Detroit) to produce these products domestically. With a savings on shipping, the cost could be competitive with higher prices from China or other countries, and it would create much-needed jobs in the US.</comment>


Adblock Plus releases standalone browser for Android - <AUTHOR> https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/19862/adblock-plus-releases-standalone-browser-for-android/

<comment><USER2> Why is this preferable to the real Firefox + AdBlock?</comment>


A new form of gold, almost as light as air - <AUTHOR> https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2015/11/a-new-form-of-real-gold-almost-as-light-as-air.html <comment><USER2> So-called gold aerogel: 98 parts air, two parts gold and milk protein fibrils. A novel drying technique, using carbon dioxide, produces the homogeneous gold structure. Advantages: lighter weight, smaller material requirement, and porous structure.

<comment><USER3> Applications aside from jewelry?

<comment><USER4> Article says pressure sensors, and also to efficiently act as a catalyst in chemical reactions requiring gold - Admittedly I'm not sure why this form of gold is superior as a catalyst.

<comment><USER5> Catalysts are not consumed. The effect is dependent on contact, so like the platinum in a catalytic converter the goal is surface area at minimum cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would porous gold be able to store a liquid, such as latinum?

<comment><USER7> You made me learn that latinum is a silvery liquid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm having a lot of fun reading this article in my head in a faux Swiss/German accent. Love the phrasing :)</comment>


Why PuSH (or PubSubHubbub) Could Threaten Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2010/03/05/2-reasons-why-pubsubhubbub-could-threaten-twitter/

<comment><USER3> RSS never caught on among the masses like many hoped, and PuSH really doesn't address much of the usability concerns, as nice an upgrade as it is to bringing feeds to real time.

Positioning PuSH as a "Twitter killer" I think forgets or ignores most of this history. Instead, Twitter and other microblogging services are likely to adopt or co-opt it and CloudRSS. More succinctly: PuSh is plumbing, not a full service.

<comment><USER4> I could not agree more. I don't know why people keep making claims that a technology (PuSH) can kill a service (Twitter) with a HUGE community behind it. The value in Twitter isn't the tech (it's nearly featureless), but the users, community, and experience that it provides.

<comment><USER5> Is twitter really more popular than RSS? How many of those 10 billion tweets have ever been read by anyone?

<comment><USER6> as a consumer destination site and a social networking hub, twitter is much more "popular" than RSS. If we define popularity as being visible in popular media, and generally acknowledged by a large portion of the population around the world as something that people know of and know about, then yes - <USER2> is many orders of magnitude more popular than RSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> PuSH is for Server to Server and does not address NAT issues. Until this problem is solved I dont see how it can replace something like Twitter which is becoming a protocol of its own. If you also consider the ability to search and filter twitter (even by location) it is a ways ahead of RSS and ATOM

</comment><comment><USER8> "Blogging Pro"? Right. My unborn child has a better grasp of basic grammar rules. What an annoying thing to read!</comment>


VoCore – A coin-sized Linux computer with WiFi - <AUTHOR> http://vocore.io/store/index <comment><USER2> Has anyone played with this yet? I'm interested in the camera module as well, wondering if the little chip is beefy enough to stream video as an ip camera or something

<comment><USER3> I haven't played with it, but I just searched a bit and found:

It's a System on a Chip, SoC. Specifically, the F revision of this one: [https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Ralink_RT5350](https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Ralink_RT5350)

This is the CPU: [https://wikidevi.com/wiki/MIPS_24KEc](https://wikidevi.com/wiki/MIPS_24KEc)

... Which is a MIPS32 device. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_instruction_set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_instruction_set)

Oh, that first page says that it is used in various IP cameras. I think the answer to your question is 'yes'. :)

<comment><USER4> Cool, finally a chance to play with some MIPS stuff again. Could anyone find/know the power consumption for this board?

<comment><USER5> Apparently the chip runs hot, ~300mW with WiFi on, 220mW with WiFi off. This is not unexpected, the chip was designed for home routers running off of a wall wart where a few hundred extra mW wouldn't be noticed.

[https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=46339](https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=46339)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this looks like an implementation of this: [https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/HARDWARE/RT5...](https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/HARDWARE/RT5350F)

olimex sells those itself: [https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/RT5350F/RT5350F-OL...](https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/RT5350F/RT5350F-OLinuXino/open- source-hardware)

</comment><comment><USER7> It looks so cute sitting on top of the "dock" board.

<comment><USER8> I thought that was a heat-sink or something. But it was just long headers and an ethernet port. 8O

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's basically a minimal system module around a RT5350, a MIPS-based SoC (hence OpenWRT?). Reminds me of ESP8266 in its not-so-ubiquitous days...

</comment><comment><USER10> How revolutionary is this? I feel like I've seen stuff like this before.

<comment><USER11> Not very. You can find various systems and modules on a chip at a similar price point and lower.

It depends on what you want on chip, if you need it broken out and if you value documentation, vendor support and community development.

I was researching this yesterday for part of a personal project.

<comment><USER12> Every time this sort of hardware appears on a news site, somebody always chimes in with

"I can't see what the fuss is; you can, of course, get equivalently/more powerful and cheaper devices yadee yadda"

but it's never actually with a name, supplier, URL or price.

Last time it was the new Raspberry Pi.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm interested so show me the goods :)

<comment><USER13> There are many system on module (SOM) vendors in the market. Many of these SoM's have limited market so they're not going to compete on price.

I've used DAVE modules in the past, PHYTEC also makes some great modules for different Silicon vendors: [http://phytec.com/products/system-on- modules/](http://phytec.com/products/system-on-modules/)

Good break-down here: [http://elinux.org/Computer-on- Module](http://elinux.org/Computer-on-Module)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like it's stuck on a 3.10.x kernel. That's too bad.

</comment><comment><USER14> These are the worst knick knacks I've ever played with

<comment><USER15> Care to elaborate?</comment></comment>


Two Letters from Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://davidgelphman.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/2-letters-from-steve/ <comment><USER3> I was looking for a second letter. It took me a minute to realize the two letters were "OK."

<comment><USER4> A better title would be _One Word_.

<comment><USER5> no, a better title would be whatever _i_ say it is

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is getting ridiculous, everything Steve Jobs did or said is getting blown out of proportions.

Yeah, it was nice of him to let this guy take the device to his friend, but let's not make him a saint or martyr or what not. Don't forget the poor bastards in China living on the edge of humanity to make the said devices..

<comment><USER7> "Don't forget the poor bastards in China living on the edge of humanity" - <USER2> be honest, people earn as much per hour in the Foxconn factory as somebody earning minimum wage in my country(Poland) does. And that's within EU, with living costs much higher than in China. Yet nobody talks about "living on the edge of humanity".

<comment><USER6> True - their wages keep increasing which is good, but think 2-3 years ago, they were probably much smaller. Think also of the work conditions, there's no "EU regulations" there... You are probably much better off in Poland.

<comment><USER7> Oh yeah, absolutely. My point is, that when people in the US/UK read an article about workers in the Foxconn factory they feel sorry for people there, for earning "just" $3/hour. Well, I know people here who earn exactly that much or even less, and that's before taxes. And we're not Saudi Arabia either, our petrol is ~$8 per US Gallon, and people need to drive places to work. I know people who spend half of their daily wage just on transportation. So if they work 8 hours per day they work for 4 just to be there,without any profit.

<comment><USER8> It is explicit western policy to use cheap eastern labor:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

ISBN: 9290831693 <http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264>

and to keep it this way:

More than 98% of the ERC's grants are awarded to scientists in the old EU-15, with mere crumbs thrown to newer member countries.

[http://www.nature.com/news/a-chance-to-drive-forward- europe-...](http://www.nature.com/news/a-chance-to-drive-forward-europe-s- science-1.12628)

Poland can at least have a little leverage, given its size -- but was hated for it (ie. agricultural pact negotiations)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On a related note I did quite like the email replies that Steve Jobs would write when he was still around. I started to collect them at one point in a web site.

<http://emailsfromstevejobs.com>

At the time it felt like an interesting meme but over time I began to really feel the philosophy of the man and Apple not having previously been a fan of Apple.

To me the interpretation was that Steve always was product focused and wanted to put out the best user experience possible. I began to appreciate this customer focused approach. So I can see why he said 'OK'.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is the minimal response I would expect from anybody in the company. We shouldn't applaud this behavior as some kind of exemplary gift from the corporation.

Why? Because it normalizes the chain-of-command, rules-are-rules way that we typically see. It makes it seem OK that someone wouldn't grant this request.

In fact, he probably shouldn't even have to ask.

<comment><USER11> You should ask.

It's not an employee's 'opinion' based on an emotional decision on whether they can share something with an individual that has cost millions (billions?) to produce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Steve Jobs was an amazing person, but who cares that he let someone show somebody an iPad?

Basically, this story boils down to: "Billionaire CEO lets employee talk about work with a friend." Not really some super amazing thing, unless you are just honored and in awe that Steve Jobs momentarily knew who you were.

<comment><USER13> What did his billionaire status have to do with anything?

I know why you said it of course, that kind of wealth has a stigma these days. And what could be more obnoxious than a billionaire CEO!

There's no evidence Jobs coveted being a billionaire, he didn't make an effort to show off his extreme wealth, and he didn't go out of his way to brag about it.

<comment><USER14> Because it affected his mentality. For example, he bought new Mercedes SL55 AMG every 6 months so he could avoid putting license plates on it.

<comment><USER15> Leasing a new car every 6 months is a world apart from buying a new car every 6 months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think SJ found it natural to just say "OK" because he thought that the person mailing him knew him enough and was mature enough to just need that permission.

<comment><USER17> As someone outside of Apple, the few times I got replies from SJ were of similar brevity, aside from one, which was a vegan cake that used apple sauce instead of eggs along with directions. I wish I had kept it longer, knowing his fate.

<comment><USER18> I'm really curious how you ended up getting recipes from Steve Jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Brilliant title.

</comment><comment><USER20> The thing that amazes me the most is that Jobs responded within a couple of minutes.

<comment><USER21> Right, every time I emailed him, he'd reply within minutes. Always just a couple of words, but the questions lended themselves for that. In person, he was a lot more chatty. For instance, I met him at MacWorld Expo SF in January of 1999, we discussed the merits of the hocket puck mouse for over ten minutes.

<comment><USER22> What are the merits? This isn't a troll, I'm interested, because I can't stand it (or most Asple mice for that matter). Their trackpads on the other hand... Every iteration blows the old one away and I love them.

<comment><USER23> It's funny. I've never understood the hatred of the hockey puck mouse, I always loved mine.

I think the answer was in how you held it. I held it very lightly with the tips of my fingers and so could throw it around with real speed and accuracy. I thought it's shape made it far more manoeuvrable. Because it had a chord I never had any problems with orientation either. I liked it's solidity too.

For a long time I assumed that the criticisms came from people who had either never used it (or had used it very briefly at a reseller's). I still believe this to a certain degree. There was a lot of irrational and ill-informed Apple bashing at the time and, to me, this was just one of the anti-Apple style- over-substance mantras.

<comment><USER22> My dislike was due to its odd shape in my hand - my hands are quite large. It was so small and I struggled to click with accuracy too.

I also dislike the current cordless one too - people I work with leave the mouse in all sorts of strange places and almost always I seem to start driving it upside down. And the lack of proper scroll wheel is infuriating when trying to scroll through a CT scan or MRI - using the fantastic DICOM/image viewer Osirix and trying to scroll 1 image either way is quite tricky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The only reason this story is remarkable is because Steve Jobs was a jerk all of the time, so exceptions and exhibitions of humanity seem special. Really, I'd see him as a cool guy if he were always like this. Not that him being an ass in any way devalues his abilities. It is what it is.

<comment><USER25> I personally think writing just "OK" does not make him less of a jerk. Seriously! This guys friend is terminally ill and he does not have a few nice words to spare? Just "OK"???

<comment><USER26> This was my thought. Could he not have spared another second or two to express his condolences?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> daigoba66 wrote:

""Except he was already allowed to carry it. He was just not allowed to show it to anyone."

Assuming that's the case then he could have weighed the possible downside (almost nil) to showing the device to someone on their deathbed (with nobody else in the room of course) vs. the risk in asking Steve for permission and the potential repercussions of doing that. [1] Almost daring him to either not respond or to say "no" instead of "ok". I suspect there is more here than meets the eye. [2]

[1] Certainly a risk greater than showing the device to someone on their death bed.

[2] Shows the level of brainwashing more or less like asking the Priest, Minister or Rabbi for a pass on a ritual that has been drilled into your head. After all only you yourself know you have committed the transgression.

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily, I am pretty sure that prototype iPads had location logging enabled and if he just took it out to a different city there would be questions asked. If he had an email from Steve himself, he had an excuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Man says OK to simple human request. Big deal.

</comment><comment> vingt-2 Did your dying friend really had to see an iPad? I mean, in her last moments, who cares about a bigger iPhone? I'm not trolling, I'm myself a tech enthusiast, and I'm not quite sure I'd expect from a friend to come tell me goodbye and show me his "latest toy he's been working on lately".

<comment><USER29> I resent that my time as a functioning nexus of memory and intellect is limited by biology. It is the future I miss the most. The things I will never live to see.

I would be so pleased if, in my last moments, a friend gives me a glimpse of what's next. Even better if I am lucid enough to appreciate it. Cherry on top that a friend of MINE is involved in it and proud of it.

This is a great story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's something really awesome when you start reading something on the front page of HN and realize the blog post is from someone you know :) Good stuff, David!!!

</comment><comment><USER31> It was interesting short story that put a tear in my eye (seriously) but since you knew Steve (even little bit), why did you put "SJ R.I.P." at the end?

<comment><USER31> Just to clarify to those who downvoted; Steve was a Buddhist. As you know, Buddhist underlying position on live after death is that it doesn't exist. After death you are simply being reborn. So Steve had nowhere to "rest in peace". He's alive again.

<comment><USER32> The person writing it might not be a Buddhist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Never optimize anyone's life but your own - they come to you for tech support.

</comment><comment><USER33> OK.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is this a joke?

</comment><comment><USER11> Legend. It's all that was needed.

</comment><comment><USER35> Honestly, I am not sure I like this story or hate it. I like that you shared it, but my reaction to Jobs only saying "OK", my read on that is that he was too busy to say much more and therefor a jerk or if he, in a Jobs-like minimalist way just though that in a serious situation like that, less is more and not much more needed to be said. Either way, thank you for sharing an interesting and thought provoking story.

<comment><USER36> While this reaction is definitely understandable, I think along similar lines of some others here that someone that busy just doesn't always have time for a verbose response. "OK" may have been exactly what he had time for, and if that were the case, I'd say his response was likely sent faster than it would have been if someone had asked him an interesting but less urgent message.

Of course, as with everyone else's opinions... this is 100% speculation.

I have the same like-or-hate reaction, though for a different reason: This sort of thing encourages the irrational hero worship that Jobs fostered while he was alive and that's only grown in some circles after his death. Yes, this story shows that he did something good for someone. Once. And I'm sure there are other similar anecdotes. But the takeaway here will not be "this is something that Steve Jobs did that was nice," it will be "OH WOW STEVE JOBS WAS A SAINT."

<comment><USER37> I'm more disturbed by the fascination that we as a species have with gadgets. I think that was a totally-chill-but-perhaps-not-especially-saintly thing for Steve to do.

But... what... show iPad to dying friend?

<comment><USER38> The iPad was a true innovation when it was released and even more so 3 months prior to its release.

To be able to experience a new invention so far before everyone else on that planet is a special experience. At least, I'd see it that way were I in her friend's shoes.

<comment><USER22> I'm obviously a bit simple if I'm willing to admit it - but I still feel like I'm in the future when I pull the iPad out the bookcase/bag/couch crack. It's a computer, its only a few mm thick, and its now!

<comment><USER39> There aren't many things that make me think I'm in the future, but the first time I saw an iPhone it was like a Star Trek device.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blessed Are the JavaScript Developers - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/frontenddude/status/1300420130346864641 <comment><USER2> Just read the docs:

> If `compareFunction` is not supplied, all non-undefined array elements are > sorted by converting them to strings and comparing strings in UTF-16 code > units order. For example, "banana" comes before "cherry". In a numeric sort, > 9 comes before 80, but because numbers are converted to strings, "80" comes > before "9" in the Unicode order.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/sort)

<comment><USER3> "it's documented" is no excuse for unexpected behavior.

(Relevant xckd: [https://xkcd.com/293/](https://xkcd.com/293/))

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure it's unexpected.

Javascript has some weird behaviors, but in this case Arrays in Javascript can contain multiple types. How would you sort an array of `['cat', 80.3, '80']`? I think I would expect that to end up as `['80', 80.3, 'cat']`, not `[80.3, '80', 'cat'].

Or to make things more complicated, `['cat', 80.3, { foo: 'bar' }, true]`. Do we want to try and intuit whether that object gets converted to a string or a value? Do we base that intuition on the prototype chain, or what?

I think it makes sense to cast every object/type in the array to a shared format so everything can be compared based on the same criteria.

\---

Have simple rules that are universally applied:

\- All objects are converted to strings

\- Strings are sorted alphabetically

vs something weird like:

\- We try to intuit what type you want based on several common type conversions and possibly the prototype

\- We have a set of built-in rules about which primitive types (number, boolean, string, Symbol) comes before and after other primitive types.

<comment><USER5> > I'm not sure it's unexpected.

What do YOU expect when you ask someone to sort items that are _clearly_ numbers?

I don't know about you, but I do _not_ expect what actually happened.

<comment><USER4> We don't know that the items are clearly numbers, arrays in Javascript are untyped.

Your proposal is that Javascript's default sort algorithm should change behaviors based on whether it can do an extra O(n) loop over the entire array and check whether `typeof x === 'number'` evaluates to true for each index? I don't think that's a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know this seems weird at first glance, but JS arrays are not typed. To all the people saying this is obviously wrong, I'm curious what your intuitive default strategy is to sort the following array:

      [
         7,
         '3',

         {},
         null,
         undefined,
         NaN,
         Infinity,
         new Date(),
         new Error(),
         Promise.resolve(),
         function () { return 'a'; },

         { toString: ()=>'a' },
         { toString: ()=>7 },
         { valueOf: ()=>'b' },
         { valueOf: ()=>9 },
         { __proto__: Number.prototype,
           valueOf: ()=>'a',
           toString: ()=>7 },
      ].sort()

The big thing everyone is always complaining about with Javascript is that it tries to guess too much. Type conversions with equality operators, type conversions with +/\- operators, lots of Javascript doing unexpected conversions and trying to be helpful at the wrong times.

So sure, you _could_ have a set of random rules based on prototype chains to figure out whether you were going to call `valueOf` or `toString` for any given object, and you could come up with a bunch of rules for whether or not primitive types like Symbols come before numbers.

Or, you could just say, "we're going to convert every value to its string representation and sort alphabetically." At which point, as long as you understand how string conversion works, it becomes very obvious and easy to understand how the array above will get sorted.

The second option is easier to learn and easier to reason about. There's weird stuff in Javascript, but if you're going to have a default (and there's good reason to say that you shouldn't, and that `sort` without a parameter should just throw an error), I think this is the _right_ choice for them to have made about how the default should work.

Lots of intuitions about what the developer meant seem simple when you're only looking at the simple case. But it is usually better to have one set of rules that are easy to describe and that are universally applied. More of Javascript should work this way, if we're going to have a default sorting algorithm, then it's good that the default sorting algorithm mostly does the same stuff every time no matter what you pass it.

This is not the kind of thing that makes me dislike Javascript, it's the other stuff -- the inconsistencies and magic behaviors -- that give me more pause about the language. But what Javascript is doing here is good.

<comment><USER6> Python also has untyped arrays, and it:

1) Uses < for whatever types are present

2) Throws an error if two of those types are non-comparable

I think that's a much better approach than the implicit casting that happens, frankly, all throughout JavaScript. I like JavaScript - more than Python, overall - but this is one of those things where I don't think we need to be defending the unfortunate decisions that were made in the past.

<comment><USER4> > Throws an error if two of those types are non-comparable

The problem is that practically everything in Javascript is comparable. This doesn't really solve the sorting conundrum, it just rephrases it. What's the intuitive way to handle:

      5 < {}
      5 < '10'
      5 < 'hat'
      5 < function () {}
      5 < { toString: ()=>15 }
      5 < { toString: ()=>'15' }
      5 < { toString: ()=>15, valueOf: ()=>2 }
      ({}) < ({})

If your assertion is that all of those should just throw errors and we should stop doing type inference entirely, then that's kind of reasonable, I guess, but that's a much more drastic change to how Javascript works. If the assertion is that thinking through Javascript operator conversions is easier than thinking through string conversions, I just disagree with that.

Javascript's operator conversions are more complicated and have more weird rules and edge cases. They are (somewhat justifiably) one of the biggest things people complain about in the language. The last thing I want is to have to explain to a new programmer why `5 < '10'`, and `5 > '3'`, but also `'5' > '10'`. Given the way that Javascript is set up at its core, I think using comparison operators for a default sort method would be a disaster.

Using `<` as it's implemented today would mean that even a simple array like `[5, '10', '3']` would sort non-deterministically depending on what the sorting algorithm was and what order the indices were compared with each other. It's unusable unless you're going to change how Javascript operators work.

<comment><USER7> > What's the intuitive way to handle:

Most of the examples you provide are meaningless. What is the intuitive way of comparing a number and a function? There isn't one, the question itself is meaningless. Saying "hey look we found a way to come up with an answer by turning everything into a string" isn't right either, since it means you come up with the _wrong_ answer in plenty of situations—like in the original tweet.

I'd rather have a library that gives you the correct answer in important common cases, at the expense of not being able to answer questions that don't have an answer. The solution JS went with was to get the important cases wrong, so that it could handle cases that don't have a meaning or use.

<comment><USER4> > I'd rather have a library that gives you the correct answer in important > common cases, at the expense of not being able to answer questions that > don't have an answer.

The problem is that optimizing for the common cases and ignoring the difficult or meaningless cases is exactly how you end up with 20 different rules for how something should work that all handle the situation kind of well, but interact with each other to create horrible, crazy bugs whenever anything unexpected happens.

Look, Javascript type conversions are a disaster, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But the reason they are a disaster is specifically because the language was so worried about making everything intuitive that it didn't stop to think about what would happen when the half-dozen 'helpful' type conversions interacted with each other in novel situations.

It's better to have one or two rules that work everywhere, even if they occasionally surprise a new programmer. Beginners will only be beginners for a small, finite amount of time, but they will need to deal with your language quirks and emergent weirdness for the rest of their lives.

If more of the core Javascript language embraced that philosophy, it would be a better language to program with.

It's the "don't worry about the edge cases, just make the obvious case right" thinking that got us class syntax that doesn't actually build classes, and strings parsed into numbers for `>` but not `+`, and basically the entirety of `==`. Because all of those situations had slightly different answers about what was the "intuitive" thing to do, and nobody thought any farther than the isolated, immediately obvious use-cases for those features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This tweet shows the following evaluation in JavaScript:

[6, -2, 2, -7].sort();

The result comes back with this unexpected set:

[-2, -7, 2, 6]

</comment><comment><USER9> This should be the canonical example given in discussions about the "principle of least surprise."

<comment><USER10> JavaScript cannot have "the" canonical example of that:

[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat)

</comment></comment><comment> asdf-asdf-asdf nobody thinks that this behavior is good. the problem is, this is how it was at the beginning, and javascript will not break backwards compatibility. so we have to live with it (or use a third-party sort-function, like "lodash.sortBy").

there are other similar problems in javascript too:

\- "typeof null === 'object'". this is very wrong, but again,this is how it was implemented at the beginning... you know the rest ( [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/typeof#typeof_null) )

\- another problem with ".sort()" is that it both mutates the input-array and returns the mutated input-array. so you write code like "const arr2 = arr1.sort()", and the code works, but if you don't know the spec, you will not know that "arr1" was modified and basically "arr1 === arr2".

<comment><USER11> [https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Mar/cobol.html](https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Mar/cobol.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is one of the reasons I am so excited about WASM. I am playing around with the Rust framework yew ([https://yew.rs/docs/en/intro/](https://yew.rs/docs/en/intro/)) to replace a lot of my front-end Javascript programming, and it is a joy to use.

If you love Javascript that is wonderful, but I am happy to not be forced to use it, when I would prefer other languages.

</comment><comment><USER13> V8 unit test for .sort() explains the behavior as...

> Default sort converts each element to string and orders lexicographically.

[https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/4.3.18/test/mjsuni...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/4.3.18/test/mjsunit/array- sort.js?autodive=0%2F%2F%2F%2F#36)

<comment><USER14> "You're using it wrong" is a poor argument for undesired/unexpected behavior (aka, a bug).

<comment><USER13> I actually stumbled across the V8 link while looking to see if there were a bug logged for this behavior somewhere. I agree it seems like a bug.

I'm definitely not saying "You're using it wrong".

<comment><USER14> Oh, I was not insinuating you were. I was directing my comment into the V8 developers' direction

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Jokes on you we inheriting this planet.

Don't sweat the small stuff.

</comment><comment><USER16> This joke was already old fifteen years ago.

<comment><USER10> There are JS devs who weren't alive 15 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > [-2, 1,5,-7].sort((a,b)=> a-b) works fine

<comment><USER18> It is not obvious that you need to include comparative function for a straightforward numerical sort ? How many developers are going to miss that ?

<comment><USER19> > It is not obvious that you need to include comparative function for a > straightforward numerical sort ?

No. It's not obvious.

Python -

        a = [6, -2, 2, -7]

        a.sort()

        print(a)

PHP -

        $arr = [6, -2, 2, -7];

        sort($arr);

        print_r($arr);

Rust -

        let mut vec = vec![6, -2, 2, -7];

        vec.sort();

        assert_eq!(vec, vec![-7, -2, 2, 6]);

The expected behavior is a default natural number sort.

What other default was chosen? String comparison for some value of Strings, coerced from the integers in some way.

If you have to research a bunch of implicit behavior to understand how sort works for numbers. I believe that's unintuitive by definition (simplest case is more complex than necessary). Fixable with a required flag or specialized functions (eg PHP).

<comment><USER20> It was more intuitive back in the day when everybody knew Perl.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nginx is used by 45.5% of the top 10k sites, more than Apache and IIS combined - <AUTHOR> http://w3techs.com/technologies/cross/web_server/ranking

<comment><USER2> Nginx works well as a reverse-proxy, often in front of Apache or IIS or other application servers. So this isn't really a fair comparison...</comment>


Fun with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables - <AUTHOR> http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/06/12/fun-google-spreadsheets-and-fusion-tables/ <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something. I thought you could do aggregations in Google Spreadsheets without using Fusion Tables?</comment>


Clojure Numerics, Part 1 – Use Matrices Efficiently - <AUTHOR> http://dragan.rocks/articles/17/Clojure-Numerics-1-Use-Matrices-Efficiently <comment><USER2> Direct link to more tutorials and the documentation: [http://neanderthal.uncomplicate.org/articles/guides.html](http://neanderthal.uncomplicate.org/articles/guides.html)</comment>


Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html <comment><USER3> I've read various things from writers about Amazon's publishing deals. They have AmazonEncore, which republishes and promotes emerging authors and mid- listers with self-published novels, giving them an extremely generous (compared to the Big NY Five) cut of the proceeds for every book sold on Kindle.

Of course, for indie publishers in general, if you sell your ebook for over US$2.99 in the Kindle bookstore, you keep 70%. Same with Nook Bookstore. Seth Godin self-publishes by this method. Stephen King publishes short stories and novelas through Kindle Singles, a more curated kindle publishing vehicle that publishes short essays, longer journalistic pieces, and short fiction that gives authors a 70% cut regardless of the author's set price.

Being the #1 bookseller and ereader manufacturer is faring very well for Amazon.

<comment><USER4> It's not bad for a lot writers, either, so far, at least compared to traditional publishing. I wrote a longish post on the subject: [http://jseliger.com/2011/10/17/on-amazon-signs-up-authors- wr...](http://jseliger.com/2011/10/17/on-amazon-signs-up-authors-writing- publishers-out-of-deal/) which explains why I might end up as one of those self-published writers: it's not just the economics of publishing right now, but the difficulty of even getting published at all if you're a classic outsider. The desperate will use whatever cheap and quick methods they can to get their work out there. Yeah, 99% of that work will be lousy, but the unrecognized good stuff will be there too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> More and more, the middlemen in every industry are starting to realize just how irrelevant they are.

<comment><USER6> Amazon's not a middleman?

Of course they are, they just happen to be the biggest one, capable of eating all the others.

<comment><USER7> There have always been two levels of middle men in the book business. The publishers and the sellers. This eliminates one big middle man.

<comment><USER8> By calling them middlemen, you're implying that publishers add no value to the end product. That's a misconception: an author writes a manuscript, a publisher makes it into a book. Often, it takes as much time and effort to turn a manuscript into a book as it took the author to write the manuscript.

As more writers choose to self publish ebooks, it's becoming quite clear how crucial the role of a publisher is. Most of those self produced 'books' are completely unreadable.

Charlie Stross explained it well: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html)

Also, Amazon isn't taking publishers out of the equation. It's becoming one.

<comment><USER9> The publisher is a very odd beast -- the services you are citing as their primary benefit are the kind you would expect an author with money to simply pay for themselves.

Or to put it another way, publishers are a combination of:

1\. Angel investors / Talent scouts (insert moneyball reference here)

2\. Labor pool for book completion (cover design, editing, etc)

3\. Marketing assistance

4\. Physical printing

5\. B2B marketing to get printed books on bookshelves.

Five distinct businesses. Why are they commonly grouped? My guess is a combination of most authors not being very business oriented / not wanting to not think about these sorts of things (30%), and most authors not having the money to hire their own #2 (the other 70% of the story).

Amazon already has a product for #5 on its own, and a separate product providing #4 and #5 together. This story is about them adding on the #1-#2-#3 punch that is currently the exclusive domain of publishers.

Stross is a technical and successful guy -- he should probably just hire his own #2 and #3, and then use amazon's #4 and #5 service. He probably won't, out of loyalty to the angel investor that pulled him out of obscurity (or the contract his angel made him sign...), but hopefully future Strossi will!

<comment><USER10> You have to think about it from the author's perspective. Many authors are not interested in the minutiae of the process, and the publisher serves as a single point for the author. There's no need to deal with a separate person for market and a separate person for physical distribution. There is a value (albeit small for some people) to bringing the disparate pieces together into a single package, freeing the author from the need to handle these pieces.

FWIW: I wish the people performing this service in the financial industry weren't gouging customers ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Barnes & Noble's has a publishing house of their own for a while; I'm surprised it's taken Amazon this long.

<comment><USER12> Amazon has been launching imprints for the last year or so, including romance imprint Montlake Romance, thriller imprint Thomas & Mercer, and most recently sci-fi imprint 47North. Nothing new here, this article has been a long time coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Books are great - and certainly more cost effective for someone like Amazon to go straight to the content creators.

I would like to see them do the same with music and video, but that costs a bit more to produce. There are a number of middlemen out there that need stronger competition from alternate sales channels. Big NY publishers are just a subset of incumbents holding on to a dying business model that need a good shot of disruption.

<comment><USER14> They've started Amazon Studios which is already heading down the road of competing with other Hollywood production companies.

<comment><USER15> At what point does this end up touching anti-trust?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've always been amazed that all the publishers never got together and said "let's build our own web store". I understand that it's not simple, but the alternative is to have Amazon disintermediate you at some point.

<comment><USER17> Why did the record labels not put together a RIAA-controlled iTunes well before Apple did? Or the movie studios an MPAA download store before Netflix?

One, they've got a lot invested in the current model, which is primarily priced around selling medium rather than content - <http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html>. Two, they've spent years learning to compete and regard their biggest threats as each other. They're not culturally equipped to work together to combat a transformational challenge.

<comment><USER16> RIAA didn't want music delivered electronically, and iTunes got them over that hump. They could not have thought of that themselves. However, an online book store selling the same products you have for a hundred years is a much easier sell. You aren't harming your existing business, you're extending it from publishing to distribution and sales. That's just vertical integration - <USER2> well-understood as a business technique.

The tricky part is the touchy-feely web aspect (since that they understand publishing and are very close to distribution already). So given the amount of money they stand to lose, I have no doubt they could have made it work. Undercut the prices everyone else has to charge and you create a serious incentive for people to try you out, forgive your mistakes and give you 5 years to slowly figure out how to perfect the model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This had to happen sooner or later. I can't help but feel sad at how some content owners have been sticking to old school technology for decades without trying out new opportunities.

Publishers will soon be replaced with such 'distributors' soon. Today its books, tomorrow someone will come along and do this to the music industry.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been reading about the imminent death of publishers for a while now, but I don't think they're ever going to disappear completely. And I run a site for writers that processes hundreds of manuscripts daily.

People like to make the comparison of the inevitable democratization of books to how the internet changed the music industry, but that's just not an apt comparison.

Books cannot be consumed in the same way as music. Pop songs are usually 2-3 minutes long, and an entire album clocks in at half an hour to an hour. Generally you can listen to a few songs from a band and make a decision as to whether you like their style and want to buy the album on the spot. Books aren't like that. A reader must often invest a significant amount of time-- days--before it becomes clear that a book is or isn't good. Publishers provide the extremely valuable service of _validation_. If you get your book published up by Random House, then the reader at the store can say, if absolutely nothing else, that a group of well-read professionals thought your book was good enough to warrant stamping with their brand and spending money polishing and marketing. You just can't say that about 99% of self-published material, and when it can take days for a reader to determine quality, that distinction becomes important.

And, despite what many would lead you to believe, publishers provide a valuable service besides validation. They take a raw manuscript and polish it up to professional standards. The manuscript is only part of the finished product that we call a book. You also need cover art, which is your book's first impression and incredibly important--not something you want to leave to your 18-year-old nephew with a cracked copy of Photoshop. You need typesetting, which is still important in the digital world: how many middle- aged writers know--or want to learn--HTML/CSS? You need editing. Having run a site for writers I can guarantee you that an author's perfect final manuscript is still filled with typos, mistakes, and ripe for polishing from a trained professional. You need marketing: the best book in the world won't get read if nobody knows it exists. The truth is that writers are good at writing, but often not that good at all of the other aspects of publishing a book. A big publisher takes that off their hands and handles it in a professional way.

I suspect that the people who say publishers are dead have themselves never picked up a random indie author's book from Amazon. If they had, they'd realize that not every author is Amanda Hocking or Scott Sigler. In fact they'd probably realize that what they just read was filled with typos, had shitty cover art, maybe had greater structural problems like weak characterization, and likely was priced just about right at 99 cents.

If anything, the death of publishers could be very dangerous, because when young new readers start getting burned by crappy self-published books, they'll get turned off to reading and we'll have lost yet another generation to TV and fast media.

<comment><USER20> Or, this could lead to the birth of a decentralised web-of-trust review and recommendation system. Imagine if something like this works: When a person reads a book, he rates it according to his taste. He would also rate how much he "trusts" the opinion of any of his peers. Then, for any book, he could ask the question "How good do my peers think this book is?" or "How good does the faculty of University of Manchester School of Computer Science collectively think this book is?" This then propagates the ratings of this group, and the ratings of the people they "trust", to come up with an answer. The amount of trust can act as some sort of a coefficient at each step.

Now, instead of saying "a group of well-read professionals, picked and chosen by Random House, thought this books was good enough," you can say "a group of people, whom I trust to be well-read professionals, or to have good taste, or to be accurate, or to be knowledgeable in their field, thought this books was good."

The technology is there, and frankly I won't be surprised if someone already wrote something like this.

BTW, this isn't limited to books. You can substitute "book" with academic paper (and you get peer review!), films, music, or pretty much anything provided by a social-web recommendation service,

<comment><USER21> _Or, this could lead to the birth of a decentralised web-of-trust review and recommendation system. Imagine if something like this works: When a person reads a book, he rates it according to his taste. He would also rate how much he "trusts" the opinion of any of his peers._

Unfortunately what you get with this system ends up looking like Amazon's reader reviews, because most readers are neither perceptive nor trained in analytical reading.

Viz: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/faint- pr...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/faint-praise.html)

<comment><USER20> That's not what I was proposing. The whole point is that you select who you trust and how much you trust them for any given subject. A random reviewer like the one on Amazon wouldn't have much influence on my rating unless I "trust" them personally, or some one I highly trust in turn highly trusts them.

I'm saying trust too much now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This may be the final death knell for the publishing industry but it also indirectly provides a clear description of how Internet empowered businesses can be fatally disruptive. The quote that has to be burning holes in the stomachs of publishing pros everywhere comes from Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti: "The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader," he said. "Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity."

<http://g2li.me/ppkHhM>

</comment><comment><USER23> Why do I suddenly get the sense that no amount of stimulus funding is going to solve the structural unemployment issue in the USA? We appear to have crossed the technology Rubicon, whereupon the ratio of jobs created to jobs destroyed by technology becomes less than unity. The Luddite fallacy only holds true as long as the ratio is above or at unity.

Interesting times.

<comment><USER24> [http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html)

I agree that it won't be fixed by stimulus - but it's because I believe that the current system is undergoing a form of violent restructuring, where current institutions and platforms are fighting for their survival against a tidal shift that's moving from a society dominated by centralized, few, powerful institutions, to decentralized, numerous, systems and platforms of democratic organization.

I think what makes technology an always doubted, yet positive, force is that the rate of change and the instability it causes makes short term guesses easier to make successfully than longer term ones. For example, at the birth of the cell-phone, it's easier to predict that this new tech will kill off the pay-phone industry than it is to predict the future coming of the iPhone, or app stores, or the market 3d cell-phone cameras. It's easier to look at the current landscape, and predict how this new tech will damage it, than it is to look at a blank slate, and predict what of an infinite number of possibilities will actually work in the newly created space.

<comment><USER25> It's also easy to step back until something good comes of it, focus on just the good, and ignore the bad.

Take your cell phone example. Cell phones are allowing the government to track the location of all it's citizens. Without a warrant in some cases. If somebody would have predicted that back when cellphones were introduced, people would have laughed them out of town. It was a ludicrous and paranoid idea. Yet here we are. We sit around watching videos, liking Facebook comments, and checking in at various events, all while a critical part of our anonymity has been destroyed.

I'm not saying it's all bad. I'm saying there is a mix. If you ask me, I'd rather not have cell phones and have a more private life. No amount of slick packaging and voice control interfaces is going to make up for what I've lost. But we don't have to choose, of course. We can have our cake and eat it too.

What's happened is that technology is staying leaps and bounds ahead of politics. It's like we're having to re-engineer the social contract every couple of decades or so. And the yahoos we have in power around the world are much more interested in their petty political games than this seismic shift that's occurring under them (which, in all honesty, they probably don't understand and probably couldn't deal with anyway). So the system gets more and more out of whack.

Just wanted to balance what you were saying. This isn't a story of technology always making things better even though we sometimes doubt. It's a story of technology making things more _complicated_ and making the individual more powerful in some ways and that having effects that we poorly understand.

<comment><USER24> I completely agree with you, it's definitely easy to filter the evidence in favor of or against new technology to make a point, or to satisfy a worldview. I also agree that every new technological advancement offers the possibility to use it for both good and bad purposes.

I think what I was trying to say to the original commenter was what you've offered me, which is a balance to the argument that new technology will have an inherently good or bad effect on the world.

I probably mis-represented my opinion by overstating the positive effects of tech - I think my real point was that most kinds of change begin with negatives - and that the reason people continually doubt technology or seem to overplay the negatives is due to it's ever-changing nature. Not that it will inevitably lead to something good and the bad part is just a hiccup - it's just easier to predict the short-term bad than it is to predict the long term good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Finally. Now somebody just needs to do this for academic papers that taxpayers pay for and leech publishers profit from.

<comment><USER27> <http://www.plos.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> My father (about 5+ years ago when itunes was picking up steam) thought Apple would sign Madonna and several other big artists and start producing music themselves. I guess he was just off by brand name and a good number of years ahead of the curve with the idea, but its exciting to see this change happening.

</comment><comment><USER29> Next in the list is Music Labels. Go Digital Companies.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if there could be a model where an author releases a "beta" version of their book at a cheaper price and then "fixes" suggested by readers are then released for free to those who bought the original. A kind of group editing. A later version 1 could be released at a higher price for those who don't want to deal with errors.

<comment><USER31> _I wonder if there could be a model where an author releases a "beta" version of their book at a cheaper price and then "fixes" suggested by readers are then released for free to those who bought the original. A kind of group editing._

These days, a lot of writers write alpha versions as blog posts. Commenters and other bloggers provide suggestions of fixes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think publishers will still have a lot of strength in niche areas/specialization, areas in which Amazon can't effectively scale. That is, unless it starts recruiting editorial staff or begins partnering with smaller publishers in those areas.

</comment><comment><USER33> Amazon is an old-fashioned monopolist. When dealing with these beasts they are your friend until it is more profitable for them not to be.

JK Rowling does not require Amazon but Amazon will never produce another JK Rowling because they will not do the marketing and groundwork necessary.

Authors are investing in their future when choosing commercial partners. By partnering with Amazon they could be putting all their eggs in one basket, this is not necessarily a bad thing to do but it does require that you watch that basket very carefully.

<comment><USER34> _Amazon will never produce another JK Rowling_

Yes they can. They don't need a widely popular children book about magic and wizards that gets lots of children excited. All they need are loads of books to sell that people want to buy.

Will Amazon shut down their eBook business if JK Rowling doesn't sign up? No. That should tell you how much Amazon need JK Rowling.

<comment><USER35> It's EASIER for Amazon produce a JK Rowling.

You sign up 10-100-1000 childrens writers, it costs you almost nothing. Then if one of them starts to get any traction through reviews, blogs, slashdotting etc you can very quickly and easily promote the hell out of them by simply putting them on the front page of Amazon.com or pushing suggested books at your customers.

Compare that to traditional publisher - it has to pick one author and spend a lot of time and money sending them on signing tours, book shop promotions, getting reviews in the NYT. So they have to spend 90% of it's money on the existing big names to be sure of a return.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Marc's on the game

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> Hello, obvious future!

</comment><comment><USER38> They're using their platform to get into publishing, not making the industry obsolete as the title (and the article) imply.

<comment><USER39> Traditional publishing is the scurviest thing you'll ever meet in a lifetime. Basically, in traditional publishing you do:

The writing. The editing. The marketing.

...and they pick up 98 percent of the profits, if any. With self-publishing (not just amazon) typically over 50 percent off the bottom goes to the author. This is an absolute necessary change to the industry. It will result in 2 or 3 fewer JK Rowlings, but 100s of thousands fewer outrages.

<comment><USER40> It's not exactly 98% of the profits; but, it still seems egregious.

From what I've noticed, royalties are generally about 10% of gross against advances (if any), or $1 on a $10 soft-cover. The publisher spends money on the acquisition, editing, printing, and distribution; in brick-and-morter land, this isn't cheap. Remember that the store needs to make a couple of bucks, too.

Additionally, major retailers include a buyback clause—if the book doesn't sell, the retailer can sell up to something like 15% of the initial purchase order back to the publisher. The publisher often forwards your share of that burden into your royalty payment schedule.

Though, ultimately, while authors might get screwed financially in a lot of ways, publishing does, as a consumer, keep a lot of crap out of your purchasing decisions. Publishers (on the whole) do provide a lot of value to you: are you going to buy _Gruen's AWESOME guide to Ruby_ or _The Ruby Programming Language_ from O'Reilly Publishing with its venerable woodcut cover treatment?

If you're trying to get your work out there (which is why people write in the first place) you're probably willing to take the traditional publishing deal.

<comment><USER41> The annoying thing about being charged for returns is that you have no control over how many are ordered. When my book Ruby in Practice went to stores, I felt like there were FAR too many copies going out. Lo and behold, tons of them came back and now I'm eternally on the hook for the cost of those even though I had zero input into how many were actually produced and distributed.

Publishers are helpful, but the game is inextricably rigged in their favor, which sucks.

<comment><USER40> Author contracts are the worst. Agents can help, but unless you're at scale, their cost/benefit is a wash.

We should compare notes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Who is the --AA of the publishing industry, obviously they have far few legal protections for their schemes.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about our Cloud CMS? - <AUTHOR> Hey Guys,
I'm Joseph Benguira, Founder & CTO of AppDrag, we have created a Cloud CMS hosted on AWS. It's a web developement platform made for professionals (Designers, Developers, web agencies, ...)
We would love to get some feedback, suggestions, remarks to improve our Cloud CMS.
You can check it here:
https://appdrag.com
Thank you for your time and valuable feedback :) <comment><USER2> The 'Show HN' is mostly for asking for feedback on a product, e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931558)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, i will repost with "Show HN"</comment></comment>


A Look at Embedded WiFi Development Boards - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fusiondigital.io/the-internet-of-things-a-look-at-embedded-wifi-development-boards-7abee1311711?source=your-stories

<comment><USER2> One thing that this article kind of glosses over is that there are a _ton_ of different form factors for the ESP8266 (ESP-01 is the original, also the ESP-03, -07 and -12 are common).

Most of them are rather inconvenient to work with directly though, not least because they aren't breadboard friendly. There are a bunch of breakouts made though that help this and integrate a voltage regulator, power jack, pin breakouts etc. The NodeMCU dev board mentioned is one- Adafruit, Olimex, Sparkfun and RaysHobby also make them and they are much easier to use for hobby projects. I've had to use an ESP-12 directly for a project before due to space constraints and it was a hassle.

<comment><USER3> Three pieces of wire makes a harness that removed the hassle and takes 2 minutes to crimp.

<comment><USER2> I'm curious, what exactly do you mean? Are you talking about wiring the pull- up's for an ESP-01? I was more thinking the SMD form factor packages like the ESP-07, which expose a bunch more pins but in a 2mm pitch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > [Philips Hue Bulb] A $50 light bulb that requires a $60 base station, > proving my point entirely

I'm not sure what this has to do with the article. Philips Hue uses ZigBee Light Link, not WiFi, and I'm pretty sure the steep price tag has nothing to do with hardware costs.

As for WiFi, it is exciting to see hardware like ESP8266 open up previously cost-prohibitive possibilities for hackers. My biggest complaint about using WiFi for IoT-related projects is the fact that every marketable WiFi-enabled device has it's own (often cumbersome) association/inclusion process. Perhaps that's a feature - enabling more options for wireless network security, but when it comes to user experience, the standard bluetooth pairing process makes WiFi association feel like pulling teeth for the average consumer. Maybe we just need a good WPS replacement.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was mistaken on the ZigBee, thanks for the correction. I will also agree that the setup is a pain in the butt for most of these things. I think that's why the Chromecast's and Dash's ultrasonic methods are interesting. Perhaps a low cost NFC one touch setup would be really cool, but any method I think of requires an extra app. But maybe that's not a bad thing?

<comment><USER5> What is the provisioning process (aka pairing) like for the ESP8266? Can it be modified?

<comment><USER6> Depends on the firmware. At least one starts up initially as an access point. You connect to it, hit a web page, enter your network credential, reboot and it's online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > While controlling the ESP8266 is great, the raw chip itself lacks an analog > to digical [sic] converter (ADC)

The ESP-12 and a few other models have an ADC integrated.

> and only a few I/O pins.

Again, with 9 GPIO pins on the ESP-12 (and various numbers in between on other models), I wonder how many are required to qualify as more than a few.

> [Philips Hue Bulb] A $50 light bulb that requires a $60 base station, > proving my point entirely

As another poster mentions, Philips Hue uses ZigBee Light Link, not WiFi. All around, a sloppy blog post, but slick web page.

<comment><USER2> They all have an ADC, it's part of the chip. It's just not broken out on all of them. It's also not that great, 10bit resolution is so-so and it only works for signals between 0 and 1V. This means you can't easily use for instance the awesome TMP36 temperature sensors with it. I mean you can, but you need something like a voltage divider (which adds error) and you need to recalculate the voltage to temperature conversion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Look at Digistump Oak[0].

It's still in pre-order but the company has delivered many products at this point, and it's expected soon this year.

[0] [http://digistump.com/products/145](http://digistump.com/products/145)

<comment><USER9> Yea, the Oak is probably the one that I'm the most excited about. I also backed one of Digistump's earlier kickstarters and was very pleased with both the hardware and the support.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I've bought a few of their digispark chips. They're $8 and work great. This one's faster, has more storage, a few more bells and whistles, plus WiFi for $2 more. I can't not buy some.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm concerned about the TCP stacks on these boards. Near as I can tell, they're all built into the chips and no source code is available. Is my impression correct?

<comment><USER11> Yeah, they're pretty much black boxes. You are literally talking to them like you used to work with modems. "AT+" commands and all of that.

<comment><USER12> You can program the ESP8266 yourself. For its TCP stack it uses lwip which you can also compile yourself. The 802.11 stack is more of a black box though, but not necessarily the TCP stack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What are the power requirements of WiFi gadgets compared to other wireless tech? I was under the impression that WiFi wasn't a good choice for embedded because it's so power hungry that it can't be powered for extended time on batteries? There aren't many places where I want tiny wireless things where I also have access to AC power. That's basically limited to sockets/switches.

<comment><USER9> I believe the peak consumption of the ESP8266 can hit 300-400mA when transmitting, so yea that will kill a small battery pretty quickly for a chatty app.

OTOH, if you can keep the device powered down most of the time and just wake up to fetch/report data occasionally, you should be able to get several months of life on battery.

[edit] Adafruit says theirs peaks at 250mA, but that's still in the same ballpark. [http://www.adafruit.com/product/2471](http://www.adafruit.com/product/2471)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can do worse than defaulting to the ESP8266. Very cheap, good tool chain available, simple component infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER14> Awesome to see this, I've had several of these nRF24L01's (ESP8266's) for a while with Arduino Micro's and some solid state relays to create my own automated light switching system. I also managed to create a digital AC dimmer for about £10 :) Phone -> Controller Dimmer -> Winning

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're interested in a NodeMCU board, I'd recommend this one: [http://www.electrodragon.com/product/nodemcu-lua- amica-r2-es...](http://www.electrodragon.com/product/nodemcu-lua- amica-r2-esp8266-wifi-board/)

<comment><USER2> The ones RaysHobby makes are pretty awesome too. They come with an RGB LED and LIPO power jack on board, plus they have the connector for an external antenna. Bit more expensive though ($16). He ships them with NodeMCU pre- flashed and the schematics are all open source.

[http://rayshobby.net/cart/esp8266/esptoy](http://rayshobby.net/cart/esp8266/esptoy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's the situation like for HTTPS in the embedded world?

<comment><USER12> No big deal, you can make it work. axTLS is a pretty lightweight TLS implementation that you could strap to your TCP framework and make it work fine. It's also BSD-licensed so you can put it in proprietary stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> i totally love the esp201. its very convenient to work with in eclipse/code blocks and can run C and C++. the documentation is a bit sparse though but thats mostly no problem as theres a great community behind it.

But the biggest point for me is the size + the price. Why would one use a Raspi or Arduino to read out some moisture-meter if it can be done with a 3 dollar hardware piece the size of a fingernail?

<comment><USER17> > Why would one use a Raspi or Arduino to read out some moisture-meter if it > can be done with a 3 dollar hardware piece the size of a fingernail?

The article states that it lacks analog input, so that might be a good reason.

<comment><USER18> The article is wrong (at least partially!) - the module they used (the ESP-01) only has a limited number of pins brought out, but the chip itself has a 10 bit ADC on board and there are plenty of modules that bring out the pins. I've been using lots of ESP-12 modules and they're great

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice summary.

I recently picked up an ESP8266 for a project, but yet to start farting around with it. Excited to find some spare time.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just recieved today a cactus micro rev.2 . Arduino+wifi+recognized as mouse/keyboard.

Pretty crazy little board.</comment>


Show HN: Fixture – Build beautiful websites that run on your own AWS account - <AUTHOR> https://fixture.app <comment><AUTHOR> Fixture is a full featured website builder that allows you to create websites using your own AWS bucket. Fixture features an easy-to-use UI, support for multiple sites, and robust e-commerce support. The websites built with Fixture are fast and serverless. Read more about why Fixture is different from other website builders here: [https://fixture.app/page/welcome.html](https://fixture.app/page/welcome.html)

Thanks for taking a look. Let me know if you have any questions. - Matt</comment>


JEP 220: Modular Run-Time Images - <AUTHOR> http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/220

<comment><AUTHOR> And here's an e-mail sent by Mark Reinhold stating: "The JAR format has run its course. It's time to move on."

[http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jigsaw- dev/2014-Octob...](http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jigsaw- dev/2014-October/003863.html)</comment>


Google is the new Yahoo - <AUTHOR> https://elgan.com/blog/google-is-the-new-yahoo <comment><USER2> >Personally, I've spent thousands of hours lovely crafting publication-quality opinion pieces. This is what I do for a living, and I gave my time and labor over to Google+ for free.

> Now, Google is going to flush all my work down the toilet.

This is hyperbolic. Unless I'm misunderstanding, the thing this person does is write words and words are easily transported to some other publishing platform.

<comment><USER3> Publishing words also involves a bit of typesetting; not much, but _some_. It may need to be re-done on a new platform.

Exporting a large body of work is not trivial if you don't know how to do it programatically. Heck, even a blog migration from Blogger to Wordpress isn't flawless, for me it failed to import comments correctly so I lost those.

So, while I agree with your overall sentiment, I can't avoid feeling a bit of pain on behalf of the authors that need to move their work now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google is not Yahoo. It never was. It's like a mad scientist, trying a lot of different things and then shutting them down if they don't work.

But I agree, Google+ sucked. Also, if you are content creator, you really should post on your own website first, and then republish the content on sites like Medium, Google+ etc.

<comment><USER5> Why would you want to republish on medium & Co. if you have your own website?

<comment><USER6> That is a discipline called content syndication, in which one as an author publishes the majority or the total piece of text into other places with the objective of reaching new public.

The easiest task is syndicate over other platforms like medium were you can find more people instead of just waiting to people to arrive via google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google is leading in artificial intelligence, self driving cars, nsa wiretapping, and has ambitious investments in a variety of companies through GV.

It's not Yahoo. It's not even close.

JP Morgan Chase seems more like Yahoo. Trying to buy their way out of becoming obsolete as their industry transforms.

</comment><comment><USER8> There are tons of things to complain about Google, but bashing a company just because they close some of their services is rather lame in my opinion. Companies innovate, and it is good to recognize you fail bringing significant value to the market, close what does not work and move on to the next. Staying relevant is difficult enough.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems kind of hyperbolic, I very much doubt Google doesn't innovate anymore. Just Kubernetes kills that argument.

Hell, killing off apps is certainly much more about innovation that otherwise. Why would you think that supporting legacy apps means innovation? They can certainly handle it better, but Google tends to be pretty aggressive in how it develops software.

</comment><comment><USER10> Catchy headline, sure, but the article is just complaints about Google killing its own products. Frankly, almost all of those products are things I wasn't interested in, anyway.

Google does so many other interesting, aggressive things that I think the comparison falls flat beyond that first, shallow point.

I appreciate pruning away mediocre products.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Google told us Google+ was the future of Google. So we jumped in and > engaged.

We did?

</comment><comment><USER12> Hyperbolic argument.

If you only posted content to Google+ you placed all of your eggs in a single basket.

Being successful in innovation is admitting when things are not taking off and letting products die, no matter how big they are.

Without having the numbers, really hard to justify any argument here.

Unfortunate because I'd be interested in that type of article because it differs so much from how I see it.

</comment><comment><USER13> > I recently got rid of my MacBook Pro and bought a high-end Pixelbook. And I > was leaning toward buying a Pixel 3. But now I'm off the fence. I'll be > buying iPhones from now on.

Mobile is the new '90s desktop market</comment>


How to create temperatures below absolute zero  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827893.500-how-to-create-temperatures-below-absolute-zero.html

<comment><USER2> A sensationalist headline (as always, from newscientist), but it's talking about a phenomenon called population inversion, and its relationship to absolute zero is extremely tenuous (and it is certainly not below it).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_inversion></comment>


Ask HN: is there a place for content management on mobile? - <AUTHOR>

While just walking between my lappy and a hair cut that almost ripped my scalp off, i was wondering about the web and mobile apps, how there are numerous CMS systems for easy content management that allow technical and non-technical people to get content on the web, from blogs to simple personal and corporate websites (let's say "mom and dad businesses").
Then i started to wonder if there was a place on the mobile app space for content management. Although i haven't yet exactly been able to almost point my finger on what it means, i was thinking about something along the lines of allowing (easy) content editing (from non-developers) that would be deployed as an mobile app and would be accessible off-line (since it's already possible to get content on the mobile at least through the browser).
Am i making any sense?
EDIT: typo <comment><USER2> Interesting idea - could go well. Having just spent the last couple of weeks building a mobile web app the most obvious think I have noticed is that I have to keep reminding myself that it is a mobile app and not a desktop app. The rules are different and the user expects to interact in a completely different way. That difference could be a business opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing is that websites are different from apps. If "everyones" able to deploy content as an app, it will bloat app market space and the devices. If that content (or whatever) is deployed through a single app, it's basically a browser.</comment></comment>