Internet Explorer is evil - <AUTHOR> http://owened.co.nz/why-internet-explorer-is-truly-evil

<comment><USER2> How is WP8 going to break the web? They have something like 2% of the market, which is hardly a monopoly that can be swing around.

Also, are the IE shenanigans news to anybody? There does seem to be a contingent of fresh-faced webdevs who think Microsoft's reputation for evil is overblown. It wasn't; they certainly did a lot earn it.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately when a website is built with the requirement to support as many people as it can, even 2% will cause things which make incompatibilities to be taken off the table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't Apple make Safari/Webkit non-replaceable in iOS? Sure, we have "Chrome" on iOS but that's just Safari with a different skin..

Ps. I hate IE, and I'm an Apple user.

<comment><USER5> But other browsers can't take advantage of fast Javascript compiler like Safari can, or i'm i wrong? That's almost like Apple forbid all other browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a particular reason for contributing this blog article, rather than just linking to the post itself [1]? It doesn't seem to add anything other than "read this comment".

[1][http://www.reddit.com/r/ragecomics/comments/11c1t1/internet_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/ragecomics/comments/11c1t1/internet_explorer_rfunny_said_i_should_post_it/c6lbhu2)

<comment><USER7> Yes, I would recommend reading the source. There's more info in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why now this article, when IE 9/10 finally works well (from web dev point of view)? Maybe it's just me, i'm not expert in html/css by far, but I must do tweaks for firefox and chrome equally like i do for IE. Or better, i don't do them very much in last year or so, browser standards works in all latest version today.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish I could downvote this "article".

</comment><comment><USER9> Yawn... Comment on reddit fails to mention the part Netscape played in their own downfall... Ultimately MS were proved right, a browser is a core part of the OS

</comment><comment><USER10> Luckily, that ship seems to have sailed.</comment>


We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach - <AUTHOR> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1116/full <comment><USER3> The content distribution problem is capital-s Solved. The reason why publishers are floundering is because their product doesn't add value anymore.

As a group they have slowly been cutting out all the value-adds and buckling down on only one thing: distribution. Distribution is not valuable anymore because distribution _has no marginal cost_. This is classic rent-seeking. Cut your costs so far that your business does nothing, nothing except extract rent out of a pre-existing monopoly. This lasts exactly as long as it takes the market to make a competitor.

How do you win against free? _Be better than free._

<comment><USER4> Be better than free? Exactly on point.

The reason I stopped pirating music wasn't because I thought there was anything wrong with it.

I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services rather than pirate.

Spotify offered something better than free.

It's time for industries that haven't caught up with the times to start rethinking their business model. Opinions on IP aside, piracy is going nowhere and trying to fight the pirates based on ethics is futile.

<comment><USER5> > _I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value > adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services > rather than pirate._

That's good and all, but we can imagine a volunteer-run service that's just as good or better than Spotify -- but it's based on piracy. We could also imagine it reaching the pinnacle or convenience, so nothing else could be added except marginal improvements.

Would that make using it OK -- that there's no other paid alternative that's more convenient?

In the end somebody got to pay the artists both for the production costs and for making a living on top of them. And I don't say every artist deserves money just because they are an artist -- but every artist that people actually listen to they work does deserve a cut for that.

<comment><USER6> Whether it's OK is the wrong question. The right question is what people do, which is largely unrelated.

You can talk about how artists need to be paid until the end of time, but that won't change people's behavior much.

<comment><USER7> It might when creators stop creating - which, arguably, is already happening.

There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for music than the 60s to 90s.

Of course, this assumes consumers and content distributors can join the dots - and so far there isn't much evidence they can.

<comment><USER8> > _It might when creators stop creating - which, arguably, is already > happening._

This is ok, perhaps even desirable. Ultimately, the market for music is already so oversaturated that more artists aren't really "needed" (that is to say, there is much more than enough music to service demand, not that more good art isn't valuable), and most non-elite artists would welcome reduced competition.

> _There aren 't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade > for music than the 60s to 90s._

Well either way that is a totally subjective argument that cannot ever be concluded definitively, there is _so_ much more music produced today than in the 60s-90s that it'd be impossible to even make a fair _subjective_ judgement regarding which decades produced "better" music. Certainly, I think everyone can agree that stronger economic incentives do not necessarily mean better work is produced and there are those who suggest that the opposite is true.

<comment><USER9> Stronger economic incentives may actually result in more bands/ artists being manufactured by labels, which generally produced worse music.

Costs of prediction are pretty low now, everything except the cheapest indy albums sounds great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The repeated use of the word "pirate" here is absurd. From a moral standpoint, the argument against piracy is that it deprives _creators_ of their livelihood. In scientific publishing, creators (and even reviewers!) are not compensated by publishers, and "piracy" actually helps their careers (this is why scientists are, in general, so strongly in favor of Sci-hub). But by abusing emotionally laden language and false comparisons with the music industry, the author hopes to win sympathy for an industry that, honestly, needs to radically change or die.

<comment><USER11> A few years ago, I wanted to switch my CS specialty from computer vision to bioinformatics and biology simulation. I have always been intrested in optimization, often wrote GPU code, found biology much more rewarding than augmented reality.

A good researcher in the field was generous enough to guide me through the process and gave me a list of basic and also cutting edge articles that I should understand to be useful in the field. Coming from CS, I expected the literature to be basically free to download from researchers webpages. Boy was I wrong.

The guy sent me a few copies, I was at the time also working close to a uni so I leeched a few from their library access, but this was a new field for me: every article rests on well-known conclusions explained in another article so I needed a ton of references, each bringing other references. Exactly like when you start reading an article in wikipedia on a subject you don't know.

At one point I just felt ashamed of asking articles after articles and my library (that was not specialized in biology) only had half the articles I needed. I considered paying for them, but I needed probably at least 200 references and each was in 30 dollars range.

I quit. I am still doing computer vision. I was ready to earn less to do research in a critical field for society, but I abandoned mostly because of this stupid barrier, that said that not only should I be ready to earn less, but also pay a huge rent to people I know to be parasites in order to be allowed to help research.

Fuck that.

<comment><USER12> Was this before Sci-Hub existed?

<comment><USER11> Yes. There was a newsgroup (or already a subreddit?) where people asked for articles and got answered with copies but these were usually students or researchers stuck by a specific article they could not get. Not someone like me who would have to ask 20 references at a time.

<comment><USER13> Well, that suggests that now is a good time to at least explore things again. Bioarxiv also exists now

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sci-hub has been a total game changer. Plug in a DOI, get a paper. No accounts/tracking, no payment, no looking up the journal and their access model. Just research. The simplicity of use and ease of access is unparalleled.

I'm not a working scientist - I have no paid-for University access to a variety of journals or other such connections, nor do I know the intricate details of how research is published. What I do know is that I'm a citizen helping to fund much of this work, and access to primary literature is critically important to make informed decisions about our future. The academics are paid a salary to produce findings, not to sell individual copies (unlike the music industry comparisons). While I'm willing to pay something, I can't be expected to pay the huge costs to access individual papers that are demanded today. Open access journals like PLOS are fantastic, but it's an unfortunate reality that much of the quality research is published on platforms that charge $30 for a paper. Until this changes, sci-hub is my answer.

<comment><USER15> It costs some money to get a DOI. Publishers can still be content aggregators and indexers, or curators. Sci-hub is merely an archive.

<comment><USER16> Paying $30 to merely look at a paper that may or may not be valuable is ridiculous no matter how you slice it.

<comment><USER17> You aren't meant to pay the $30, you're meant to be inside the firewall at an institution.

<comment><USER18> And that excludes 99% of taxpayers.

<comment><USER17> Correct, but I think people are getting hung up on the price and rent-seeking aspect. The price is a farce. Really, what's happening is the restriction of knowledge to the ivory towers (and their VPNs).

<comment><USER19> But why is the price a farce? Why not make it some nominal amount? Universities will still buy subscriptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If anyone is confused like I was:

"Gold open access": publish paper in a publicly accessible academic journal.

"Green open access": self-publish. For instance, throw it on a website, and allow it to be indexed.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> """ In _gold_ open access, you write a paper and pay a big company lots of money to give it away for free. For some reason this isn't catching on.

In _green_ open access, you publish your paper with a big company. They charge people to read it – but you make another version available for free. This has not caught on except in math and physics.

In _diamond_ open access, you publish your paper with a journal that's free for you and free for the people who read it. This has also not caught on, because most "prestigious" journals – the ones you need to publish in to get a job – are run by companies who don't do stuff for free.

In _black_ open access, people illegally download millions of papers and books from big companies and make them available to everyone for free. This is working great. """ \- John Baez post on google-plus.

<comment><USER21> It's a great post.

[https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999/posts/Wto5MmfCP9o](https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999/posts/Wto5MmfCP9o)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's not that complicated. The author seems to think that academic journals were somehow high-quality products that were co-opted by privacy. The music industry also, once upon a time, thought that offering disks in record stores was a high-quality offering.

Music pirates forced the music industry to realize that they were charging too much for user-hostile formats. Publishing pirates ought to force the publishing industry to realize that they are charging too much for user- hostile formats, too.

The music industry started to win back market-share from pirates when they understood that they had to compete with pirate offerings and offer a better, higher-quality product. The results were iTunes, then Spotify and similar competitors (Google Music etc.). The publishing industry ought to be no exception.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure the academic publishing industry is going to get what little goodwill the music industry has. With iTunes and so on, there's at least the idea that some small fraction of the money spent is going back to the artists.

That doesn't seem to be the case with academic publishing, where you have these purely rent-seeking corporations. Why would I want to give Elsevier my money, when the authors of the paper don't get any of it?

That's the problem academic publishing has, making it hard to recognize sci- hub as illegitimate.

(One of my happiest academic publishing experiences was when I wrote a paper while working for the US government, which meant there was no copyright for the publisher to insist on stealing from me.)

<comment><USER24> I would prefer to see the reviewers of a paper getting paid than the authors.

I was a founder of a startup in the 80s that was part funded by Elsevier. I spent a fair bit of time discussing the possible impact of computer networks and graphical displays on their business model with their then CTO.

<comment><USER25> Please go on. Your anecdote stopped before any of the interesting parts. Did the then-CTO not see any of this coming, or did he/she just think that they couldn't change anything one way or the other?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In my opinion, at the root of a lot of these problems is the fact that copyright has moved from being something designed to have a very limited duration and then expire, to something that lasts far more than a lifetime.

If copyright still expired in 14 or 28 years, we'd have a rich public domain from which to draw from. Think about all of the "fan fiction" that could be commercialized, or the textbooks which could be freely modified and redistributed by students and the academic community.

Because the public domain has been cheated out of such wealth (in no small part due to lobbying by Disney and other IP-based corporations) it really doesn't surprise me that piracy is so popular.

<comment><USER27> What wealth? We already have plenty of public domain works, and they get bundled 50 to 100 movies in a set for ten dollars. We already have plenty of things you can make fan fiction of an monetize, but very little public domain stuff gets that. There was a spate of this in comics, with people attempting to do that with The Shadow or Green Hornet, or other lapsed properties.

What people really want to do is make money by piggybacking off established brands that spend a lot of money to remain relevant. They don't want public domain in general, they want disney to be stripped of copyright protections so they can milk them dry through parasitical works.

But they don't get that once that happens, the works because worthless precisely because no one is willing to spend more than the bare minimum on something they can't protect. It just winds up on youtube for free; who cares about spending money restoring or advertising for it?

<comment><USER26> You're telling me star wars would have never been made if Lucas only had 28 years of exclusive rights to the franchise? Please.

Here's some public domain characters that have ended up in works that have given a lot of people entertainment: Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Dolittle... that Mickey Mouse and C3PO haven't joined this list is only because of relatively recent extension of copyright terms, which have amounted to a transfer of wealth towards those who didn't need more of it to be artistically creative...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Information economics seem to be playing out exactly as expected. The price of a good is reverting to its cost of production--near $0 for copying bytes. You can't stop the rock.

In Information Rules, Shapiro & Varian argue that if you're selling an information product, all that you can charge for is the value that you add on top of the information, such as convenience, freshness, etc. It's best to assume the information itself is free.

<comment><USER29> > The price of a good is reverting to its cost of production--near $0 for > copying bytes.

That needs the word "marginal" inserted just before the word "cost".

<comment><USER30> Can you explain why?

<comment><USER28> When you're making a new movie, the production of the master copy can cost millions of dollars. Same thing with software products, songs, and digital photos. However, making a digital copy after that is very cheap.

Therefore, it's better to say that the marginal production cost moves towards zero instead of the total production cost, which would include the master copy cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> They get the content for free, they get the editing for free, now that they are digital rather than print, distribution costs almost nothing ... and then they sell back the research to the institutions who created it in the first place.

They're a parasite, and have been for years.

The other awful part is their "bundling" \- only want access to journals X, Y and Z? Tough. You have to buy them in a package that includes bottom of the barrel journals A-W as well, for a huge fee.

<comment><USER32> Two thoughts:

\- Most of the journals I publish in do a considerable amount of layout, and I find this to be a significant value in reading papers.

\- At least one of the academic societies I'm in is essentially financially dependent on the income they make from allowing $Publisher to publish their society journal. My corner of science would be considerably worse off if that was dropped.

<comment><USER31> They are certainly valid points, and the second one especially so, but the current situation can't go on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In cryptography, we've had eprint.iacr.org for a while now and if you want your paper to get noticed, an eprint version will do more for you than a talk at a second-tier conference. Even at first-tier conferences like Crypto, people will sometimes have "eprint 20xx/yyy" on their last slide to encourage people to go and read the paper.

Peer review still has direct value, and peer reviewed publications on your CV have indirect value so the IACR conferences (and possibly Springer/LNCS) aren't going away any time soon. But everyone I know of in the field looks on eprint first when they actually want to read papers.

</comment><comment><USER34> The article and it's original title are about black open access (piracy) winning over green (author-distributed in parallel to journal publication) and gold (journals being paid, per article, to directly provide open access) open access models, not about open access winning over non-open access. Taking "black" out of the title radically changes the meaning.

</comment><comment><USER35> Open access journals have failed in part because they lack the prestige of top tier journals like cell or nature

<comment><USER36> The business model of journals seem to be particularly perverse and artificial. The universities not only have more brand value and credibility but also the resources to publish journals themselves.

It's interesting how the journals managed to get a monopoly on this over 50 years. There seems to little reason for a private entity to be able to inject themselves here and take control of public output.

It's like the public paying for oil exploration with private companies like Exxon Mobil stepping in when it is found to take control and sell the oil. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with capitalism or any ism, it looks like pure theft.

<comment><USER37> > _It 's interesting how the journals managed to get a monopoly on this over > 50 years. There seems to little reason for a private entity to be able to > inject themselves here and take control of public output._

I think it's symbiotic relationship between universities. Universities get together and decide who to pay to distribute their "best" research, in effect creating a prestige/walled garden affect surrounding academic publishing, raising the barrier for non well monied researchers having access to the audience.

If universities decided that they would no longer publish in nature et al., and just put publications on arvix or something, then the monopoly would effectively die, but It's not in their interest to do so since universities will have to compete on mind-share on what papers attract the most interest in a field and chip away at the advantages they have today.

Long term though, universities will loose their advantage as it becomes easier to engage and propagate knowledge outside of such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "After all, the pirates have long since been chased out of the music business (Gapper, 2017)."

The pirates were doing the chasing. Without the pirates, we wouldn't have multiple competing services that grant unlimited access to practically every note of commercial recorded music for a very modest amount of money.

If scientific publishing had a Spotify or Apple Music, then there would be no need for a sci-hub. Your move, Wiley.

</comment><comment><USER39> Title, together with the domain, is very misleading. The impression is that Wiley is admitting defeat against open access. Instead, the author (not affiliated with Wiley) regrets that piracy is winning over open access.

</comment><comment><USER40> Are the pursuits of knowledge and profit in conflict?

<comment><USER41> Yes.

They have been for decades.

Thankfully the internet created another door, but we'll see how long that lasts...

<comment><USER42> > Thankfully the internet created another door, but we'll see how long that > lasts...

Can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. The interesting thing about the Internet is that its creators were either unaware, didn't care, or more likely, didn't see as negative (regarding the economic impacts) they were creating something that would eliminate scarcity of information. Everyone else observing either shared that lack of awareness in slowing the train, or was not able to foresee the practical impacts.

Any attempt to put the brakes on now is going to be a net economic loss. Profit-seeking entities have an interest in preserving the internet as-is, even if they make occasional short term decisions counter to that (like abandoning net neutrality).

The handful of industries that profit entirely off of information scarcity will either adjust or go away. They really should spend their money finding new value streams rather than fighting piracy. That's not winnable.

<comment><USER43> And once the publishing, movie and music industries have 'gone away, together with the authors, artist and producers who rely on them for a living, what kind of world will that be?

<comment><USER42> There's a demand for content. Some of the distribution value proposition is in question. I don't think entire industries will disappear, but I do think there will be winners and losers based on who adjusts.

As someone else in this thread said - you gotta be better than free. That's true in many cases. Music is a great example - it's more convenient to buy or subscribe than it is to pirate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I spent over $1,000 one quarter on books because I couldn't buy ANY of my books used as they all had half of the content in one-time online codes. Even worse, the online codes expire every quarter.

<comment><USER45> Complain to your university's administration that the faculty is outsourcing assessment to the textbook company. The access codes are a racket, but they are a _convenient_ racket, because the university doesn't have to hire extra faculty or assistants for grading tests and running tutorials, teaching faculty is seriously overburdened.

It's really bad and has gotten worse in the last 20 years. This is a standard text for advanced undergraduate organic chemistry: [https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0387683461](https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0387683461)

USD 35 on Amazon plus another USD 35 for its sister volume, good for all Orgo courses that an undergraduate might choose to take. A new edition would come out every 8 - 10 years. Solid. Good addition to the personal library when working in the field. Over 2500 pages altogether. Whoever says that isn't a fair deal is lying.

This is the slim-down-rip-off introductory textbook edition: [https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0073402745/](https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0073402745/)

USD 268, but you get an access code. And a new edition seemingly every other year, as if the content in introductory courses changed that fast. It's a useless piece of dead tree, never to be looked at again once the course is over.

It's the students' turn to revolt. The situation has been intolerable for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Journals and publishers should start focusing on creating value out of their community: the authors and readers they've attracted.

[http://hypothes.is/](http://hypothes.is/) is a nonprofit that makes annotation tech that some are using to publish peer-reviews, not just the article. I think that's pretty cool. Give the content away for free (you have to/should), but focus on having the best community around it.

</comment><comment><USER47> The topic of academic journals comes up repeatedly on HN (which is great) and is inevitably filled with an echo chamber of people saying that publishers add zero value, produce a literally worthless product, and they should all be put out of business. I've grown tired of the hyperbole, but sometimes (like now) I try to add a bit of perspective from within the industry. FWIW I serve on the board of SAGE, which is an independent but relatively large academic publisher.

Publishing articles has real costs. This is not about hosting PDFs, it's about everything that goes into editorial curation, managing peer review, marketing a journal to build a brand, copy editing/formatting, and then yes, finally at the end of the day hosting a PDF. Those tasks do indeed have costs. They range from anywhere from something on the order of $500 - $5,000 per published article. Nobody is publishing at scale for cheaper than that. The argument that it should only cost something like $30 to publish an article is a complete fantasy. So if you want to argue about the value add and that all publishers do is sit around collecting rent for doing nothing, you have to check your hyperbole and come to the debate with reasoned arguments about the realistic costs of performing the very real tasks that are performed.

There has never been a better time to try to be an academic publisher for cheaper than the incumbents. The tech infrastructure is there, clearly the PR and anti-publisher sentiment is on your side. So why aren't there millions of publishers springing up to publish articles for $30 a pop (or even better - free!)? It's because it's not possible to do the job that's required for free or for that low a price. But there are literally no technical barriers to someone trying. Come up with a complete alternative to the journal system for publishing research, or figure out how to magically do it for free. There's nothing technical in your way, but there are still major hurdles. You'll find that doing the job a publisher does in fact involve work. You can deride that work all you want, but you cannot deny that publisher do indeed spend the money to do that work. So if you think that work is truly worthless you should launch a competitor that doesn't do any work at all.

But the biggest barrier to radical changes in business model is all cultural. Academics are slow to change, and you cannot underestimate the importance of reputation. So any competing product has to address the cultural role that journals play (working as proxy for quality measurement and assessing academic job applicants). So yes, you can put PDFs online for basically free. That's not the job of journals. To replace journals you have to solve the content curation and bestowing of prestige issues in some other way. There are loads of people trying (or startups that have died trying), and so far nothing has done much to dislodge the journal (and particularly Impact Factor) as the sole arbiter of academic quality. It's a heroic task to try to tackle, because largely I think the world would be a better place if there was some real disruption in how academics judge other academics.

Now onto Gold OA. From my perspective Gold OA, which means the author funds the publication of the article, typically through baking it into the research funding grant, is making HUGE progress. Gold OA publishing is one of the fastest growing segments (both by revenue and number of articles published) for all major publishers — at least in STM fields. In fields where there isn't readily accessible grant money (the humanities and social sciences) there isn't nearly as much progress on Gold OA (and the path forward isn't clear either). But Gold OA is so mainstream now that I can imagine it gobbling up the entirety of STM publishing in 10-20 years (god I hope before that, but this industry moves slow).

I'm happy to talk more about academic publishing from the counter perspective to most people here, although a lot of these discussions can be more productive outside of the HN forum. Feel free to email me (details in profile).

<comment><USER48> Would you care to give a some sort of breakdown on how publishing one article costs even $500, let alone $5000? I have tried to ask this from publishers I've published with, but never get any real answers. Also, the obscene profit margins reek of rent-seeking.

Authors, reviewers and mostly editors don't get paid. The "services" that the publishers provide are mostly some outsourced minimum-paid clerk complaining how some technical detail doesn't match some arbitrary rules arising from an arcane system.

Before such breakdown is given, I keep on thinking you are leeching the work of scientists and taxpayers and making the world a worse place.

<comment><USER47> It's mostly people costs. There's also royalties to societies (the basic deal is academic societies own a lot of journals and license them to publishers for a royalty on sales). And there's tech/infrastructure costs for the systems to manage the manuscript workflow (and yes, for hosting the journal websites and serving PDFs). And even in this modern age some journals (most still maybe?) have some print component with costs. You can argue that's ridiculous (as I do) but parts of the academic library market is still in love with print for some reason.

But if you're trying to understand the real cost drivers it all comes back to the people involved. You're totally right in that peer reviewers are almost never paid (there are a few exceptions to this, like eLife). And often editorial boards of journals are not paid. Although there are also a significant amount of paid editors as well, either stipends provided to academics or in house editors. The internal staff manages the peer review process, which includes everything from finding reviewers to hounding reviewers to complete reviews, etc. That peer review management gets done by a combo of unpaid editors and paid editors.

So then there's society journals. More and more society journals have been scooped up by the major publishers, and the academic societies rely on the journal royalty to function. Now, you could argue (as I would) that academic societies should figure out ways to survive without journal subscription revenue royalties being an integral part of their finances (ie run conferences, purely via membership fees, etc) but the current reality is that a huge number of academic societies rely on the journal royalty to stay afloat.

Then there's marketing. A journal lives or dies by its reputation, and building a journal up requires a significant marketing effort to establish a journal to drive submissions. For new OA journals that marketing spend works very differently, and in fact requires a lot more spend on a consistent basis. OA journals live and die by steady submission flow (since the only revenue ever comes from accepted papers), and so you have to market the journal constantly to ensure you drive submissions.

There are also people employed that aren't direct costs to production but are responsible for new product ideas (R&D), and all the kinds of folks that are required to run a large organization, like HR, people in acquisitions trying to grow the business, people in sales, legal, etc etc.

I understand the visceral reaction against publishers. I have the same reaction to the subscription business model to be honest. My preference would be that the service publishers provide gets treated more like what it is - <USER2> service to academics who choose to use it - and gets charged accordingly. That's actually exactly what's happening with the move to Gold OA, where authors pay for the service of publishing. IMO that's actually working pretty well in STM, even though there's a long way to go. But unfortunately the non STM fields in the humanities and social sciences are having a lot of trouble in a transition like that. There are two main problems: in HSS there aren't tons of grants that academics can use to fund publication fees, and there's a huge, longstanding cultural assumption that publication should be free to academics, so it's hard to convince people that the publishing service should be bought (for any price). There are other people trying to solve this in different ways, like the Open Library of Humanities, but nothing has had significant success yet.

You can argue with profit levels (although I do think it's funny how much people are against profit in certain businesses and have no problem with profit in others, ie large tech cos). But what I object to is saying that publishers don't provide a valuable service. The use of terms like leech and rent-seeking imply a monopoly position and no value add whatsoever. First, nobody (even Elsevier) has a monopoly. There are 4-5 big publishers (Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, SAGE) and then a huge number of smaller players (some of whom are substantial and highly influential, like Oxford University Press and Cambridge). So at best you can make the argument it's an oligopoly (although one that has about 2,000 total players).

<comment><USER48> Sorry, but I don't accept this as a breakdown. Surely as a board member you must know an approximate dollar amount/labor time going to different direct production phases per article published (or submitted). Eg, how much time it takes for the staff to manage the editors, check the manuscripts and lay them out.

The other stuff sounds like overhead, so feel free to lump it as a single figure.

PS. I'm not a fan of (obscene) profits in any industry. Even if one believes in capitalism, the usual basic tenet is that no company's, let alone industry's, profits should be able to consistently surpass the interest rate if the market is working.

I find it sort of ridiculous when publishers throw figures like $1000 a piece as a reasonable APC. That's over two weeks of research stipend in Finland at least. If it takes anywhere near two workweeks to process an article and handle the overhead, you guys really suck at what you do.

<comment><USER47> And yet nobody in the industry is doing the work for cheaper at scale. And the noble non-profit players like PLOS aren't able to do it cheaper either. So yes, you can take the stand that literally every single player in the industry really sucks at what we do, from the large commercial publishers all the way to the non-profits. Or you could acknowledge the alternate hypothesis, which is that it might simply cost that much to deliver the services performed.

<comment><USER48> PLOS's prices are ridiculous as well, and their surplus is quite staggering.

There are players like peerj that publish at the fraction of the price. Also many smaller non-profit journals have APCs in tye range of tens of dollars.

But whatever makes you sleep at night.

Edit: Also, no breakdown given, as expected.

<comment><USER47> PeerJ's APC pricing is $1,095. We're actually an investor in PeerJ and are really hoping they're a success. But they're not a counter-point to PLOS-level APCs (they are indeed still cheaper, but not substantially anymore).

And yes, there are examples of small-scale journals charging less, or society journals charging less/free because it's paid for by the society membership fees. There's Tim Gowers' arXiv overlay journal. There's a bunch of small- scale examples or anecdotes. But none of those are repeatable at the scale the academic community needs.

You're right, I didn't give you the financial breakdown of our operating costs that you wanted. First of all, I don't actually know the per-published-article costs and breakdown off the top of my head. And second, I wouldn't post that information publicly here. I guess that means you'll continue to think that we don't do any work and collect vast sums of money, sitting in dark rooms laughing about how we get to fuck everyone over. You clearly think every single player in the industry is doing it wrong. I'm not going to change your mind.

<comment><USER48> Ah, PeerJ did the bait and switch too. Thanks for the heads up.

And yes, that's what I'll keep on thinking. I wouldn't be much of a scientist if I'd take an industry shill's claim at face value, 'cuz secrets and all.

And I don't think you're very different from other corporate leeches. Probably the investors take the biggest cut of in the racket, but I'm quite certain many of the minions get compensated quite well too. Plenty of those in the academia as well.

<comment><USER47> You can call it bait and switch, but the reality is simple and not nearly as nefarious, it's just about trying to find a sustainable business model. It's either that or go out of business. There's no grand cabal running a conspiracy that forces players like PLOS and PeerJ to raise their prices. They're just trying to stay alive, and they price their product to do so, just like literally every other corporation in the world.

<comment><USER48> "Staying alive" meaning paying those yachts? If PLOS pays out hundreds of thousands to its execs, I can only imagine the gluttony going on in the for- profit scams. And they have to make those rich investors richer for being rich on top of it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > After all, the pirates have long since been chased out of the music business > (Gapper, 2017).

Did somebody tell the pirates?

<comment><USER3> That quote is plain wrong. The pirates weren't chased out of the music business. While they have declined, they still exist (like you said).

Why have they declined? Because free was _out-competed by paid options_. Spotify/Netflix/iTunes etc is a better experience than free, where the value of the experience is greater to the user than its cost.

If publishers want to come out of this alive, they have to start providing more value than some dude running a server out of their basement could.

</comment></comment><comment> Chiba-City Getting any technical books even for money before Borders and now Amazon arrived was almost impossible. I used to go to DC's Library of Congress to get papers on garbage collection. Publishers freaked out over Xerox machines during the 80's. Financial windfall incentives were never good reasons to study or design. Broke lesser universities mostly funnel noise into our pools of research. Silly entertainment fictions and games are more valuable in dollars. Information asymmetries on taxpayer subsidized research was both unjust and leveraged for cascading abuses. Non-monetizable riches are the HIGH CLASS problems our civilization needs. We can solve that "problem" forever.

</comment><comment><USER50> Open Access will always win, the question is how to take content to the next level. For example providing free open access to content is the product Google, Yahoo, FaceBook offer. The real question is how to take content, music, novels, academic papers, etc. into the value chain.

Artists will always produce inspiring things, they get paid however only when that inspiration creates value, so the question is how to measure that value and return to the creator of value. This seems simple enough – measure, gather, settle, return. For example, our system of transportation paid for by the community of interest – yet it returns value in the form of supporting a supply chain. Indirect, but successful.

</comment><comment><USER51> There are a lot of faulty, manipulated or statistically underpowered studies out there. Some are doing real damage and the only way to stop it is to look at the details and discredit them.

Worse there are people out there who specialize in selective quoting and manipulating our understanding of science. Case in point "The plant paradox" book telling everyone that egg yokes reduce cholesterol and citing a paper which said the exact opposite: [https://youtu.be/7NT4q_5dfLs?t=216](https://youtu.be/7NT4q_5dfLs?t=216)

People wielding science have a lot of power - without transparency there is no accountability.

</comment><comment><USER52> Can we not just have the law changed and buy them all out? Like ending slavery.

</comment><comment><USER53> I am very much in favor of open access, but there is one service that these publishers could definitely provide that would definitely be a value-add: replication. I can imagine a prestigious journal or publisher using the money they've collected to sponsor studies that replicate results. I need to think more on how this model could work such that piracy doesn't circumvent it, but I think there is definitely a need for more replication studies and prestigious publishers have an incentive to ensure that their studies are replicable.

<comment><USER54> You are hopelessly naive if you think for profit publishers would ever do that.

<comment><USER53> It's not necessarily a concept relegated to the publishers. Just a potential revenue model for replication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Pay to read an article? No, but I'd pay to talk to somebody who understood it, or who could answer questions about it. Is that a viable extra service that the publishers could move into?

</comment><comment><USER56> 1\. Go to the library of a public university

2\. Download all the articles you want to a USB stick and print them at work.

3\. Profit!!!

Downvoted? I thought that this was relevant to the whole publisher issue myself. They provide zero incremental value and serve as little more than incremental friction towards accessing their content freely. Notice that step 2 was _not_ upload to scihub.

Peer review, the last thing that they did provide, seems to be undergoing disruption by crowdsourced attempts at replicating results.

<comment><USER57> 1\. You usually need to be a student or staff member to be able to do that.

2\. Few universities have access to all journals - it's too expensive.

<comment><USER56> Not at state university campuses. I do this all the time at UC campuses. In fact I've been doing it for the better part of two decades since I left academia. And if I wanted to pay $60 or so annually, I could even borrow books.

Ironically, I've worked with academia and government labs on two major projects and because I don't have an official academic email address, I can't even get a researchgate account without paying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> While the analogy to musical recording publishers does not fully compare to the scientific publishing in question here, I'd like to point out the similarity to start-up funding, venture capitalism et al: It's quite funny how some will argue against music lables on a site like this. At least the vetting and fostering part _should_ apply to scientific publishing, too.

</comment><comment><USER59> > brought forth a roar of policies and mandates that aim to oblige authors to > change their publishing habits

Right. Blame the authors. Not, say Elsevier, who _demands authors remove their own research from their own sites_ and charges exorbitant prices for access to journals.

> Now, some European countries are trying a new approach: to demand of the > major publishers nationwide open access contracts, such as Projekt DEAL in > Germany

Indeed. Because it's _not the authors who are to blame_.

\- In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to negotiate on any Open Access policy for Dutch universities

\- In December 2016, Nature Publishing Group reported that academics in Germany, Peru and Taiwan are to lose access to Elsevier journals as negotiations had broken down with the publisher

etc etc. etc.

"What I find startling ... [that] 15 years on from the Budapest Open Access Declaration, a pirate site is needed at all." asks the author of the article. Why, indeed.

> Sci-Hub, which is self-reporting more than 60 million articles freely > available (Sci-Hub, 2017) and could have harvested nearly all scholarly > literature (Himmelstein, Romeo, McLaughlin, Greshake, & Greene, 2017) – if > true, Sci-Hub has _single-handedly won the race to make all journal articles > open access_.

So... WHY IS THIS A BAD THING?

> Set against this are the combined efforts of stakeholders in scholarly > communications who, after two decades, have managed only to get around half > the world's research articles open, with the rest still behind a paywall 3–4 > years post-publication

WHY ARE THEY SET AGAINST THIS?

> For books, despite initiatives like Open Access Publishing in European > Networks (OAPEN), Knowledge Unlatched, and Open Book Publishers, progress > has been glacial. At the time of writing, there are just over 8,000 titles > listed in the Directory of Open Access Books > ([http://www.doabooks.org/](http://www.doabooks.org/)), which – considering > that Springer alone offers nearly 280,000 titles from its online bookshop – > suggests that the proportion of books published open access has yet to reach > 2%.

"What I find startling ... [that] 15 years on from the Budapest Open Access Declaration, a pirate site is needed at all." asks the author of the article.

.... and then he goes on blame authors, and only authors.

> On the author side, peer review management, copyediting, and language > services could be offered along with services to promote the publications > and make them more accessible to non-technical audiences.

Peer review is already done mostly for free. Why does he _keep blaming the authors_?

Surprisingly, after spending the entire article vilifying the authors, the author of the article reaches this conclusion: " Critically, only one actor is needed to start this process of unbundling: the publisher. In making a basic, legal version free for anyone to read, gratis open access is achieved at a stroke, and it would start to make the pirates redundant."

 _orly_?

<comment><USER60> Excellent post. I'd add two things (quoting TFA, not you):

> copyediting

In my experience, that's a bad joke. The last paper I had edited by professional Springer editors came out with more errors that I had put in. The process achieved the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

> when allowed, just 13% of authors posted green versions on their > institutional repository, and allowed or not, just over half posted full- > text versions on ResearchGate

Besides the factor mentioned in the article, that universities are bad at communicating their services _to their own employees_ , there is also the fact that these institutional repositories simply suck. They suck because they are a large heap of "not-invented-here", they suck because they are bureaucratic and usability nightmares. But even without all that, and even 20 years into the age of Google, one centralized repository is easier to search and explore than 1000 little ones.

Authors know this, which is why they prefer putting their work literally anywhere else. This is not about aversion to change, it's about aversion to bad systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Does this really matter to people trying to publish and get recognition? I know for a fact that professors, like any author are touched when people discuss their work.

I've never heard of anyone first asking where they got the article from or if they paid for it.. Research is hard enough without worrying about the bean counters.

</comment><comment><USER62> It's simple. Stop selling journals and host conferences instead. People are still willing to pay for conferences even if the papers are published open access. The gatekeeping role played by journals can be replaced by conferences.

</comment><comment><USER63> Love how these parasites appropriate words like "fairness" and define the scope of all possible ethical options within the bounds of whatever business model is profitable for them...

... bah

</comment><comment><USER64> Did anyone actually read to the end before unloading the acerbic comments?

This article is obviously targeted to the people involved in publishing who care only about the profit model part and not of the science part. I presume that's why it reads like a first year essay in some economic degree.

As an occasional consumer of research papers I see nothing wrong of the conclusion in the end:

"I suggest that we might be encouraged by the airline industry and unbundle the product. This would make all content free to read, answering the plea that the results of publicly funded research be available to the public,"

</comment><comment><USER65> The title here and many comments are based on a misunderstanding: the article is not about _open access_ beating closed access, the article is about _piracy_ beating proper open access.

The question is: we've spent so many years trying to make sure published research free to access, trying different models [1] to make it happen, with only very limited success. How come Sci-Hub is taking off so well, and what can we do to free articles from paywalls legally?

[1] [https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access- be-c...](https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be- cf6662565ecd)

</comment><comment><USER66> > We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach

"What do you mean, "we", white man?"

</comment><comment><USER67> The job of the journals is in providing middle-man services for scientists. Everyone loves to hate middle men, but sometimes you can't do without them. The best way to trade equities is on a stock exchange. Similarly, the best way to prove that you're a scientist of the caliber that publishes in Nature or Science is to publish in Nature or Science.

<comment><USER68> The people who accept/reject your paper are mostly volunteers [1], so that service alone doesn't justify the prices.

And if you take a look around this thread, the other services really aren't that much better.

[1] [https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75147/do- peer-r...](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75147/do-peer- reviewers-receive-any-salary/75163#75163)

<comment><USER67> The people who sell or buy my shares of stock don't work for the stock exchange either. That's what makes the exchange a middle man.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> One of my frustrations is that scientific papers decades old are still locked behind a paywall - so while I might voluntarily donate something if I find the content useful - I'm not for example willing to pay 40 dollars to find out if an article that is 60 years old is interesting or useful - but I might pay 1-2 dollars after the fact. I totally get paywalling say.. anything newer than 5 years - I don't get the point of paywalling something 40-50-60 years old.

<comment><USER70> You're not the target market. A person with a corporate credit card is willing to pay that much to read it, in certain industries.

<comment><USER15> Any sane bean counter should be able to work out a way to segment the market, like every subscription service ever, but it would require distributor content control, like DRM or streaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I definitely have issue with the fact that so many papers are behind Paywalls, and I don't really have a problem with SciHub, since I think research should be open, but don't most of the major professional organizations/communities give you a Spotify-like access to papers?

I know my ACM membership, which is ~$200 a year has given me access to a ton of compsci papers. Maybe ACM is the exception on this?

<comment><USER72> Journal access through society membership is like needing a subscription service for every record label. I do a lot of reading about solar power technologies. Relevant articles are published in journals of the IEEE, ACS, IOP, RSC, OSA, APS, AIP... and a bunch of non-society journals too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Fuck yeah. This is fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER74> I'm not sure many people who have commented on this article actually read the entire thing through. I think it was a very insightful article on the vertically integrated business of scientific study that was the issue, and the suggestions as they relate to the airline industry as something that I hadn't seen spelled out in such a detailed manner before.

</comment><comment><USER75> Cody Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free is a good read about this.

[https://archive.org/details/InformationDoesntWantToBeFree](https://archive.org/details/InformationDoesntWantToBeFree)

</comment><comment><USER76> The comparison to the music industry omits that other than music, science tends to be funded by governments.</comment>


Adobe to release critical update tuesday - <AUTHOR> http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2009/10/adobe-to-release-critical-update-on-patch-tuesday/

<comment><USER2> More fun from adobe. They covered their ass this time and said the work around of turning off JS might now fully protect.

</comment><comment><USER3> At least Adobe's getting faster on the fixes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Patch day comes again!</comment>


Apple Content Cache Reverse Engineered - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kendfinger/AppleCache <comment><USER2> The new "Content Caching" option in System Preferences is news to me. Probably a good feature if you have multiple identical iOS devices. I wonder how much sharing there is between different models, or even iPhone vs iPad.

<comment><USER3> Quite a bit. iOS is pretty modular(as are individual apps), but there is a lot of overlap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone explain the use case of this for me?

I read the site, but still don't get the purpose of it (obviously I get the technical challenge).

<comment><USER3> Run a guest network on Wifi? App updates, system updates and iCloud traffic can suck up an inordinate amount of bandwidth. Instead of blocking it if you run content caching you can efficiently serve your users.

Heck if you have more than a handful of Mac's/iOS devices at home even, content cache can make a huge difference, especially when new versions or major updates to OS's are released. It also caches iCloud data so if you use iCloud Drive and/or photos on multiple devices it can also dramatically cut down the amount of traffic between your network and Apple's servers. It's pretty neat and great that Apple moved it from OSX Server into the regular OS (sharing pref pane as noted). This would be better still for sites with large guest networks and not having to have a Mac just to run the content cache.

<comment><USER5> Apple device household, a Mac Mini running just this made a massive difference around OS release times when every app on every device is frantically getting updated as bugs are squashed.

<comment><USER4> That's all it takes is running a mac mini - like just sitting on your network and not personally having to do anything??

Crap - I need to look at this more closely!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome - this will be really popular with service providers that support businesses that have large guest networks.</comment>


Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source newsletter app like Mailchimp - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain <comment><USER2> The value in SAAS email services like MailChimp is not really in the sending infrastructure. It's in the dark arts of keeping your IP's from spam blacklists and ensuring email delivery rates are sufficient. You'll find that any naive attempt at running your own will be very hard to scale.

<comment><USER3> You use Mailtrain to manage your list subscriptions and manage your email blasts. If you want your email to then land in inboxes instead of spam, you can use an emailing service, like MailGun or Amazon SES, to actually send the mail. Instructions for using both are on Mailtrain's wiki.

The problem with MailChimp is that it's very simple and easy to use, and once your list actually gets popular the pricing falls off a cliff. At 2,000 subscribers MailChimp is free; at 3,000 it's $50 a month, and it keeps going up.

There's no monthly fee to send email through Mailgun, and the only thing they charge for is number of emails: you can send 10,000 a month for free, and it's $5 per 10,000 after that. You can also manage mailing lists directly through mailgun, but it doesn't have as polished an interface (and you need to send the actual mailings yourself through the API). So if you want a polished interface, use MailTrain to manage your lists and Mailgun to send the emails.

Amazon SES is even cheaper, and also hooks into Mailtrain. "$0 for the first 62,000 emails sent per month, and $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent thereafter."

MailChimp offers better deliverability than Mailgun and SES, but at a pretty steep cost. If you're a professional company with income, pay the $50+ a month for Mailchimp. If you're doing a list for a sidegig or a hobby, use Mailtrain.

<comment><USER4> That difference in price only gets more pronounced as you scale up.

The cost isn't just in dollars, but in time and hassle. MailChimp will halt your send and wait for a human to review it and your list practices if you hit various undisclosed triggers. Makes sense, but if your emails are time critical and have real revenue riding on them, it's not really workable.

<comment><USER5> The alternative is to use a service that doesn't review suspicious activity, which is going to have significantly worse delivery rates.

<comment><USER4> I think a much more common alternative is to work with a provider who specializes in enterprise customers instead of small retail customers.

I'm happy to sign a long term contract and make guarantees about my list acquisition practices, but I lose money and my readers' trust if I click the Send button and it doesn't send.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It has an interesting license history:

> Versions 1.22.0 and up GPL-V3.0

> Versions 1.21.0 and up: EUPL-1.1

> Versions 1.19.0 and up: MIT

> Up to versions 1.18.0 GPL-V3.0

There's no rationale for the changes in the commit logs nor could I find any related issues. Curious as to what caused this in only a few releases.

edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER7> I really dislike mailchimp. You spend a lot of money every month and get almost no innovation from their product. It seems like there's an opportunity for a new enterprise mail sender to take away mailchimps top customers. Through the mailchimp API the service could review the historical open/click rates and if they show sufficient quality then a one button click could import all of that data. The enterprise mail sender could get there if they were willing to offer a free service for the first six months to build up the algorithmic reputation.

</comment><comment><USER8> We recently moved to Mailtrain for the Citationsy newsletter after hitting 10K users and not having sent a newsletter from MailChimp for a couple months (basically since we hit 2K users, the limit for the free plan). We now use Mailtrain with Amazon SES and it costs less than a dollar to send one issue of the newsletter, as opposed to $250 on MailChimp. I can absolutely see the value in MailChimp, their editor is one of the best and the tools and ease of use are second to none, but the dirty secret is that you can still build your email in MailChimp, and then simply export the HTML and send it with Mailtrain.

<comment><USER9> I am curious whether your stats such as open rate changed after you have migrated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Still no sane installation, still can't use. "Clone this git repo and run this Docker thing" isn't for me. If this was made into a normal system package like a .deb and/or .rpm, I would run this in a heartbeat. Or even if it could be run as a Heroku type buildpack. But this whole process is unnecessary complex.

<comment><USER11> I was actually impressed by the installation instructions. Sometimes opensource projects like this require several specific library installations, compilation, set environment variables etc.

This has two incredibly lightweight installations, a docker build and a node- js install. Both can be installed and removed fairly easily in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have used Mailtrain and it's a simple alternative to Mailchimp (that I also use at work). I want to recommend Sendy, though, that costs around $60 for a one-time license and uses AWS SES for sending out mail. I bought it recently and am quite happy with it. Support indie developers!

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat. Is this your app? The tabs on the top of mailtrain.org seem to want me to log in, which is confusing or possibly broken?

How would you compare it to Sendy and EmailOctopus?

I send a lot of email newsletters and I've always wanted to do this general approach (decouple list management & analytics from SMTP & deliverability) but found existing solutions pretty far from what we'd require.

<comment><USER13> a naive question, what about GNU mailman, yes it does not have the fancy GUI but it gets the job done?

<comment><USER3> Mailman is for discussion lists. Mailtrain is for marketing emails.

Mailman is really good for setting up discussion lists for a group or even a company, and managing all the people in those lists. People can sign up themselves, and can view list archives. You can have announcement lists, but people sign themselves up, and you generally send the announcements from your own email. If you're making mailing lists for a group of people, mailman works great, but Mailtrain is for marketing.

Email marketing software like Mailtrain, or services like Mailchimp, are for sending email blasts for marketing purposes. If you're sending email for marketing, you need to track things like email bounces and unsubscribes, to see how effective your marketing campaigns are. Mailchimp / Mailgun have additional features like report, and click tracking from your emails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Mailtrain certainly works very, very well. I wouldn't go back to a paying service.

And the "deliverability issue" stated as an "advantage" of commercial mailing solution providers is way overblown (fear always works in manipulation), as long as you follow the now very well documented rules for sane emailing practice. It's really not hard at all.

<comment><USER8> Or just uses SES - costs $1 for 10K emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Slight off topic rant:

It's 2018 and we still don't have a better alternative to email? Almost everyone is on Facebook but even if you do follow a page, FB deprioritizes your posts unless you pay. A mobile app gives you the opportunity to send notifications but then people have to install yet another app. Web notifications don't work on iOS.

I guess text messages are better and I haven't received any unwanted messages from the few companies I opt in for notifications.

<comment><USER16> Prior to asking for email alternatives one would probably need to define which features and procedures of current email usage are meant to be replaced.

I am a heavy email user and I am glad that none of the loads of services pitched as email alternatives were successful.

It's a solid tool working great for most people.

<comment><USER15> The signal to noise ratio is too low for email. Spam filters are pretty good these days but they still have false positives and negatives.

The other methods of contact - cell, text, messenging apps, etc are easier to white list people.

I know you can create separate alias emails for each point of contact that are all funneled to one inbox that hopefully remains private but that's still complicated.

I guess I'm looking for an easier way to give out emails that are specific to one contact that you can easily filter.</comment></comment></comment>


Faulty Logic: Debating won't bring us closer to truth - <AUTHOR> http://reallifemag.com/faulty-logic/ <comment><USER2> The author references reddits "Change my View" subreddit, and dismisses it as a failed experiment, "the instances of the original poster actually changing their view were discouragingly few."

I think this is an unnecessarily dismal take on an interesting community. While out-and-out 180 degree reversals of viewpoint are comparatively rare, a very notable portion of posters approach the debate in good faith, and often the discussion results in a softening of views, and an admission of "maybe it wasn't quite so black-and-white or extreme as I originally thought".

i.e., where the author of this article asserts

> Today, the fundamental orientation of online debate culture is toward > universals, which are more likely to spark a reaction. There is a heavy > reliance on words like "always" and "never," as well as a tendency towards > extreme responses to perceived social ills:

I think the CMV community, on occasion, manages the miracle of pulling away from universal absolutes, and towards an empathetic understanding of concrete situations.

<comment><USER3> CMV is a great community. I also found its dismissal unpersuasive.

In my opinion, the phrase "discouragingly few" shows the author's unrealistic expectation, not the quality of CMV debates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I very much disagree with the thesis. Logic is asymmetric: logic works better for the true side. As for the "rhetorical power of social media networks", it's symmetric: it may be advantageous for the author's side right now, but tide can turn and it can favor the other side.

The author talks of "hate speech" and assume the certain side should win, otherwise debate is useless. This is wrong. The true side should win, and you don't know whether your side is true or not. This epistemic humbleness is the essential ingredient of the useful debate.

<comment><USER4> It's often clear that one ideological disposition relies on laughably untrue rhetoric more than the other, but on their best days, the left and right both agree on facts, they just disagree on their interpretation of them and what that means we should do.

Debate doesn't work because the idea of the right is to restrict resources to the "deserving" (individualism, tax breaks, etc) and kick around everyone not in the in group. The left says that we can make a more equal society and so we should try to solve our problems by redistributing resources.

This is not a gap you can bridge with logic, it's a fundamentally different moral interpretation of reality. This is sharing vs defending.

EDIT: However, Noam Chomsky gave a very interesting talk about how moral senses develop and change. There is some flexibility in our moral systems. For instance, until like, a year or two ago, casual homophobia was acceptable in public, now it isn't amongst a growing swath of the population. It's kind of fun to look at old Tweets by media personalities and see how much they've changed their positions (something very desirable) either because their beliefs changed or because their audience did.

<comment><USER5> Or, for a more reasonable description of the differences: the American right is interested in equality of opportunity, while the American left is interested in equality of outcome.

There are good points to be made for both positions, although 2018 sees both parties skewing heavily from these historic emphases, one more than the other.

<comment><USER6> Just a data point, as a lifelong democrat I definitely view the American left as being more interested in equality of opportunity than equality of outcome. Although that's gotten a bit muddled in recent years, since I see a split between the center-left Democrats and the more "progressive" wing. (Not sure there will be much of a home in the future for people that believe an expanded EITC is better than a massively-increased minimum wage.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I also had trouble following the author's point. It appears the author is saying that since people don't change their mind as often as the author would like, then it means that reason doesn't matter. (That's probably a wrong or (unintentional) straw-man summation.)

The weird part is that the author seems to take pains to draw a distinction between reason and rhetoric, but it seems her general conclusions conflate the two. If I have a conclusion based on logic, and someone comes at me trying to convince me with rhetoric based on ethos or pathos, it's not going to be convincing to me no matter how many points it scores on the audience. But that doesn't mean logic won't change my mind.

And most conclusions along the lines the author describes are normative conclusions. If, through logical debate, it's discovered that both parties are reasoning correctly, basing their conclusions on _different_ moral (axiomatic) values, and neither has changed their mind, that is perfectly okay and should be considered a victory for responsible dialectic. Dialectic is about finding shared understanding and unsound reasoning, not about humiliating your opponent for having different values than you.

I haven't taken a close look at Kialo but if, for all their structure, there isn't much effort spent on the logical relations between statements, then... well, it might still be helpful to a degree, but I can also see it inviting a lot casuistry.

<comment><USER7> It is a questioning of the merit of debate versus just plain virtue signaling. The last sentence summarizes it pretty well:

 _" The idea of "debate" imposes an adversarial framework on online interactions, as well as privileging logic as a tool of discovery."_

>> It appears the author is saying that since people don't change their mind as often as the author would like, then it means that reason doesn't matter.

It's more that if you want to effect positive change (like "ending slavery"), reason doesn't get you far. To the contrary, a very _reasonable_ argument could be made to non-slaves on why freeing the slaves would be a mortal risk to them. Changing "morals" on the other hand, is effective, because morals transcend reason. This is the playbook of the left.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The author says debate privileges logic as a tool of discovery, as if it is a bad thing! What does the author propose to privilege as a tool of discovery instead? "moral honor"? Really, LOL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I disagree with the thesis that debate doesn't bring us closer to truth. I think it does, just _astronomically slowly_. For example, I often get in arguments where I vigorously debate one side, and then realize I might be wrong, and I may continue to argue in order to "win", but deep down after the argument my beliefs have changed slightly in the opponent's direction. I feel like this process over time has gradually approximated to some sort of truth, the truth believed by all of the people I've ever interacted with. Even after this noisy process, there is still a thread of reality left where people have at least concluded internally what is truth, and there is only one set of axioms which allow all of the parties to arrive at their separate conclusions. In short, as the number of people you debate approaches infinity, I think the truth emerges.

EDIT: I also think it is really ironic that she is using reason to say that reason doesn't actually let us arrive any closer to the truth: why write the article at all then?

<comment><USER9> > I may continue to argue in order to "win"

I do that too sometimes though I think the reason is deeper than simply winning. The few times I concede a point, the opposition is very likely to ridicule me for that (on the internet at least that is my experience, even in so called "welcoming communities").

It's a rather hostile behavior to laugh at others for having learned or discovered something new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author of this article really took a lot of time to write an intelligent and reasoned post that is, unfortunately, painfully oblivious to a core truth that underlies everything she is unsuccessfully trying to understand.

Fake news, online hate, disrespect, etc are part of an extremely innovative and subversive reactionary movement (for better or worse).

This movement is a reaction to the failing economies of the late 20th century (generously padded over by ever-so cherry picked statistics), the fact that secularism never really came up with any kind of raison d'etre, and the hijacking of legitimate means of truth seeking (government departments, universities, think tanks etc) by powers with ulterior motives.

Saying "the earth is flat" is the best example of this. It''s such an amusingly false claim, to continue to believe it and declare you believe it is a kind of emancipation from / attack on the systems of power. There is nothing they can do.

Also the best example of the last point regarding "hijacking of legitimate means of truth seeking" is replacement of public intellectuals like James Kenneth Galbraith, who lead all rationing for the US during WWII, with the likes of those desperate for more PR, sales, and conference speeches such as serial-plagiarizer Fareed Zakaria.

<comment><USER11> Since _when_ were government departments and think tanks legitimate means of truth seeking? Some, sure, and at some times.

But on the whole you can practically guarantee both of those methods will be primarily PR mechanisms, and / or used for the advancement of those who control them.

Universities used to be, but they are becoming increasingly politicized again.

<comment><USER12> Universities were never non political. What you more likely mean is they used to agree with you more. None of these social institutions were ever non political, the political context has changed, the national politics have changed, and you've changed and I've changed. I just want to push back against anyone thinking anything going on is new, all of these social and political institutions have always been sites of political struggle.

Perhaps they used to be better at producing an aura of speaking and deciding from up above or from a mythical social consensus that "everyone" (suitably filtered) agrees on.

<comment><USER13> No there really was a time a few decades ago when republican professors and democrat professors weren't under or overrepresented by more than a factor of 2. Now it's something like 30 IIRC. And really a lot of the "conservatives" turn out to be libertarians, centrists, or even moderate liberals that are turned off by the more extreme people around them. That's at least in the social sciences, it's slightly better in less politically relevant fields.

<comment><USER14> Oh the other hand, mainstream politics everywhere seems to edge towards social conservatism and mixed economic stances.

Some countries are more "pure" on one side or other.

<comment><USER13> From my point of view most western nations are extremely liberal politically. Compared to how they were historically and compared to other countries.

<comment><USER11> That's true; but I worry about the overall trend. Perhaps it's unfounded but my fear is that we are trending towards less liberality, rather than more, except in a few areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I strugle to follow the authors point, but the topic goes to two interesting problems I'd like to pick out to see if there are any opinions on them:

1) Once a person has decided they have enough evidence to form an opinion, they form the opinion then forget the evidence. This makes it excruciatingly difficult to change their minds, because they can no longer check why they formed their original beliefs.

2) Debate will likely be one of two cases:

\- A factual debate, where one side who is 'wrong'

\- A values debate, where both sides are necessarily focused on different issues

Both of these are very delicate situations where empathy, moderation (as in mildness) and consideration are quite important in getting to a good place. Unfortunately, if participants suspect the audience perception is that they are losing in a factual debate rather than learning about others in a values debate they get very defensive very quickly.

<comment><USER16> I get the impression that debate these days is more of a game to see whose opinion wins, rather than debating to see others opinions and reflect on your own in order to jointly come up with a better result.

<comment><USER14> Instead of the word debate, why not use something better understood, such as discussion instead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Pet peeve: the name "Kialo" in Esperanto _doesn 't_ mean the type of reason the people who chose it think it does. "Kialo" means something closer to "motivation" or "cause" [1]. "Racio" is "reason" in the sense of debate or logic [2].

(It's unfortunately common for non-Esperantists attempting to use Esperanto words or sentences not to fact-check their translations. There are plenty of fluent speakers who would be glad to fact-check a translation you're going to publicize. Shout-out to the New Yorker who _did_ fact-check a recent one-off Esperanto translation.)

On the topic of the article though, I've come to believe a similar thing lately, with one caveat – reality is often a forcing function to align the "honor world" with logic. Cognitive dissonance can only get you so far, and e.g. in the workplace I find it easiest to resolve debates by demonstrating hard consequences of some particular faulty logic. The places we see the most disconnect in today's society tend to be the places where demonstrating consequences is difficult (e.g. global warming).

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kialo](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kialo)

[2] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/racio](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/racio)

</comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of something I read once in a book about false memories. 90% of psychotherapy is based on the idea that examining and talking about your experiences is helpful, but that's really just an assumption. There are some situations where it is predictably and categorically false. There are many others where it might be true but remains unproven. Debating is kind of the same way. We _believe_ that at least some forms of vigorous debate will lead to "best of both" understanding or solutions, but can any of us _prove_ that?

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure about prove, but I definitely believe that it can lead to actionable statements. Logical arguments are a layering of priors, arguments, and conclusions, which can be deductively analyzed to find proper conclusions given a known set of priors. I find that a lot of unconcluded arguments are based off of an unresolved set of priors that are never acknowledged, but are blamed on the lack of logical arguments made by the opposing party. Other times debates fall apart when one party approaches a conclusion that they do not agree with and form arguments that conveniently side-step that outcome. Because of these possibilities I think we may write off vigorous ~logical~ debates as relativistic and populist pandering, or uncouth shouting matches, but if logical principles are applied properly with a distinct lack of emotion (not morals) debates can be effective in finding truth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought this was an interesting point:

 _> In his 2010 book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah shows that arguments are not what change people's minds on moral questions — honor is. The end of dueling, or Chinese foot-binding, or the Atlantic slave trade, did not come about, Appiah writes, because of new or more convincing arguments — the arguments against these practices had been in place, sometimes for centuries, before most people were turned against them. What changed was the "honor world" — the group of people who understand and acknowledge the same codes of behavior. Dueling was illegal before it came to seem dishonorable, in part because a newly created popular press brought the aristocracy's honor code into discussion in lower class circles. This exposure to ridicule or mimicry put a new complexion on a practice that had persisted despite all logical argument against it._

It seems like the culture of rationality, logic, and debating is itself one of these "honor worlds", where defending your positions against logical attack is an expected code of behavior. If you're not part of this culture, you may not be prepared to defend yourself, even if what you're saying is totally true.

I think this is really what the article is talking about -- not that debate is intrinsically bad, but that it only operates well within a particular cultural context. Since most important decisions affect more than just rationalist debaters, the tools of rationalist debate may not be enough to make a correct decision.

<comment><USER14> Did you just pose a strawman that a rationalist debater would ignore irrationality?

Or that only use of rational arguments is rational, as opposed to rhetoric?

As we stand, accrual debating is likely to entrench views of people rather than change them, even if irrationally.

Experiment and results are more convincing than any amount of words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The author's examples are all moral issues. There is no "right answer" to a moral question. Morality is all just subjective personal feelings, biases and culture. But even in politics, there's an entire world of questions that do have objectively correct answers. You can't debate "should people be allowed guns" but you absolutely could debate whether guns statistically increase the murder rate. And there's all sorts of data and examples you can point to on that subject.

I do think you could make a more interesting argument for the author's view though. One thing that's always disturbed me is just how highly heritable political views are in twin studies. And that's after excluding the influence of family which share much of your genetics. If people's political beliefs are so predictable, then there can't be that much influence from reason and debate.

Perhaps this is just a consequence of the above. Perhaps most political issues are just about people's subjective moral feelings about things. And that could be mostly genetic.

<comment><USER21> You are incorrect. There is a fact of the matter as to what is good.

I do not mean to say that my beliefs as to what is good are always correct. It is quite possible for me to be wrong about such things.

But I am not incorrect when I say that there is a fact of the matter.

<comment><USER22> Yes and no. You'd have to answer, what's the objective source of morality?

If you're a believer, you may say God - though that still leaves two questions open. One, of implementation details - where is that morality codified, so that we can tell good from bad? In God's word? In our brains? Two, (almost?) all religions teach we have free will. So we can accept or reject God's morality. That decision is based on _something_ that's purely in us. I'd suggest that this something is morality.

If you're not a believer, the only reasonable source of somewhat-consistent morality is the shared architecture of human brains. That is, we're all born with mostly-same hardware and firmware, and as members of human race, we find ourselves in agreement to some basic moral ideas - like "suffering bad", "joy good" \- from which each culture weaves its complicated moral lattice.

<comment><USER23> Is "good" a matter of morality?

Can there be a conceptualisation of "good" independent of morality?

How or how not? To what limits? Or is good axiomatically moral?

<comment><USER22> I'd say good is moral by definition :).

As for morality, I don't see how it can be objective. It's not a feature of the universe, it's a feature of a mind. Humans have common values, because we naturally have common brain design.

<comment><USER14> Not just brains, simular biology too.

Consider that outright murder (in-group) and cannibalism are considered immoral by almost all moral systems. There are very good reasons why. (Both are due to is how fear works and social survival.)

Also why any act of killing is very restricted and the individual is cut out of the group.

Being moral does not guarantee a good outcome...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe truth in the end doesn't really matter? Only actions taken from perceived truth that increase the fitness for a moral, rule, opinion or belief. Debate and arguing maybe are just entropy like random mutations in DNA that drive cultures to differences where some are benign, some fatal, and everything in between. Morals or rules you see universally across cultures may have been highly selected due to their necessity. Culture and morals change over time because our environment changes, the context differs. Maybe that could be called truth?

</comment><comment><USER25> Behind every logical argument is a vehement emotional one. Debates rarely change minds because they rarely address the real underlying anchors.

</comment><comment><USER7> TLDR: Obtusely veiled apologia for moral outrage culture. (you can skip to the last paragraph).

The reasoning for this is the idea that slavery ended because it was deemed "dishonorable" through a transformation of "morals", not through "logical debate".

Further points against "debate culture":

\- winning a debate is not about the "truth", but about "persuasion"

\- ensuing moral relativism

\- debates don't actually change minds

I disagree with the last point. People simply don't change their minds in real time and many people are too invested into their points of view. I've personally _gradually_ changed my viewpoint away from the left in large part due to the general failure of leftists to persevere in debate. What a coincidence then, that some of the same people would question the merit of debate altogether...

<comment><USER26> The author seems lost in this article. It seems she's just seems frustrated that parts of human nature extends itself in the free market of ideas. Everything is about persuasion and winning. That's life...and it extends itself into the exchange of ideas. However you need this exchange to drive meaningful change...and you can only fool people for so long if you don't have logic and reason on your side. So I don't really understand what the author is driving at. I guess they are upset certain arguments they don't like are winning...which isn't really an argument at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was ready to hate this piece based on the title, but after giving it a read with an open mind, I'm not actually all that upset with it. The author does have some salient observations buried in there, but ironically enough, the author's language betrays that she is clearly engaged in exactly the type of debate that she finds so tiresome and uninspiring.

Ie:

> Today, the fundamental orientation of online debate culture is toward > universals, which are more likely to spark a reaction. There is a heavy > reliance on words like "always" and "never," as well as a tendency towards > extreme responses to perceived social ills

Yet is the author not herself attempting to spark reactions by making broad, universal claims like:

> Debating won't bring us closer to truth

> Was logic an inappropriate tool with which to approach this question?

> The ostensible divorce of reasoning from identity becomes a meta-argument > for universal truths and solutions. It works to shore up the idea that a > logical truth will stand on its own no matter who is delivering it.

> The fixation on logic as an ideal vehicle for human progress is less a > reflection of the practicality of this means of resolving our shared issues > than it is a longing for a moral framework beyond human perceptions.

Seems a bit extreme to pigeonhole all advocates of using logic as a valid piece of an argument as people who advocate for exclusively logical arguments. It's perfectly reasonable to discuss logical arguments divorced of identity. That doesn't mean that a logical argument must be divorced of empathy though. John Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" and other works make a compelling, logical case, for social justice and liberalism, and that concept revolves entirely around learning to think in terms other than one's identity.

I also found it interesting that right after the author laments how ineffective facts and figures are for convincing people > But logical argumentation rarely makes people change their minds; neither does exposure to facts.

She uses cites a well known academic body that analyzed facts and figures to strengthen her argument! > Cornell analyzed data from Reddit's ChangeMyView community, where users propose a thesis and invite others to debate. While the results showed that some tactics are better than others...

My final bit of amusement comes from that while she counter-argues that "honor" and experiences are a better way of convincing people > In the behavior of social media users posting under their real names, identity — contrary to logic-proponents' assumptions — may be among the strongest persuasive tools.

It's mentioned in the same article, that Aristotle considered _ethos_ a fundamental component of rhetoric, along with logic. It's strange to see that she is clearly arguing for the inclusion of ethos and pathos in online discussions over social issues, yet she seems to be sarcastically deriding Aristotle along with the online debating platform crowd by aligning them with hate speech?

> Aristotle saw the possibility of misuse in laying out his theory of > rhetorical tactics; in the wrong hands, persuasion could be used for ill. > But he generally agreed with the site administrators of QallOut — that it > would be easier to convince people of things that were just and good than of > things that were not. So "the average Jew would kill you over a penny" > should be easy to argue against, and your audience should find arguments > against this thesis more persuasive.

On the positive side, I do agree that "sport debate" and the tactics it engenders are often meaningless and sometimes to dangerous to an individual's pursuit of truth. Logic itself as a means to question assumptions though? The author clearly knows better than to think that's actually the case. Like so many others out there, she's exaggerating to enhance the impact of her argument on the listener.</comment>


Show HN: Wikifeat – a wiki/collaboration system made using Go and CouchDB - <AUTHOR> https://www.wikifeat.com <comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on a little side project and thought I'd share:

Wikifeat is an extensible wiki system (support for plugins and additional custom services, etc.) written in Golang intended for organizational/enterprise use. It uses CouchDB as its main database and Etcd for its service registry.

The frontend is written in Backbone/Marionette (using Bootstrap for layout).

Project site (running Wikifeat on FreeBSD): [https://www.wikifeat.com](https://www.wikifeat.com)

Plugin example: [https://www.wikifeat.com/app/wikis/developer- documentation/p...](https://www.wikifeat.com/app/wikis/developer- documentation/pages/plugin-development-guide)

Github repo: [https://github.com/rhinoman/wikifeat](https://github.com/rhinoman/wikifeat)

I've also written a Blog post with some more detail: [http://jamesadam.me/index.php/2015/11/03/making-an- extensibl...](http://jamesadam.me/index.php/2015/11/03/making-an-extensible- wiki-system-with-go/)

Lots of rough edges and yet-to-be-implemented features to be sure (especially on the front end), but I believe it is at the point it might be minimally usable :)

<comment><USER2> Some feedback:

1) On chrome, this site breaks the back button. Once I get to the site, no amount of pressing 'back' will take me back to where I came from - additionally, if I visit a second page on the site, then the back button actually rotates between the front page and the second page indefinitely.

2) It loads in an odd fashion, loading the sidebar first and then the content. It's not a deal breaker, but it looks odd when reading the page, and I wonder how well this would work on slower connections. It does also make me wonder how well it might actually scale in practice.

3) CouchDB is an unusual choice for a product like this - if you're shipping a product with an embedded database, something lower maintenance (and with better HA capabilities) might improve the lives of your users.

4) Minor point, but why is the 'View Raw' button given such prominence? I'm not sure what purpose it solves for an end user, and it could perhaps be better hidden under 'Page tools'.

Overall though, I like the architecture and design. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! As you can probably tell, the front end needs some work.

1.) The back button breaks in most (all?) browsers. I'm doing something odd with the history and I definitely need to fix it.

2.) The application does start loading the sidebar before it does much of anything else. It's kind of arbitrary and I suppose I could change it.

3.) I wasn't thinking of a self-contained product with an embedded database. I suppose Couch is higher maintenance than say, SQLite, but I haven't found it to be more onerous to administrate than Postgres or (especially) Oracle. I suppose a lack of familiarity on the part of sysadmins could be a possible issue.

4.) It was/is a useful feature during development, but I take your point most end users aren't going to use this feature as much as I have. Moving it is a good idea :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> maze-le Did you resolve the 'concurrent editing' problem, or: What happens if 2 users edit the same resource?

<comment><AUTHOR> First one to submit their changes wins. The second update is rejected.

The revision # of the document must be included in the header of the PUT request (If-Match), if it doesn't match the revision # of the document in the database, you get a 409 error back.</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley House-Price-to-Income Ratio - <AUTHOR> http://earlywarn.blogspot.ca/2013/02/silicon-valley-housing-to-income-ratio.html

<comment><USER2> I'm lucky to enjoy living in Memphis, TN. Various reports put the median house price between $73,000 and $99,000, which seems about right based on my experience. Avg income reports range from about $39,000 to $46,000. Luckily, salaries for developers and engineers is roughly consistent with national averages, and sometimes higher due to unmet demand, which obviously sits well in this housing/income market. There is also an increasing amount of state and local funding for startups and entrepreneurship, and with it a growing amount of programs to foster startups and small businesses and connect them with VCs. I've interviewed with several companies, small and large, in the valley and bay areas, but I've always found the absurd cost of living and crowded population to be a turn off. All that is to say, I wonder if the disproportionate costs and perceived lower-quality-of-life (to outsiders) will slowly decrease the centralization of tech startups in the valley. Perhaps it is a question of when, not if... Sources: <http://www.homeinsight.com/home- value/tn/memphis.asp> [http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2011/snapshot...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2011/snapshots/PL4748000.html)</comment>


Heartbleed, 2 Weeks Later: A Graphical Report - <AUTHOR> http://blog.trustlook.com/2014/04/24/heartbleed-two-weeks-later-4-4-ssl-enabled-websites-still-vulnerable/

<comment><USER2> For anyone who thinks it doesn't matter that apps like Candy Crush Saga are vulnerable to heartbleed, remember that the majority of users use the same password for multiple sites and apps. So gaining access to their video game password can give a baddie access to their email or bank account password.

</comment><comment><USER3> 3D charts with perspective ftw</comment>


Some interesting new beginnings? (OpenEMR Project) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MatthewVita/status/983163925070921728 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all! Matthew, one of the project admins here from OpenEMR ([https://www.open-emr.org/](https://www.open-emr.org/))!

I know there are a _lot_ of charitable and ambitious full-stack devs here. Now is a _great_ time to check out our open source project!

We have _so_ much work to do to bring OpenEMR to more healthcare facilities around the world and we need some more great devs! (Clinicians, Students, Designers, QA'ers, Tech Writers, Lawyers, Grant Writers, Hackers, etc too!)

Email is in profile :).

If you can't help out directly, but believe in this mission, please donate here: [https://opencollective.com/openemr](https://opencollective.com/openemr)</comment>