An interview with the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidote-to-civilisational-collapse <comment><USER2> An anecdata on that topic.

I am working for a subsidiary of big company.

Six months ago, while other parts of the company were divested, the plan was to keep us. Evey internal communications from the top management were saying basically "we are proud to be a strong pillar of BigCo going forward"

Now, it seems the plan have changed and we are going to be divested as well. Now the same top managers have all the same discourse (literally copy paste): "This is a new chapter opening, we are all very excited, and this will open new opportunities".

I don't blame top management or internal communication, but really you cannot have two opposite strategies in six months, and in both case think that is the best thing since sliced bread because it is basically meaningless.

So, top management knows they are repeating the empty official party line, employees knows that it is essentially a smokescreen, but everyone pretends everything is planned and this is working as intended, and everything's going to be great. The reality is that no one as the slightest idea of what is going on. If you step back, this is actually quite comical.

<comment><USER3> Apropos of simply chatting around the topic, I always (well, for the last five years or so - took me many years to get to this point) say out loud in such meetings that if there's no budget for it, the company doesn't really care.

In the last year, after the powers-that-be said they believed in training, saying that out loud has won my team 5% of their time and some capital expenditure for training (works out to a little over a day every month that can be spent on the company dime explicitly reading, watching training materials or other such), and when those same powers said they believed in continuous improvement of the product, on the order of 15% of the team's time can now be booked to just that; working on things that don't provide new features or bugfixes for customers, but just make the software better in general. I was surprised at just how much it turned out that the company really did believe in continuous improvement of the product, when I challenged the powers-that-be to put their money where their mouth is; I am a little worried that if I hadn't opened my mouth, we wouldn't be doing it, but then I suppose that's why people like me are employed - to open our mouths.

I'm not sure know I would spend budget in support of "being proud to be part of BigCo going forwards", but I'd still ask for it and still say that if there wasn't any, it wasn't true. Money seems to sharpen the corporate mind very effectively and force people to actually confront the values they espouse.

<comment><USER4> If your in frontline management isn't that basically your job? To translate company goals to on the ground action?

I suppose its a little surprising to hear upper management is not spouting BS, but I now also wonder how much of that is frontline management simply not acting on the vision.

<comment><USER3> _If your in frontline management isn 't that basically your job? To translate company goals to on the ground action?_

Surely that's _everyone 's_ job? To know and understand the company's goals and ensure that their actions are in support. I certainly try to ensure that everyone on my team (is "software team lead", one among many, considered frontline management? I honestly don't know where people draw the lines) knows what the bigger goals are, and I routinely push questions and comment about those goals back up.

I try to advocate that it is never wrong to pursue the company's goals, and demand from directors that people who come a cropper while, in good faith pursuing the direction that the directors have set, will not suffer for it. We are quite a small company so it's quite easy to badger directors to provide direction. Don't know how this would go in a larger company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fans of Adam Curtis, particularly his characteristic use of 'historical collage' to create a compelling narrative, might be interested in the book trilogy 'U.S.A' by John Dos Passos. It's a great read.

A quote from Adam himself:

"The biggest influence I've ever had was actually a novel my father gave me to read at the age of about 13. It was a novel called USA by John Dos Passos. At that age, it just got me. You can trace back everything I do to that novel because it's all about grand history, individual experience, their relationship. And also collages, quotes from newsreels, cinema, newspapers. And it's about collage of history as well. That's where I get it all from."*

*[https://web.archive.org/web/20140116091402/http://filmcommen...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140116091402/http://filmcomment.com/entry/interview-adam-curtis)

<comment><USER6> Wow, thanks for the recommendation...this interview is blowing me away. So much insight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the more unique insights here:

"Its downside is that it's a static world. It doesn't have any vision of the future because the way it works is by constantly monitoring what you did yesterday and the day before, and the day before that. And monitoring what I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that and doing the same to billions of other people. And then looking at patterns and then saying: "If you liked that, you'll like this"."

"They're constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour. We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people's behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that."

<comment><USER8> The obvious counterpoint is that much of civilization has been stasis.

Also, the sum total of years in the post-surveillence world we now live in may be too small a sample-duration to conclude that it isn't subject to the same fluctuations of disruption that have occured throughout history.

Tldr: history teaches us that it's only a matter of time before shit goes bananas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Adam Curtis is great. He's been making films for about 30 years and has a large fimography. Early in his career he's made some 20th century history documentary series, very recommended. Lately he's been making great films about contemporary phenomenon, I loved both of his last films, Bitter Lake (2015) and HyperNormalisation (2016). Highly recommended, especially the latter.

<comment><USER10> I love all the films I've seen by him, but I feel like Hypernormalisation was a cut above the rest. Adam Curtis feels like a continental philosopher (yes, I know he's British) making films instead of writing books and Hypernormalisation feels like his Magnum Opus. This interview is probably a great way to get the same in writing.

<comment><USER9> I feel similarly. I try not to stress this point, so that people don't ignore the rest of his filmography, which would be a great pity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision > for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total > fakeness as normal."

I don't think there is a lack of vision out there, see the book Four Futures for example. In the case of the Soviet Union speaking out about things not working was a good way to get punished. Most of us have experienced the same thing in corporate america. Everyone around the cooler says "this is broke" one guy says as much and loses his head.

It seems we are just incapable now of agreeing to collective visions, which require compromise, and supporting each other in making that happen. Something has caused us to become incapable of compromise. Everyone is beaten down by the past century and no longer want to trust each other, or something like that.

Perhaps communication now is just too impossible to allow this to happen. It's become seemingly much much easier to attack and divide people than bring them together. Hard to see how to change that without some really low level change happening.

</comment><comment><USER12> "The problem I have with a lot of investigative journalism, is that they always say: "There should be more investigative journalism" and I think, "When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren't paying tax, I'm shocked but I'm not surprised because I know that. I don't want to read another article that tells me that". What I want is an article that tells me why, when I'm told that, nothing happens and nothing changes. And no one has ever explained that to me."

I think he is making a big mistake here. There are a lot of things we "already know" that aren't actually true or we don't know the extent. We should appreciate people who deliver data that we can then try to explain. there is already way too much opinion going around that has no data to back it up.

<comment><USER13> While that may be true about misinformation/underinformation, it still seems ultimately pointless if nothing is being done about it...

<comment><USER12> It seems that way but nothing should be done without hard facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _The opposite of stability is a politics of imagination. There is a yearning > that there must be something more than the repetition we hear every day that > "if you like this you'll like that". I think it's coming but I take your > point, you are right, there is fear of that. But the job of a good > politician is to say, "Yes, I understand your fears but look, it's not right > and we can do better than this". I'm waiting for a politician on the left to > come along and say that. So far, I haven 't seen one._

I'm very curious why he thinks Bernie Sanders doesn't qualify. Regardless of what you think of his political views, the political _story_ he was selling fits this description to a T.

I suspect it's not that these politicians don't exist, it's that the rest of the political establishment _also_ is afraid of them and cooperates to keep them out. Kind of like how managers never fire themselves.

<comment><USER15> Seen from Europe, Bernie Sanders is just a mainstream centre-left politician, he wasn't proposing anything particularly controversial.

<comment><USER14> Of course, but that is not the point. The point is that from the American point view his proposals were still something that they as a society could aim for, not something they already have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's quite a piece where he simultaneously laments the common sense that leadership is corrupt and everyone knows it, and at the same time dismissively mocks "liberal hysteria" over Russian election interference and their compromising of the president, which is literally the giant glowing core of executive branch corruption in this administration.

</comment><comment><USER17> Russell Brand also interviewed Adam Curtis about this film also, on his podcast - [https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/under-the-skin-with- russe...](https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/under-the-skin-with-russell- br-455708/episodes/003-adam-curtis-do-we-really-w-15260116)

<comment><USER18> Just adding to the Adam Curtis podcast appearances - he was also on Chapo Trap House: [https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-65-no- future...](https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-65-no-future-feat- adam-curtis-121216)

<comment><USER19> Good interview with Adam Curtis and comedian Tim Heidecker (yes, _that_ Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric) here, too: [https://soundcloud.com/thetalkhouse/tim-heidecker-with- adam-...](https://soundcloud.com/thetalkhouse/tim-heidecker-with-adam-curtis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the article, this is so incisive:

The problem I have with a lot of investigative journalism, is that they always say: "There should be more investigative journalism" and I think, "When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren't paying tax, I'm shocked but I'm not surprised because I know that. I don't want to read another article that tells me that". What I want is an article that tells me why, when I'm told that, nothing happens and nothing changes. And no one has ever explained that to me.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is very insightful: "Every morning Donald Trump wakes up in the White House, he tweets something absolutely outrageous which he knows the liberals will get upset by, the liberals read his tweets and go "This is terrible, this is outrageous," and then tell each other via social media how terrible it all is. It becomes a feedback loop in which they are locked together. In my mind, it's like they're together in a theatre watching a pantomime villain. The pantomime villain comes forward into the light, looks at them and says something terrible, and they go "Boo!!". Meanwhile, outside the theatre, real power is carrying on but no one is really analysing it."

<comment><USER22> The President of the United States wields real power, full stop.

He is not an absolute monarch, and other powerful forces may have their own designs, but it's disingenuous to suggest the head of government in the world's largest economy and biggest military power is purely a sideshow to "real power" carrying on elsewhere.

<comment><USER23> Why is it disingenuous? Trump can barely make plans minute to minute, never mind day to day or year to year. If he wasn't insulated by his inherited wealth he'd either be a homeless bum or in jail.

When has Trump ever contributed to a detailed industrial or economic strategy for the US?

That's never been his job. His job has always been to be the dummy in the window display, while the shop behind him is sold off and looted.

<comment><USER24> > Why is it disingenuous? Trump can barely make plans minute to minute, never > mind day to day or year to year. If he wasn't insulated by his inherited > wealth he'd either be a homeless bum or in jail.

Quite the contrary, he has a unique talent for naming things and people for example that will get people to talk about for months or years. Think about his liberal use of expressions like _fake news_ for instance. That seems to come to him naturally, not to mention his particular brand of original taglines and scornful epithets. Many of these words had an impact, in his election, in the first place, but also in the shaping of American politics.

The failure to recognize his talent is actually what hinders his opposition the most.

You may not like his unique form of marketing genius, but it's a creative force to be reckoned with. After all, this is a man who dubbed himself a _stable genius_ , no less. Then you could say marketing BS is not a talent, or rather talk about creative destruction and fraud—but that wouldn't be very effective against it.

Believe it or not, naming is a field that supports added value. Some companies would pay good money for some of the gems he produced over the years. If Trump wasn't insulated by his inherited wealth he would probably do very well as a copywriter (short copy).

<comment><USER25> > Quite the contrary, he has a unique talent for naming things and people for > example that will get people to talk about for months or years. Think about > his liberal use of expressions like _fake news_ for instance.

But he didn't introduce that term into wide discussion, his critics did to label the phenomenon closely resembling the m.o. of Russian state propaganda that was deployed in favor of Trump (which it is increasingly obvious resembled that because it largely _was_ a Russian state propaganda effort.)

The practice of adopting and widely using such a term that has been deployed by critics to neutralize the criticism is not unique to Trump, it's a fairly standard, well-established reaction in politics.

While it's true the front business that is used to justify his wealth has been more about brand marketing than real estate, that doesn't mean he's a marketing genius. His real secret of success has been willingness to corruptly funnel money while cultivating a playboy image with a superficially plausible business front.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > know very well that in 200 years the world > won't look much like the world > we're living in now."

This will happen not because of AI or nuclear fusion reactors or space travel or lab-grown meat.

I love Curtis's documentaries and agree with the central thesis that the models/stories to describe the world leave us trapped and need to be switched for better ones, but I think he is underestimating the potential for Climate Destruction to force a reconfiguration.

Politicians have always been mountebanks surfing on the wave of change initiated by either physical realities or collective imaginings... they don't create new models, they just latch onto whatever seems opportune.

<comment> jules-jules Based on his repeated mention of climate change in the interview, I wouldn't conclude that he is disregarding the possibility of climate change reconfiguring human civilization, rather, I'd venture that it is perhaps so obvious, that he failed to mention it?

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure. Although it is an excellent interview it feels like some follow- up would be good on a couple of points, one of them being whether he believes that climate destruction is going to leave anything resembling a civilization behind. There is a slight suggestion that he believes that liberal pessimism is ignoring some wonderful new opportunities inherent in the complete destruction of a stable, predictable climate.

Also he completely ignores that the Corbyn manifesto and recent speaking tours have emphasized that a reshaping of the UK economy to emphasize green jobs in a low-growth, post-Brexit world is exactly the sort of inspiring leadership which claims is lacking.

I suspect he just does not want to look at what the left of the Labour Party is proposing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm a huge Curtis fan and have seen and read just about everything he has done, even his early appearances with talking dogs on That's Life! [https://youtu.be/ajsCY8SjJ1Y](https://youtu.be/ajsCY8SjJ1Y)

I flew to NY to see Massive Attack vs Adam Curtis in 2014 and it was probably the best live event I've seen this century so far [https://youtu.be/25g6ShHtzWo](https://youtu.be/25g6ShHtzWo)

Excited to hear Curtis is back in action and doing more films, presumably still for the BBC where he seems to be a lifer.

I thought this was a great, thought provoking interview. He did tackle the darker side of banking he briefly discusses in relation to UK economic austerity in this short Newswipe piece 'oh dearism' [https://youtu.be/3UstNBrmJFc](https://youtu.be/3UstNBrmJFc)

An interesting aside though - before Hypernormalization Curtis literally disappeared online for about 14 months - no news stories or Google alerts and quite a few links about him disappeared. Glad he's back and looking forward to seeing the new material.

</comment><comment><USER28> "If you take climate change, which is a serious issue, it's been co-opted by pessimistic baby-boomers and turned into a dark nightmarish scenario, rather than saying that we need to restructure power and resources in a way that could make the world a better place. That would have been a really good way to deal with climate change. Instead, it got possessed by a dystopia which I think reflects that generation's fear of mortality because they can't see anything going on beyond their own death."

Ultimately this is true, we preach dystopia because we cannot see beyond our lack of power (ability, influence), our fear of instability, fear of death. We cannot even begin to imagine what such restructuring would look like.

All the while the dystopia is steadily becoming reality.

And that's the hard part, and imagination, especially political imagination, and very especially progressive political imagination should be the antidote. Less static, and less managerial. Let's feedback management.

I guess he is right that dystopianism and right-wing populism (racism and so on) are governed by (the same kind of) fear and anger.

This interview certainly gave me things to think about.

<comment><USER29> > " ... it's been co-opted by pessimistic baby-boomers and turned into a dark > nightmarish scenario ... "

Similarly, this is how Christianity's public image was killed in the West.

<comment><USER30> Can you explain what you mean by this? Priests raping kids did it for me with Catholiscm....and people like Blair and Bush murdering people en masse to serve their fairy overlord sealed the deal for protestantism. Not sure how this ties in?

<comment><USER29> It's certainly multifaceted. I could write a pretty substantial article on this topic.

My comment was mostly alluding to the unsupported imagery of a fire and brimstone pit of eternal torment for all non-believers. There's also excessive pessimism about the implications of Christian values not being mandated by legislature (ex: abortion).

For your concerns, I would attribute those to the collapse and corruption of internal governance systems. Without much exposition, churches do a pretty terrible job of ensuring their leaders are moral and capable of conveying responsible interpretations of doctrine. Again this is more or less due to fatalism. EG: "Humans are inherently sinful, therefore there's nothing we can do about awful leaders"

If anyone is actually interested in a related article, send me an email. I'll assume that, if a few people spend the effort to send me an email, it will be worth the effort to synthesize a responsible article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The is an excellent 3 min deconstruction of Adam Curtis' work on YouTube [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg)

</comment><comment><USER32> A great article. This is pretty much summarises everything I an raging about on HN. Every citizen of a self respecting nation has a personal responsibility to fight wrongs, and be sensible and rational in how he treats others.

Western society has become greatly desensitised to idiocy and wrongs.

Today's popular culture celebrates the "war on reason." We should reject and destroy it.

<comment><USER33> > Every citizen of a self respecting nation has a personal responsibility to > fight wrongs, and be sensible and rational in how he treats others.

I think everybody already does so. But right and wrong are very subjective things and this fighting the wrongs is contributing a lot to the global mess.

<comment><USER34> >But right and wrong are very subjective things

is "the earth is flat" a subjective wrong ? is "climate changes unless you change" a subjective wrong ? is "poverty" a subjective wrong ? is "education is important" a subjective right ? is "rules of law" a subjective wrong ? is "same gender, same pay" a subjective right ?

<comment><USER35> _is "the earth is flat" a subjective wrong?_

No.

 _is "climate changes unless you change" a subjective wrong?_

Yes. Define "change". Also, climate changes without individual change. Also, individual change _isn 't_ going to impact climate change.

 _is "poverty" a subjective wrong?_

Do you mean the source of poverty or how to deal with it? Either way, yes both of those are subjective.

 _is "education is important" a subjective right?_

Yes, this is subjective. Many people have massive student debt and education that doesn't offer them any sort value in the employment marketplace.

 _is "rules of law" a subjective wrong?_

Yes, how it's carried out very much so.

 _is "same gender, same pay" a subjective right?_

Yes, because a lot of people would say we've already achieved that in the west and a lot of people feel the opposite.

I think you've picked some of the most subjective issues of modern times as your examples of things that are objective in nature.

<comment><USER34> >individual change isn't going to impact climate change.

Each individual not changing is not going to help either. Inaction makes it worse.

> Do you mean the source of poverty or how to deal with it? No, I mean > "poverty is a bad thing and we should work to eradicate it". As for 'how to > deal with it', it's a polical choice.

>"education is important" Yes it is. Both for basics (democracy, "being able to make an 'educated' choice when I vote", ) and "AI is coming to get you"

>people have massive student debt This is mostly a US problem, no ? The world is bigger. (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9656905](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9656905) )

>education that doesn't offer them any sort value in the employment marketplace. But at the same time, the "learn to code in 30 days" business is booming, because there are jobs there. And education is used at least as a proxy when hiring.

>is "rules of law" a subjective wrong? Business can only prosper if rules of law is enforced. So I see "rules of law" as an objective 'right'. "How" is the essence of "rules of law".

>I think you've picked some of the most subjective issues of modern times as your examples of things that are objective in nature.

Actually, I voluntarily selected the ones where it makes people uncomfortable to acknowledge they are on the wrong side of the "right and wrong", to illustrate what I see as the parent point "every citizen of a self respecting nation has a personal responsibility to fight wrongs".

<comment><USER35> You picked a bunch of partisan issues then claimed your side is "right" and the other side is "wrong". I'm not even commenting on what's right or wrong, I'm just saying it's subjective.

<comment><USER34> Thank you, I think I understand your point about subjectivity now.

I have another question, if you can: can you comment on what is right and what is wrong in absolute, if anything is ?

<comment><USER35> I think you can be correct or incorrect about facts (such as the earth being round) but that human society is too complex and there are too many individual and conflicting desires to say that there's a one dimensional scale of good->bad that you can judge it on.

Take that remote island tribe that recently murdered a Christian missionary. Was it good or bad that he went there? Was it good or bad that they killed him? Is it good or bad that anthropologists are trying to keep them isolated? Is it good or bad that they want to stay isolated?

I don't think those questions can be answered. Society is an emergent behavior built up from individual wants, desires and compromises. There's stability and instability at a macro level but I don't think there's good or bad. There's just different.

It strikes me that a lot of modern political thought has embraced pieces of post-modernism but at some level has almost reverted to fundamentalism. "Good" vs. "evil" doesn't sound like the options we should be discussing in a post- religious society.

<comment><USER34> >[list of good or bad question about what happened in North Sentinel Island ] > I don't think those questions can be answered

I don't understand why not. More exactly, if we decide that there is nothing "right" or "wrong", just "dimensions and scales and we can't decide without offensing someone", isn't that a bleak state of mind (and of society) ?

>"Good" vs. "evil" doesn't sound like the options we should be discussing in a post-religious society.

So only religion can define "good" and "evil" ?

Not society as a whole ? or the law - would you agree that the law is just a slowly written process to write down the current state of mind of a society ?

What about "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" ? Also just an opinion ? or it's a "religious"-like text and therefore we can talk about "right" and wrong ?

<comment><USER35> > _I don 't understand why not. More exactly, if we decide that there is > nothing "right" or "wrong", just "dimensions and scales and we can't decide > without offensing someone", isn't that a bleak state of mind (and of > society) ?_

Not at all! You can have your own personal moral code that you live by. It's also not about not "offending someone". It's just acknowledging that people have different perspectives and that even if you believe 100% in something, there's someone out there that won't agree with you and their lived experiences will justify that position for them.

> _So only religion can define "good" and "evil" ?_

I'd say yes as those are religious concepts. You can have non-religious empathy that compels you to not "hurt" other people but I wouldn't say there's an objective "good" or "evil".

> _What about "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" ? Also just an opinion ? > or it's a "religious"-like text and therefore we can talk about "right" and > wrong ?_

I would say this is a religious like text. It just so happens that many people agree with it. Back to logical facts though, if one posits that there is no higher power then it's definitely a fact that society has been built up from individuals imperfectly communicating over time and not some objective truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Adam Curtis is amazing. If you don't know his work, I would highly recommend checking it out [0].

[0] [https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam- curtis/](https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/)

</comment><comment><USER37> The director states:

>"With the rise of that hyper-individualism in society, politics got screwed. That sense of being part of a movement that could challenge power and change the world began to die away and was replaced by a technocratic management system."

I understand that in the US, election campaigns are data-driven but beyond that are either of the two major political parties platforms managed and/or guided by a "technocratic management system"?

</comment><comment><USER26> Love Adam Curtis's work but he is completely wrong about a lack of story/vision being presented by current leaders: under Jeremy Corbyn the Labour Party is poised to present a complete re-envisioning of manufacturing and employment, based upon a Left-exit from the European Union: something anathema to majority of "educated thinkers" in the U.K. [https://novaramedia.com/2018/06/24/financial- globalisation-h...](https://novaramedia.com/2018/06/24/financial- globalisation-has-been-a-disaster-brexit-gives-us-a-chance-to-resist-it/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Why was the title changed? Will all interviews be changed like this?

</comment><comment><USER39> This is very interesting, and Curtis has a lot of great insights, but it seems like moves from accurate insight to hyperbolic and emotional conclusion many times during the interview.

For example:

"No one is really sure what Trump represents. My working theory is that he's part of the pantomime-isation of politics. Every morning Donald Trump wakes up in the White House, he tweets something absolutely outrageous which he knows the liberals will get upset by, the liberals read his tweets and go "This is terrible, this is outrageous," and then tell each other via social media how terrible it all is. It becomes a feedback loop in which they are locked together. In my mind, it's like they're together in a theatre watching a pantomime villain. The pantomime villain comes forward into the light, looks at them and says something terrible, and they go "Boo!!". Meanwhile, outside the theatre, real power is carrying on but _no one is really analysing it._ "

I think this is a great insight, and it's true: but is "no one" paying attention to any other news? Surely many organizations are provably doing so every day. Why don't they count as "someone?" Presumably because they don't fit Curtis' definition of the cultural mainstream. But, Curtis (at least in the interview) never defines the cultural mainstream. What is inside it, what is outside it, and why? Would two individuals define the cultural mainstream the same way? What if my cultural mainstream does include people who are "analyzing the real power?" It seems that the conclusion based on his insight is meant to be emotionally powerful and impactful, except that anyone should be able to think of counterexamples.

He makes this mistake the whole article. Here's another extraordinarily brilliant insight: (I'm not being sarcastic here, I think this is genius and he's really onto something)

"I think the old mass democracies sort of died in the early 90s and have been replaced by a system that manages us as individuals. Because the fundamental problem is that politicians can't manage individuals, they need us to join parties and support them and let them represent us as a group identified with them. What modern management systems worked out, especially when computer networks came into being, was that you could actually manage people as groups by using data to understand how they were behaving in the mass, but you could create a system that allowed them to keep on thinking that they were individuals."

He expands on this idea, adding more insight and precision until finally stumbles into this:

"They're constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour. We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people's behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that. It's benign in a way and it's an alternative to the old kind of politics. But it locks us into a static world because it's always looking to the past. _It can never imagine something new._ "

I can't possibly see how this can be true. Creativity is dead? We can't imagine new things because facebook (or the internet, or modern media) exists? I'm being a bit dismissive here, but I don't see how he can support this claim. People are coming up with new ideas all the time.

Again, his insight about how the internet and algorithms allow systems to cater to and control individuals was genius. But, the conclusion he draws from that insight is deeply emotional, catastrophic, and not very well constructed. It sounds like the sort of emotional mistake someone might make in therapy: "I'll never find another girlfriend again," or "I'll always be socially unpopular," etc.

<comment><USER40> Yeah hes a good public speaker and story weaver. Its 'exciting' to listen to his words, even though the subject matter may be bleak. He has a flare for the dramatic and that sells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It is good to note that they passed over Ayn Rand. Many Americans are surprised when I tell them that so much of Ayn Rand's maxims are a direct copy and paste from different communist manifestos.

Maligned societies look much like each others once you scrape off their ideological facades.

Best quote:

 _> I often think that one of the reasons why there is so much pessimism around, especially among the baby-boomer generation, is that they cannot face the terrible fact of their own mortality. So what they have to do is project that onto the whole planet._

<comment><USER41> Which maxims are those? It doesn't help to ccompare societies on the basis of rhetoric (appearance) rather than logic (essence), so I'm skeptical of your point.

<comment><USER32> Then it will be her maxims like "family is legalized prostitution" (literally, the same quote from either Lenin or Trotsky and her,) statement on "setting man free from men" and on and on and on with her equating any social process to material/financial interaction. No wonder, some reasonably suggest that she might have been an actual cryptocommunist as the "objectivism" she birthed is strikingly similar to whatever rationalisations communist regimes around the world made for their existence.

The biggest selling point that second world country regimes had for the masses was the material abundance out of nowhere, second to "liberation" of common men from moral norms and duties.

Back in twenties, the unwashed masses did genuinely believe that they are instating the communist system for their own rational self interest

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A lot of his points are echoes of what the economist Mark Blyth uses to point out the lack of narratives in politics of today. While it is true that people do respond to narratives, it's questionable how far that goes. Both brexiters and Trump offered narratives (of some vision of britain and an american economic rennaissance) , and it did work. Yet the majorities were feeble, not overwhelming (especially considering the lack of narrative on the other sides). Even trump could not motivate the US today to go on another space race like in the 60s. It is thus possible that democracies have transformed away from the collectivist spirit irrevocably. Indivudualism has been on the rise since forever, and (apart from an alien invasion) there doesnt seem to be any major forces countering it. Today's collectivist politics are either identitarian (the easy solution / instead of endless politics, vote by color) or mildly globalist, like climate change politics. While both have fierce supporters and detractors, the main mass of voters says "meh" to both.

Then again, even the mega monolith called China will not be able to control its well-trained citizenry when the hypergrowth stops. Despite remarkable progress and optimism, the chinese don't seem to be going for "space races", instead those megaprojects appear to be more driven by personal ambition of their leader. Maybe bowling alone is the future of politics, more personalized, individualized and decentralized societies. The republics of large narratives may already belong to history and maybe we should stop expecting the "return of religions".</comment>


Hacker News RSS feed is broken - <AUTHOR>

Doesn't seem to work for My Yahoo! I have even tried it in Safari and doesn't work there either <comment><USER2> If you like, you can run your own: <https://github.com/jackdanger/hacker_news>

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know why there is no official HN feed?

</comment><comment><USER4> Works fine on Google Reader for me</comment>


An Estonian Startup With €25 Million Turnover - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/09/26/the-estonian-startup-with-e25-million-turnover-you-havent-heard-of

<comment><USER2> Ah yes, the #not_quite_estonian_mafia or as some commenter put it on the site #foreignermafia (as opposed to the #estonianmafia label that goes around every time an Estonian start up is mentioned). In all honesty I'm very happy to see foreigners achieve good results with their start ups in Tallinn. I would love nothing more than to see Tallinn become this international hub for start ups.

<comment><AUTHOR> We love foreigner-started startups as part of #estonianmafia. That's the joy of the broad term, it can include both Estonians abroad, foreigners in Estonia as well as anyone with any relation to Estonia. You're definitely part of it as well :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Although I'm a believer in bootstrapped startups, I just hope that if AdCash raises capital they make it from European funds, and not foreign ones. Europe needs to considerably develop is own venture funds and funding resources, and that won't happen if capital comes from abroad.

<comment><USER4> What Europe needs is less bureaucracy and taxes, Here in Ireland i have to handover 23% (likely to be more in upcoming budget) in VAT on all EU sales!

Not only thats almost a quarter of your price gone in sales tax but, there is a quite abit of added work in remaining tax compliant

Of course if you are Google etc of this island you can just launder your money onto Bahamas or somewhere else warmer and barely pay any taxes

<comment><USER5> Well... Google and Apple pay their taxes in Ireland, rather then where the money is made.

<comment><USER6> Except they don't.

"And under Irish tax law, the second Irish resident subsidiary is not taxed on the royalty payment because it is controlled by managers elsewhere."

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/22/how_vendors_avoid_ta...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/22/how_vendors_avoid_tax/)

Google (as a verb, no pun intended) for "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" if you want the full picture of the scheme.

<comment><USER5> Despite these tax-avoidance shenanigans, I think they do pay tax in Ireland, just a ridiculously small amount.

[http://www.theguardian.com/business/ireland-business-blog- wi...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/ireland-business-blog-with-lisa- ocarroll/2011/mar/24/google-ireland-tax-reasons-bermuda)

<comment><USER4> Oh they do pay some taxes, but rather insignificant amount when compared to the billions they launder thru' here.

And not just Google I believe Apple laundered north of 50 billion and only have a handful of employees here [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax- strate...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy- aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html)

As a small business owner it sickens me with how these large companies can get away with so much here, ok granted they are creating jobs (badly needed) and have other positive effects on a sinking economy but having Revenue put a blind eye on these shenanigans while making life miserable for small companies is unfair.

<comment> lhc- Having "only a handful of employees" is hardly creating jobs. And Apple is a notorious example of a company that doesn't actually reinvest most of the money they avoid paying in taxes, they just sit on enormous cash reserves (reinvestment is often used as an excuse for tax breaks and tax holidays here in the US).

<comment><USER7> Apple's one of the largest employers in Cork, and Google's headcount in Ireland is measured in the thousands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are quite a few companies like this (and much better ones) that power infrastructure for whole industries. I'm always very much impressed by these submarine operations.

Try this one: [http://www.iponweb.com/](http://www.iponweb.com/)

imho it is much more impressive than AdCash.

</comment><comment><USER9> The €25 Million turnover number is misleading. Later, the article notes, "AdCash gives about 70% - 90% of revenue to their publishers, so with a turnover of €25 million, you can do the math on their theoretical profitability."

Let's say they keep 20% (the middle of that range). That's €5 Million. Of course, that's not profitability. That's essentially their revenue before the expense of having 40 employees, etc.

Still impressive but more realistic with that aspect clarified.

<comment><USER10> don't confuse revenue/turnover with gross margin.

gross margin is turnover minus cost of goods sold.

<comment><USER9> Sure, so this is a company with a paltry 20% gross margins.

<comment><USER10> I guess PayPal, eBay, VISA, and all the banks should just shut up shop then...

The number alone means nothing without understanding the business that they're in.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Review my startup - <AUTHOR>

Please check www.quoteroller.com - new saas that helps to create and send proposals.<p>Just released and really need your feedback. UI, Usability, how useful is it. Much Aloha! <comment><USER2> I tried it and I think this needs a lot more work. Overall, this does not feel like it "just works." I realize you are still adding new features, though. You also need to have an English native write your default text. A few nitpicks follow...

-Welcome page is confusing. What am I supposed to do? I just glazed over the explanatory image with the callouts -- it has all the information on the dashboard plus more in the callouts, and everything is the same size.

-The profile page needs to be reworked. Everything is in the wrong order.

-I don't like being forced to add e-mail addresses for the company I am quoting. Are you going to send them an e-mail? It's not clear.

-When I saved the new company and came back, the Project Name field had been cleared.

-The review section is actually a very important section to fill out and should be renamed. At the least, if you want it to be treated as a review, you need to preview the whole proposal on one page instead of showing one section at a time.

-Your default text in the overview should fill in the names of my company and the company I'm quoting.

-Generate PDF has some character issues. The emdashes in your default text come out as –.

-Generate PDF is confusing…if I check the box and then hit send, is it going to generate a PDF and also e-mail it?

-I see the e-mail body has some form fields. Give us a way to preview those. If I make a mistake the e-mail is going to say ::client name:, etc., but I won't know until it's too late. Also, what is the e-mail from: field going to look like? Update: just sent and received my test, and it comes from "Quote Roller Team." You have to change that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Michael, I really appreciate your feedback. You pointed out issues that surely should be addressed. Actually we got half of your items in our bug tracking list. Again, thank you so much for your feedback. It is great and straight to the point. Would you mind to elaborate on profile page? Thanks

<comment><USER2> The fields in the profile page (name, address, city etc) are all out of order. Check out profile pages in some popular apps to see how this should flow. Glad to help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love this concept, and I can see my business using it. We have three team members, so I'm surprised you consider us an Enterprise. I'd be more comfortable if you called us a "Business" or an "Agency". And should a true enterprise be capped at five users and pay just $69 per month? If I were to sign up, I'd get an Advanced plan and deal with just having two users.

As a business owner, this product solves two needs: 1) saves lots of time and 2) ensures that salespeople can assemble good looking proposals.

Do you have example proposals on the website? I want to see what this generates without creating a free account and doing a bunch of work myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apowell, Awesome thought, thank you soo much. We tried to minimize quantity of team members and other items in plans so that we have capacity to add them up after application release. Right now all plans are free and there is no limitation on features. I've already added a task to create one more banner that says "Beautiful proposals in minutes. Check what your clients will get" linking to a live example of web based proposal. Again, really appreciate your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very good looking product. My question is more business related: What is the benefit to the user of having in online (versus desktop app) and paying monthly (versus one time purchase)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for checking out Quote Roller. Here are some benefits: 1) Team work on a proposal 2) Ability to track client's activity 3) Ability to interact with a client 4) (in new release) Clients can sign proposal online 5) (in new release) integrations with popular tools [freshbooks, SalesForce, HighRise] 6) (in new release) mobile version

... and just in general... software is going to loose to saas. It is just more convenient to use web based apps.

<comment><USER4> OK, that's great, thanks. If those points are pitched on the landing page all the better to convert customers I am sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apowell, Awesome thought, thank you soo much. We tried to minimize quantity of team members and other items in plans so that we have capacity to add them up after application release. Right now all plans are free and there is no limitation on features. I've already added a task to create one more banner that says "Beautiful proposals in minutes. Check what your clients will get" linking to a live example of web based proposal. Again, really appreciate your feedback.

</comment><comment><USER5> The key value is going to be hooking it up to CRM systems like Salesforce to automate filling in the address, rates etc. across both systems. My old employer had a horrendously kludgy Active X control that generated MS Word forms from Salesforce fields. Using their API and a web-based service, I would imagine you can do a lot better than that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your feedback, we are working on it. SalesForce integration is coming in April-May. First CRM we decided to connect with is HighRise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clickable:

<http://www.quoteroller.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats on the launch. I have used a service called Proposable before which seems to offer some similar capabilities. The analytics and tracking of the proposal reader is something that was very valuable to me as a B2B marketer.

<comment><AUTHOR> danke! We plan to implement more comprehensive analytics by the end of July.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Add something descriptive to the headline or at least your app's name, or why would people click on it? This is not the best time to post either, so maybe you should try in about 5-6 hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for advise, next post will be much more descriptive

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Typo on the Tour page - "Start with a pre-maid proposal template" should be made, not maid

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, Max. Scheduled for update.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for suggestions, I'll be more descriptive next time.</comment>


Don't use markdown for documentation (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://mister-gold.pro/posts/en/asciidoc-vs-markdown/ <comment><USER2> Concurrent rebuttal thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677970)

Edit: ah, the original post in this sequence was [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675165). It set off the flamewar detector. (Apparently markdown does.) We've turned that penalty off, so it's back on the front page now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not going to happen. Markdown has been a godsend to me in getting my thoughts in writing in a way others can consume, which is critical in my business. My time is already at a premium, and Markdown is both readable to technical and non-technical users, as well as easily parsable to other formats.

This blog post doesn't get it. It immediately starts touting advanced complex features as a benefit. The benefit of Markdown is the absence of advanced complex features. It's my absolute guarantee that what I write is readable and understandable to all audiences and can easily be converted into rich HTML docs with embedded media.

I am not going to stop using Markdown any time soon, and I hope nobody else does either.

<comment> seph-reed > I am not going to stop using Markdown any time soon, and I hope nobody else > does either.

I wish more people would.

I spent a whole 2 minutes fighting with the text styler in a gmail draft today. One of my bullet points ended in styled text, so it really wanted the next bullet point to be that style too. The whole cmd-shift-v for unstyled pasting wasn't the issue. Selecting the text and unstyling it removed the bullet point. The trick was to unstyle all the text except for the first letter, then delete that and type it back in. Would rather just have used MD.

<comment><USER4> You may be interested: [https://markdown- here.com/features.html](https://markdown-here.com/features.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh boy it's been a while since I've read something I disagree with to this extent!

People use Markdown because you can read it both in its formatted version and in its raw unformatted source. Asciidoc is... not that.

Just looking at the examples it looks like a full templating language: conditionals, includes, blocks... I don't want _any_ of this.

> Actually, I was surprised by the fact that so many people think Markdown is > a really powerful tool for documentation.

I don't think Markdown is powerful, unless you're counting "power through simplicity". Markdown's lack of power is a positive: there is a very limited set of things I need to learn in order to use it effectively and someone who knows _literally nothing_ about Markdown can read its source immediately.

<comment><USER6> I don't see how AsciiDoc source is any more or less readable than Markdown. AsciiDoc does everything Markdown does, but since there's a specification there are no inconsistencies.

It also has features beyond that. You don't need to use them.

Edit: here's an example from KiCAD's documentation ("Raw" to view the source, as GitHub supports AsciiDoc as well as Markdown) [https://github.com/KiCad/kicad- doc/blob/master/src/getting_s...](https://github.com/KiCad/kicad- doc/blob/master/src/getting_started_in_kicad/getting_started_in_kicad.adoc)

<comment><USER7> The argument that certain features are optional overlooks the fact that other people can and will use them, especially in collaborative projects.

That's not a death knell. You can gate the features behind style guides, linters, or social conventions. However, those are costs in and of themselves. Additional features of a language always have a carrying cost, even behind optional flags.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Consider reflecting on what you or someone else might mean by "documentation". A submission from 3 hours ago titled "Please don't write your documentation in Markdown" was on the front page earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675165) — but according to its author ([https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1242502542212333576](https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1242502542212333576)),

> _most people are talking a different kind of "documentation". Most people > are thinking of "basic instructions + API", I'm thinking "multithousand-word > manuals and reference materials". The latter needs a lot of stuff the former > doesn't_

With this context, I think it absolutely makes sense that if you're writing something structured (like a book), Markdown may not be the best choice to capture that structure. Of course, if you aren't already sure you're going to have enough documentation "content", then the best choice is whatever gets you writing at all in the first place, whether it's Markdown or Google Docs or emails to colleagues or whatever.

<comment><USER9> That's pretty illustrative, in that it demonstrates how actually thinking about what you are trying to communicate is going to be much more important than what format you've used to write it. That article would be equally poor in html, latex, markdown or reStructuredText.

<comment><USER10> Hah! It's almost as if the developer "tool wars" are stupid because everything has its place. Every tool is useful to someone; someone wrote it for a purpose.

I think an article like this should be called, "markdown is good, but fur large documentation requirements try ASCIIdoc" and approach it from that angle, and then people would have a chance to compare the two, and maybe use a new technology, without the clickbait title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the problem here comes in disagreement over the meaning of "documentation". When we talk about documentation for a program, do we mean the man pages? The README? The help docs? The API specifications? Or a long- form document or manual describing the use of the program, such as 'The C Programming Language' or the Camel books?

For all of the preceding except the long-form document at the end, I'd say Markdown is a perfect tool. It's portable, it's readable as-is, and it's supported on a variety of platforms including all the various git hosting platforms with native parse-and-render. That makes it the perfect tool for straightforward, uncomplicated documents.

For more complicated, formally structured documents, however, Markdown is awful. I've worked on a number of structured documents like public standards docs, procedures docs, and formal specs in Markdown, and they're a pain in the neck. Without using one of the less portable variants like Kramdown, you quickly find yourself having to work your way around the lack of formatting in table cells or specific list-numbering (or lettered lists at all), and so forth, and the less-portable variants mean you suddenly have to worry about your publishing/rendering chain to make sure everything supports what you're using in the form you're using it.

The rubric for me has been this: if the way the content looks/is structured on rendering matters, use one of the more structured tools like AsciiDoc or even Word. If the presentation of the content isn't as crucial, Markdown is a perfect tool (and makes a good default!).

</comment><comment><USER12> > According to John Gruber, the inventor of Markdown:

> "Markdown's syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for > writing for the web."

> So, I want to finish this article with the simplest conclusion ever:

> "Do not use Markdown for things it was not designed to do. For example, to > write documentation."

Documentation is a form of writing on the web. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER13> "Documentation" and "writing on the web" _do_ intersect, but neither is a subset of the other. A technical manual is documentation but I'd rather die than write one in Markdown, especially when there are much better systems in place for that such as TeX, DocBook, or hell even MS Word.

<comment><USER14> Well, yes. Markdown is the right tool for some documentation. For other documentation, it isn't. Use the right tool for the job.

Markdown is a great format for writing basic HTML documents. It sucks for writing books or complex documents, as Matthew Butterick has argued [0]. But that's only a problem if you try to write books or complex documents in Markdown.

[0]: [https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/second- tutorial.html](https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/second-tutorial.html)

<comment><USER15> I used markdown for my documentation of a embedded liux system years back ([https://brainyv2.hak8or.com/](https://brainyv2.hak8or.com/)) and have been very pleased. While it's not a book, it's also not a single page document.

The rust official docs are also written in markdown and thrown at mdbook ([https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/](https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/)) to generate documentation of a similar style, but it's much more book like.

I am pretty much all in for markdown based documentation for almost everything. It does what I need and nothing more.

If I need more control over styling, that's a different story, but thankfully almost all my use cases are good enough without such control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm in utter disagreement. As others have noted, the brilliance of Markdown is its simplicity — both in use and in readability. Since 2008, I've successfully taught so many people — technical and non-technical — how to use Markdown.

The complexities of the various flavors is true — and the author has resisted supporting any of those flavors for that reason — but the way around that, in my opinion, is to treat each flavor as its own language. If I get to the point where my needs require I use another flavor of Markdown (I personally use Fletcher Penny's MultiMarkdown superset and have for ~12 years or so), it is with the understanding that those features are for that project. That's the same approach I use for any collaborative effort.

And frankly, if I have to look at pandoc or as Asciidoc or something else, I'm already complicating my life and the life of the people I work with. Which is fine if that's the premise and if that is the tool we need for our job.

I can and do use Markdown for documentation of almost anything I do, persona, side-hustle, or for work. The Microsoft Docs team (I'm not on that team but I work with them from time to time), even has a VS Code extension pack with a collection of plugins specifically geared to how we do docs. Markdown is a massive part of the workflow, in large part because it is so readable. I honestly wish Microsoft Word and OneNote had native Markdown support (OneNote especially. Yes, there are some kludgy plugins but I mean native).

I have never been a technical writer as a profession (I've written my share of documentation, however), but I was a journalist for a decade and wrote millions of words in Markdown in my text editor. Markdown might not be perfect for all documentation types, but to pretend or even encourage people to NOT use it is a really, really bad take.

</comment><comment><USER17> Pass. Markdown is pragmatic, works well and is most importantly, easy to learn and maintain.

Asciidoc is well-intentioned but is way too complex. Variables, extensible formatting language, and conditionals really don't fit for 99% plus use cases where you'd use Markdown... and if they do, they are as a part of a web templating engine that is being fed markdown.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've done my time with LaTeX for years, arguing for its virtues, and once I discovered that I could write Markdown and convert it to LaTeX with Pandoc, I haven't looked back. I feel like a lot (though admittedly not all) of the Markdown rough-edges go away after that. Granted, I don't use Pandoc for "documentation", just technical writing, so maybe that's irrelevant.

Most of the criticisms listed here aren't _wrong_ exactly, but I feel are a bit short-sighted. If you tell people to stop using a language that's well- supported as a rendering tarket in their favorite code-sharing repo, they're not just going to switch to AsciiDoc or TeX and host a PDF on Dropbox...they're going to stop writing documentation entirely, or just do some crappy attempt of doing "documentation in the comments".

As it stands, I think slightly-NSFW quote says it well: "Documentation is like sex...when it's good it's great, when it's bad it's still better than nothing.".

<comment><USER19> I think the last sentence hurts your point. There is definitely painful sex which is worse than nothing and there is definitely misleading documentation which is worse than nothing.

Markdown is good because it is much easier for someone to notice it needs to be updated and to fix it without yak-shaving.

<comment><USER18> Fair enough, I just thought it was a humorous aphorism more than anything.

Yes, documentation can be out of date but even then it's often still more useful than not having any. I agree with markdown being a lower barrier of entry than most other stuff, increasing its appeal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sorry, but no. Documentation should be small, portable and easy to read on any device, even if you don't have a graphical interface. Hence the reason why markdown succeeded. It is meant to be simple to learn, simple to write, simple to understand. And you can teach a non-tech person how to use it in a matter of 15 minutes. And it is nearly perfect for wikis.

That is no to say that in some cases you may find it lacking. I have and in those cases I always resort to restructuredtext. My biggest argument in favour of restructuredtext is the scikit-lerarn documentation. It covers a variety of complex topics and everything has come out perfect. Annoyingly it hasn't been very successful outside the python world but as an example I am currently using it for documentation on a project which(for the time being at least) won't include any python code.

</comment><comment><USER21> All the benefits OP sees for AsciiDoc are negatives in my book. The primary benefit to Markdown (in my opinion) is that it is always plain human readable text. I don't have to worry that there will still be a program in the future that knows what

include::source_code.js []

function multiply(num1,num2) { var result = num1 * num2; return result; }

means or how to process it.

I can read markdown easily without having to run it through a program. Of course it is nice to run it through a program to change __bold text __to <b>bold text</b>, but that is entirely optional.

I keep all my notes and other writings in markdown because I know that even if all markdown parsers ceased to exist and another one was never written, I would still be able to read everything with no trouble.

</comment><comment><USER22> >Lock-In and Lack of Portability. The tons of flavors and the lack of semantic support results in a lock-in.

Markdown is text, so very portable. The flavors of markdown can be ignored.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The author is missing the difference with markdown, which seems to be the main blocker here. But Asciidoc is more like markdown + extras. It's (optionally) backward compatible with markdown, so unless you use those extra features, it's unlikely that an average person will distinguish the difference. So you can continue to write markdown as usual, only add extra stuff when you learn it.

The minor difference is things like how you embed images, and so on. _For me_, the main feature of the Asciidoc is the syntax for tables. Tables are important for good documentation, but with markdown it's really hard to write with tables, it makes a document a total mess and ruins the whole idea.

</comment><comment><USER23> For me the biggest advantage of markdown is that it works just as well without a parser/formatter. Markdown documents are perfectly readable as-is, in plain source form. All the various alternatives mentioned fail at that.

</comment><comment><USER24> No. Markdown is the sweet spot between plain-text and HTML, and that makes it perfect for the task.

</comment><comment><USER25> The point of Markdown is to be legible as plain text, without being run through a rendering engine. Rendering engines are a bonus, but not required. Based on the samples shared, ASCII Doc is hard to read without a renderer (just like HTML). I appreciate being able to use a simple, well thought out set of conventions to facilitate writing in plain text files. Markdown isn't perfect, but it helps make plain text documents a little more readable, especially when dealing with hyperlinks.

</comment><comment><USER26> (Discussion-wise, the link is a dupe.)

A recent discussion thread on exactly the same topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675165)

</comment><comment><USER27> Disagree. Actually I've written my whole thesis in Markdown and it was distraction free, practical and very easy to work this way.

If somebody needs the link to a good Markdown thesis template: [https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown](https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown)

</comment><comment><USER28> Is Docbook dead?

I see it mentioned here only as an _output_ format, between HTML and PDF, which sounds strange because I don't know any way to view it without first converting it to something like HTML or PDF.

Docbook is a bit verbose, but highly semantic. I always liked the _idea_ of Docbook, though I could never get it to work well. At best, you waste a lot of time installing and configuring a big slow chain of programs to get ugly HTML or PDF that's virtually impossible to adapt to the style of your webpage or book.

Today the docbook.org "Tools" tab only points to a couple of XSLT stylesheets, so it looks like they haven't improved since last I tried. It's one of those technologies that I say "I should learn that...", look at for a couple days, and then say "Maybe I'll check back in 5 or 10 years." Like XSLT.

</comment><comment><USER29> Weak semantics are a feature not a bug. Flavour standardisation is happening (see [https://commonmark.org/](https://commonmark.org/)). The ability to abuse notation a little to provide extensions is actually rather practical. Things like templating, inline code, slides.

</comment><comment><USER30> Whenever I need anything more capable than markdown I go straight to HTML/CSS. I understand this often isn't an option for technical writers who aren't developers but I'd rather not take the time to learn any niche tools in between. I guess you could say "when you can't markdown, markup!"

</comment><comment><USER31> Markdown actually doesn't have tables - they're only in extensions or if implemented in HTML: [https://talk.commonmark.org/t/tables-in-pure- markdown/81](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/tables-in-pure-markdown/81)

</comment><comment><USER32> Most of these reasons why Markdown Fails are weak at best.

The 5th reason especially You can convert markdown into other formats such as PDF, Word, Media WIKI etc using pandoc (I am sure there are other programs). It is trivial to write a shell script or similar to convert markdown files into another format.

> After that, it is hard to migrate to another tool, as custom-defined HTML > classes and flavor's features won't work outside the current set of tools > and page designs.

That contradicts his Lack of Extensibility. Typically anything custom you do outside what is supported officially by the tools maintainer is your own lookout.

Markdown is a like a lot of things that succeed. It is good enough to produce well formatted documentation to be read by a client and simple enough for people to learn it relatively quickly without headaches.

</comment><comment><USER33> Every GitHub repository with a `readme.md` file formatted with Markdown would disagree and proves otherwise.

Markdown solves 90% of the problem, which is more than good enough.

</comment><comment><USER34> Org-mode is another powerful alternative to markdown. Github can render org- mode documentation.

</comment><comment><USER35> I prefer plain text.

Plain text is best viewed in a program that turns URLs into follow-able links. I use vim. Press 'gx' in vim to open the URL under the cursor in your browser.

Plain text is far more ubiquitous than Markdown, although Markdown is slowly gaining ground.

Like Markdown, plain text also has different flavours. UTF-8 is my personal favourite.

Like Markdown, plain text is easy to read in its source form.

Unlike Markdown, there are clear standards for the rendering of plain text.

In plain text, non-savvy people are not confused by ~this sort of thing and~ [this sort of thing]([http://example.com](http://example.com)).

In plain text, a line break is a line break.

Swap out your README.md for a README today!

</comment><comment><USER36> Sure, Markdown isn't perfect - but it's good enough. It's not so bad that we all should start using asciidoc. For most documentation needs, markdown works great over it's real competitor, plain text.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've used rst. It was an unmitigated disaster for anyone except the rst-fan who initiated the project. We eventually hauled the contents over to Confluence, because it was less painful that way. If you can imagine. Later on, we started using markdown.

All the fancy features and attempts to smooth over complexity are a hindrance to having text that is easily writable. The complexity is there for a real text processing engine, you can't avoid it.

I either write LaTeX or org/Markdown, if given the choice. Note that org and markdown are trivially usable if the renderer explodes under you.

</comment><comment><USER38> Your "headline" is just too general..especially for advertising asciidoc ... for sure there are use cases for both

If you do that kind of stuff with people, it would be called "racism" or "discrimination" ...not a good start ;-)

Why should anybody use asciidoc (over md) for a simple doc or user guide ... ? My customers wouldn't pay the premium, because there is no added value for them if I would "learn" asciidoc for these tasks.

And maybe next time better use a term like "I don't use..." people don't like to get told what they have to do. ;-))

</comment><comment><USER39> > As the result, the base Markdown syntax can have an extra set of features > available only in a particular specification.

The big win of Markdown is that the source reads just fine, without conversion to html. The source itself is formatted, especially a monospace font. That makes it easy to write, since you can still easily attend to both content and formatting while writing it. It also makes it readable by folks in terminal or text editor. That also means that if your converter doesn't support some special feature, it will just leave it there and you can still _just read it_.

On the other hand, if as a reader or writer I have to go to some other part of the document or some entirely separate file, e.g. to find out the value of an attribute or edit an included external code snippet, that really interrupts the process. Same for computing if-else clauses.

</comment><comment><USER40> The arguments in this article are extremely weak.

First, yes, Gruber established the base specifications for Markdown back in 2004, but so many other people have added extensions on top of it. This is also a contradiction to the author's third point about there being a lack of extensibility. Pandoc has a really extensive Markdown syntax, as does Github. As far as I know, nobody has mucked around with the basic semantics.

Second, I would much rather be able to express things that aren't supported by my flavor of Markdown with HTML, which is a typesetting language at its core, than something like LaTeX, which is kind of a mess readability-wise. Additionally, the nice thing about HTML is that I can add CSS to it (for most rendering engines) and stylize it however I want).

That said, I agree that AsciiDoc isn't bad. I also liked emacs org-mode before I discovered Markdown.

</comment><comment><USER41> Whether or not Markdown works for documenting your project depends on your definition of "documentation" and "works." Blog posts telling you to stop or start doing something are myopic and rarely helpful.

</comment><comment><USER42> Markdown is far from perfect, yet it remains my format of choice for most writing that requires some formatting. I even write my longer emails in Markdown and then paste them into an email app (would be great if gmail accepted markdown).

If you require as much power for your documentation as demonstrated and don't mind the relative obscurity in the source, why not just write it in your favorite language and have it output to whatever format you want? Most languages have a means of entering muti-line strings. And then you can include all the bells and whistles your language and its ecosystem provides.

</comment><comment><USER43> To the author: perhaps you're an authoritarian manager, or a manque thereof. I don't know. But I'm pretty sure you're not the boss of the internet. So please drop the petulant imperative title.

</comment><comment><USER44> YAMTF: Yet Another Mouth To Feed. Noun:

"Tool that purports to simplify, yet which exacerbates complexity."

If one is adept at the HTML, it is not infrequently faster to just use that instead of figuring out how we do X in Y new tool.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't mind giving up Markdown for writing docs, but only if we all agree to use Org-mode text instead.

</comment><comment><USER45> If Markdown gets you the features you need, go for it. In my experience, it usually doesn't, except for the simplest projects. So I use reStructuredText, so that I don't have to deal with someone telling me I need to use DITA because the documentation is too low-fidelity.

</comment><comment><USER46> Can't we just use JSX or XML? Those both beat this house of cards formed out of one-off and nonstandard extensions, parsers, and pipelines built around Markdown, which in itself is deficient and prompts the creation of these fragmented ecosystems.

<comment><USER19> Asciidoc and RST fall down because they act like Excel: a UI which expects its user to work through a tutorial on pivot tables. The success of Markdown comes from knowing that its users don't want to spend any more time learning it than they spend learning how their bank website works.

So you want to preserve that navigability.

A source-reader isn't going to have the time to learn "conventions" like rails asks them to do. So for any deviations from markdown, you would want the reader of the source to be able to see how those are defined.

I think the sweet spot would be markdown-biased JSX.

The directory structure would be:

\- `/components` with two file to start: index.jsx, which would import the `Markdown` element from the library and re-export it. There would also be custom-component-example.jsx to demonstrate and document the interface expected by the renderer. Any custom components go in this directory.

\- `/theme` which has theme information across the whole site. If you want a different theme for a different part of the page, that is a different site

\- `/source` with a tree of mostly .md files, but occasionally .jsxmd files which tell the source-reader where the component was defined, but otherwise get out of the way. A .jsxmd file might look like this:

```

      from '../../components' import Markdown, Aside;

      export default () => (<Markdown>

      ## JavaScript Resources

      The React documentation assumes some familiarity with programming in the JavaScript language.
      You don't have to be an expert, but it's harder to learn both React and JavaScript at the same time.

      We recommend going through this JavaScript overview to check your knowledge level.
      It will take you between 30 minutes and an hour but you will feel more confident learning React.

      <Aside>
      #### Tip

      Whenever you get confused by something in JavaScript,
      MDN and javascript.info are great websites to check.
      There are also community support forums where you can ask for help.
      </Aside>

      ## Practical Tutorial

      If you prefer to learn by doing, check out our practical tutorial.
      In this tutorial, we build a tic-tac-toe game in React.
      You might be tempted to skip it because you're not into building games — but give it a chance.
      The techniques you'll learn in the tutorial are fundamental to building any React apps,
      and mastering it will give you a much deeper understanding.

      </Markdown>)

```

<comment><USER47> This seems worse for the markdown use case. The tags are distracting, and arbitrary use cases (like github readmes, or in browser previews) need to run JS code to render it, which probably spits out HTML specific output and requires all renderers to pull in the web stack.

Compare that to markdown, where in the worst case, the .md file is readable as a doc in isolation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_(markup)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_\(markup\))

I remember ages ago someone went and did a review of markup DSLs and _Creole_ was their winner IIRC.

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish there was a datastructure standard for the "AST" that mardown et. al. produce. (Maybe that's just HTML? I wonder what Pandoc's internal datastructure(s) for docs look like..?)

</comment><comment><USER49> Hm. The fact that markdown doesn't understand its own structure is a bit annoying - but anchor tags are easy.

I could be swayed, but I personally LIKE markdowns limited palette.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is just too much. Nobody wants to have a linter for their code "documentation"! Oh we're gonna have the linter in our CI pipeline too probably.

</comment><comment><USER51> The ifdef and ifeval features are nice, but I would not take advice about document formatting from anyone who uses full justification layout.

</comment><comment><USER52> no

</comment><comment><USER53> Who's the idiot who made google docs and didn't focus-test it for software docs? You need a third party add on just for code blocks ffs. I really wanted to use Google Docs for this but it just didn't work. Confluence makes you switch between edit mode and view mode just like Markdown, and Notion is cool but has limited features for this application (no api)

Sadly there's no really mind blowing solution for documentation in 2020. Crazy. Markdown for me for now

</comment><comment><USER54> As long as the converted html is provided for the reader, markdown is perfect

</comment><comment><USER55> I feel for the author. However, I strongly disagree with the conclusions here in practice. A lot of this boils down to "other tools are better," and that's true, but the issue is that it's really, really hard to get people to write documentation, and handing them a perfect but complex tool means they're less likely to actually go through with it.

I've written every kind of documentation in Markdown, and it's not a panacea, but it does work. I'll talk about the article's points first, though:

> Lack of specification

[https://commonmark.org/](https://commonmark.org/). It's not perfect, but GFM and it are (slowly) unifying. Pick one, document that that's the one you support, and you're done.

> Flavors

See answer 1.

> Lack of Extensibility

While it does not have an extension system, that doesn't mean that you can't do it. As long as you only add things, you should be good to go. Most things you'd want that aren't in the spec proper have some sort of existing extension that will solve your problems.

This is not ideal, but it's also not insurmountable. This is the only true negative I agree with on this list, I just don't think it's the end of the world.

> Lack of Semantic Meaning.

While this is true in a sense, at the same time, CommonMark lets you put any string on a code fence, which means that you can add whatever sematnic you'd like.

> Markdown is now dependent on specific HTML classes, and page design

No more dependent on those classes than on whatever other semantic marker you were trying to do, and if you want to change them, do what you'd have to do with the semantic: configure your tooling to put out something else.

> Document content is no longer portable to other output formats

This problem would still exist if semantics were there; someone has to write the mapping.

> Conversion to other markup tools and page designs becomes much harder

I disagree, but there's also no justification, so it's hard to respond.

> Lock-In and Lack of Portability.

This is a non-issue in practice. It's just like any other format.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

All of Rust's documentation is in Markdown. We've overcome these challenges in a few ways:

* Choosing CommonMark

* Defining some additional, backwards-compatible with regular Markdown semantics. If you don't use them, you won't get as nice of an output in some cases, but if you do, stuff is a lot nicer. This includes things like "Show an icon to indicate that this does not compile" or "run this code sample as a test" or "this is a summary line and then this is a body."

* Writing Markdown to other format compilers. The Rust book (540 pages for its first printing) was written 100% in Markdown. Our editors don't use Markdown, they use Word. Carol, my co-author, wrote a DOCX to Markdown compiler in XSLT[1]. We write Markdown, compile it to HTML, concatenate it all into one big document, and send it to them. They open it in Word, they leave comments, we take the resulting DOCX, compile it back to Markdown, and address things.

[1]: [https://github.com/rust-lang/book/blob/master/tools/docx- to-...](https://github.com/rust-lang/book/blob/master/tools/docx-to-md.xsl)

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm guessing the author doesn't like reStructuredText either.

</comment><comment><USER57> Both alternatives look like garbage as plain text.

</comment><comment><USER58> At least he's not vehemently advocating Word.

</comment><comment><USER59> rST fits all the goals of both sides of this argument. Reads well in original format, supports more features than Markdown.

</comment><comment><USER60> > Note: I Love Markdown

</comment><comment><USER61> Don't tell me what to do.

Also, I like markdown.

</comment><comment><USER62> No way!

</comment><comment><USER63> What is wrong with you... Markdown is structured enough to be ingested by a parser. You can input or output Markdown from and into any other structure you prefer... :D</comment>


Free to Play [video] - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/app/245550/

<comment> markus-rogue yea yea yea</comment>


Kevin Rose Weighs in on iPhone OS 3.0 - <AUTHOR> http://news.worldofapple.com/archives/2009/03/15/kevin-rose-weighs-in-on-iphone-os-30/

<comment><USER2> Kevin Rose, ah yes, that famous Apple predictor. <http://is.gd/nx0e>

<comment><USER3> no matter how much the 'prophets' miss - there's always someone that finds what they say relevant (and right). All hail the the marketing powers of cognitive bias and huge audiences...</comment></comment>


Show HN: Simplistic game for iOS written in OpenGL ES 2.0 - <AUTHOR>

Hi folks,
I thought I'd share my game I've been writing for the last several months. It's my first one written in OpenGL ES 2.0 so it's very basic, but I still like the outcome. It's paid so I added some promo codes at the bottom.
The URL for the game is http://www.til3s.com and the game itself can be found on the App Store at http://appstore.com/til3stilesin3d.
Let me know what you think!
PTRFN7TTX4NJ   LK3XY7AAXLWL   ALLTXT3ETRK3 MTMR3NPRA7YM   X9TL9NXWJR4K   RMKAMFPHEAE3 NT7NJA3PFL7J   F3PF7N9J9366   9H4MR6MJEFAP <comment><USER2> Good game. I like how the music builds up and colors change as I progress. I also like that the gesture help cues automatically disappears as you get going. My only feedback is to make it more obvious that the column of moving tiles is not interactive.

Thank you

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the hint. Thinking of how I could achieve that. Thanks for downloading! :)</comment></comment>


Readlax – Speed Reading Tools - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readlax-speed-reading/noggimpgfjnknjblddfibbdnocffdoii <comment><USER2> I've been reading its reviews and I can't honestly say if they are machine generated or not. They are so generic that they'd work for any app. Examples:

> This chrome extension saves my time. Just love it. Very very useful thing I > have ever got.

> It's a awesome app and work effectively. I try to use in my all work. It's > truly a great extension

> Highly recommended extension. I am so much impressed with it. In one word > it's great.

> This extension has improved my work efficiently. I am very much comfort in > every time for this extension. In one word it's best.

> Its relax to run. Totally a WOW app. Looking forward for more updates. > Thanks.

> This is one awesome app that I have come across so far. The functions and > features available are outstanding. I love it ..!

And now some with basic context awareness (the word "Read" from "Readlax - Speed Reading"). Examples:

> Speed reading apps is a very enjoyable to run. Its simple instructions will > make you comfortable to use it. Just loved it.

> Its a awesome app that makes reading speedy easier and interesting. Highly > recommend.

> I am very much happy to get it. I faced difficulties when I used other apps. > But after getting this it makes my reading so simple and flexible.

> This app makes my reading very speedy. I highly recommend it. Best app ever.

I'm inclined to believe that they are spam. But surely Google won't allow that, _right_?

<comment><USER3> I'm so grateful that HN has such a fine-tuned BS detector - filters out the noise (eg. suspicious apps like this) very quickly.

<comment><USER4> I didn't even look at the link. Speed reading doesn't exist. It is, and always has been, a hoax. I thought this was widespread knowledge by now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't agree with you. Speed reading exist. Just remember how fast you read in school and in university. It's two different speeds. That skill you can train. It's like going to the gym to train the body. You can train your brain as well. Standart person read with speed 150-200 words per minute, but it's very easy to train speed to 700-1500 words. For example, after some training, I can read with 700-1000 wpm. And as usual, I read 10 books every month. I think it's great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kind of disappointing. Best thing for reading that I've found lately is Spritz ([http://spritzinc.com/](http://spritzinc.com/)) . I use it mainly to read online articles. It's a shame there are not many apps that use Spritz to read books and other stuff. I tried some of the website recommendations buy they weren't very good IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't like Sprits. It could be good for training eyes to recognize words but it's not good to train speed reading. It's not natural for reading

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Made a similar app for android some years back. Let me know if someone wants the source code of this

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blueflame....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blueflame.speedreader)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to learn code, could u send to my eamil any usefull info, golovatyi[@].hotmail.com Please delete brackets when send email

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi. I'm founder of Readlax and Lead developer there. This app helps to improve reading skill, train speed reading and focusing for eyes.

<comment><USER4> Does it bother you that there is substantial scientific research showing that no meaningful increase in reading speed is possible without sacrificing comprehension? In essence, showing that speed reading is a hoax?

<comment><AUTHOR> Speed Reading is just trained a skill. You can train it like a body in exercise room. Reading consists from three steps: decoding text symbols (you should train decode couple words at one glance), comprehensive that text and retention. For speed reading, you should train all these steps. Just think about your reading speed on 7-8 age and on 22 age (in university). Does it have the difference? I think yes, but why? Because it was trained year by year and this skill is trainable. For example, I read before start to learn speed reading 2-3 books a month, but now I read 8-12 books a month. This is my challenge for 2017 year - [https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/8700342](https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/8700342)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I downloaded it and tried it on Scribd and I can't tell what it is doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> open any books and click button "Start Reading"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing that helps my reading, paradoxically, is listening to speech on headphones whilst out on a walk. I sometimes find myself visualising the words as I hear them. Presumably this helps me to recognise them more speedily in print.

<comment><USER9> If visualizing words at listening speed helps you read faster, you're probably reading pretty slowly.

One key technique in beginning speed reading is to stop subvocalizing the words, so that you can go faster than speech.

<comment><USER10> What is done instead of subvocalizing the words? Everytime I look at a word I instantly "hear" it, my imagination isn't good enough to conceive of what could replace that internal experience.

<comment><USER9> The purpose of the written word is to help you think the concept.

You can read faster if can see the wordand think the concept rather than mentally sounding it out:

        abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

did you really vocalize each letter, or did you just think the concept, "alphabet"?

       alphabetically

rather than "al-fu-beh-ti-cully" just the concept of "a-z order".

You can also see groups of words at a time:

        The end of the road

and think the concept instead of thinking each syllable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>