Apple to wrap digital books in FairPlay copy protection - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/02/apple-ibooks-drm-fairplay.html <comment><USER2> Okay - is anyone _actually_ surprised by this?

Publishers clearly gave Apple a lot of leeway in order to generate some competition for the Kindle - but I doubt dropping DRM would be one of them.

<comment><USER3> What I'm curious about is if they'll be labeling DRM/DRM-Free book downloads like they started doing with songs.

I know that at least a few publishers are willing to go the no-DRM route.

Contrast with Audible, for example. Cory Doctorow has had public arguments about the fact that they will not let him sell audio versions of his books without DRM.

<comment><USER4> > I know that at least a few publishers are willing to go the no-DRM route.

RPG (not "computer RPG") publishing has been in a post-DRM era for several years now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has the book publishing industry failed to learn from the music publishing industry?

Perhaps, this is a last ditch effort at extracting as much revenue as they can by retaining their illusion of control over something that fundamentally needs to be easy to share so that it becomes viral and generates a lot more revenue...

<comment><USER6> I don't think the two situations are entirely comparable.

The decision to purchase music is squarely on an individual, whereas in colleges I think there's plenty of politics involved in bribing committees to keep on using the newest editions of books, thereby practically forcing students to purchase certain books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought FairPlay was alive and well on video files sold through iTunes?

<comment><USER8> Most, not all. Movie downloads have it, but not all music videos do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"according to sources in the publishing industry."_

Who?

Of course, we'll never find out _who_ , whether or not this is true.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it sort of depends on the professionalism of the LA Times reporting, but Jobs has been making the rounds of enough different publishers (and presumably had to share _something_ of how "protection" is going to be handled). Certainly likely that some of those publishers loosened their lips to a LAT reporter.</comment></comment>


The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher - ely-s http://school.neocities.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> "If I'm told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think."

?</comment>


2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-000-year-old-redwoods-survive-wildfire-california-s-oldest-n1237949 <comment><USER2> I was elated to read this, and then disappointed at the comments here. It seems to be feeding an argument of "see, fires are natural and these trees are old - Climate Change is a fear-mongering hoax!"

Firestorms are not the meandering fires that have long been a natural part of ecosystems. Ladder fires — where fire leaves the forest floor, up to the crowns, creating a wall of fire that can change weather patterns — are incredibly powerful events. Despite how much fire these trees have survived over their long lives, they dodged a bullet here.

As an environmentalist, seeing that these trees won this battle is stirring. But it's cavalier to assume they'll win the next fight, or the one after that.

Fires are becoming more intense, more frequent, more damaging. Part of this is because the yearly burns the Native American Indians did to maintain the habitat have gone the way of history. Part of it is due to natural drought cycles. Part of it is our increasing development of the urban-wilderness interface. And part of it is climate change. The world is getting hotter, and drier. We are in the midst of a mass extinction event. These trees survived today, but will we do anything to help them survive this century?

<comment><USER3> The world is getting hotter, but only parts of it are getting drier. Parts of it are getting wetter. Overall it will get wetter. For each 1C rise in temperature, the air can hold about 7% [1] more water vapor. Warmer air above warmer oceans will pick up more water and dump it over much the same places as it does now, although the prevailing winds and ocean currents changing will also change that up.

I think the effect will mostly be that dry places will get drier and wet places will get wetter. Which is a disagreeable change, to be sure.

[1] [http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr_oa/c047p123.pdf](http://www.int- res.com/articles/cr_oa/c047p123.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Thats a bad way to look at it.

A better way:

The moisture is being sucked out of some places and falling to others. So one area is becoming barren, and another is being flooded. This means a few things:

\- It is harder to farm. Can't farm when it is flooded, can't farm when it is barren

\- It is harder to keep fixed cities because the climate changes. Imagine having to move NYC every 10 years. It is far worse when people don't have good infrastructure.

\- The displacement of people will make the syrian refugee crisis look pale in comparison to what is coming.

\- Entire ecologies being destroyed is gonna be an economic hit we can barely comprehend.

\- Extreme weather is another effect. Example being freezing temperatures mid- bloom. Or a hot week mid winter. Crops grow and freeze causing entire crop failures.

And fires are only gonna get worse. The fact that right now this tree survived is great. But will it in 10 years?

<comment><USER5> Overly pessimistic. We have irrigation, dams, and drainage, we're not totally beholden to the natural rainfall cycle anymore for farming. As far as coastal cities go, we should be investing more in sea walls, but I think technology can help solve these problems too as it has so far in Miami and Venice. If it eventually gets too expensive to maintain that will happen gradually, not like a sudden refugee crisis.

<comment><USER6> we're not too protected either. What percentage of the US's food gets grown in CA? [https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/27/california-farms- prod...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/27/california-farms-produce-a- lot-of-food-but-what-and-how-much-might-surprise- you/#:~:text=While%20California%20produces%2013%20percent,more\)%20for%20the%20following%20crops).

The solution to California's droughts isn't just dams. You can't build a dam large enough to hold enough water for going multiple years without rainfall and the aquifers, which bank water in the ground were deeply depleted in the last drought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Redwoods not only survive the fires, they tend to proliferate afterwards. After lesser trees have been cleared out by the fires, redwood seedlings take root.

Redwoods also thrive in low rain areas that are prone to fog because they benefit from the fog in a way that other trees do not.

I once suggested redwoods as an alternate or additional metaphor for giftedness re Stephanie Tolan's "Is it a cheetah?"

[https://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm](https://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm)

My idea didn't get any traction, but I think we need more mental models than the "cheetah" one because that not only implicitly suggests that gifted kids are always fast, it also implicitly suggests that they are dangerous predators. While it is true that intelligence can make you a danger, I would like to see myriad metaphors proliferate and redwoods are at the top of my list as a metaphor I would like to see proliferate.

<comment><USER8> I believe the heat of a wildfire is literally the trigger for the cone to open up and release the redwood's seeds! (I don't know the exact mechanism for this, though.)

<comment><USER7> I don't know. I know there is a pine that does that, but I'm in rough shape and trying to stay out of trouble, which is challenging for me under the best of circumstances.

I remember the pine cone of I think a yellow pine species opens up at 170 degrees, so it typically opens in response to fire. A quick google suggests it is called a Jack Pine.

Hurricanes are also thought to be responsible for bringing fly species to islands and new islands end up having bird poo on them with seeds the birds ingested. Plants do this intentionally to let birds spread their seeds because birds lack teeth, so the seeds don't get chewed up in the process.

Hot peppers are intended to be eaten by birds but not other species. They are hot as a form of chemical warfare against things they don't want eating them. Chocolate and maybe also coffee is bitter like it is to kill ants and if you have sufficiently dark chocolate (in, say, a tent), it doesn't attract ants. Milk chocolate attracts ants because of the sugar, but the cocoa itself is ant poison.

Anyway, little islands form from volcanos and they start sticking up out of the ocean a little and they become resting places for birds and the bird poo is the first soil and fertilizer on these barren volcanic rocks and then coconut trees are typically the first trees because the coconut will float across the ocean without being killed by the salt water and land on some newly formed little island with a bit of bird poo and a few plants and it will take root. I think no other tree does that.

If you get rid of all "disasters" entirely, you kill off a lot of stuff. Mother Nature or "mother earth" has fascinating and complex ways of letting life find a way and fire laying waste to some portion of the forest and leaving in its wake fertile soil and opening the cones of some pine species is just one of the fascinating ways she does that.

Anyway, I have big plans to shut up on HN and attempt to go behave now by being elsewhere. Ciao.

<comment><USER9> Why shut up? Your post was very informative and thanks to you I learned a lot of things!

However, I bet that the scale of the wildfires in our apocalyptic late- Anthropocene is something hardly seen before in healthy forests... all these species would be better off with less of it.

<comment><USER7> I have a medical condition and I was extremely frazzled. I can't judge if I'm making sense or not when I'm really frazzled. I've napped a bit, so I'm less frazzled now, but I'm still dealing with a lot of stress, as is often the case.

<comment><USER9> You were perfectly making sense! ^^

I hope you are better now, I am sorry to hear that you had medical problems... Do not give up! Your contributions are helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A hundred miles north of this fire, at the Armstrong Redwood State Park, there is another lightning-caused wildfire that is burning through an old growth grove.

That fire is burning through the forest floor only, and is significantly less dangerous. The 1400-year-old Armstrong tree, and park buildings, have been protected, while the fire is free to burn through the surrounding undergrowth. Everyone involved seems to suggest that the fire is a net positive for the forest, and an overdue ecological renewal.

[https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/flames-yet-to- rea...](https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/flames-yet-to-reach- armstrong-woods-old-growth-forest/)

While it's definitely sad to see historic buildings destroyed, not to mention hundreds of homes, I look forward to returning to Big Basin over the next few years to witness this renewal first-hand.

<comment><USER11> > The 1400-year-old Armstrong tree

The bare fact that a tree is 1400 years old is pretty strong evidence that it's unlikely to be harmed by a fire.

<comment><USER12> The global temperature anomaly is already out-of-range for not only the lifetime of this tree, but much of its evolutionary history. We are entering an out-of-context situation for a large portion of the earth's extant lifeforms.

<comment><USER13> California has been subject to century long droughts in the not too distant past (about 1000 years ago).

"BEGINNING about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern California from time to time, new studies of past climates show. The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur."

[https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient- dr...](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-droughts-a- warning-to-california.html)

What's amazing is that many of these trees survived that. And that modern humans think modern California is "normal".

<comment><USER14> Further to that, the global temperature anomaly has caused rainfall patterns to change, meaning some places are trending wetter, and some drier, and crucially, volatility has increased. Having wet seasons, generating fuel load, followed by dry is more problematic than a sustained drought.

<comment><USER15> This was actually part of my theory of why California electric companies got so lazy about tree and brush removal around their power lines. I don't think it's a coincidence that just 1 year after exiting a 6 year drought state power companies started huge fires in both Northern and Southern California.

<comment><USER14> So, I'm curious, what do you think would motivate a power company to let their infrastructure burn, along with the trees?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Climate change is real, but climate change includes both changing temperatures and rain patterns AND change to the local climate of the forest.

When we prevent small fires from happening that burn out all of the small bushes and trees on the forest floor, we dramatically change the climate of the forest. When we build houses in the middle of the forest and then _fight_ the fires that threaten them, we just build up more fuel that will eventually result in giant fires like the ones we are seeing now.

Of course temperature changes and changes in rain make this all worse as well.

But if we're going to be honest about climate change, then we need to be honest about climate change. We have entire government agencies whose sole purpose is to fight against the natural ecology of the forest.

Something big that we can do to both allow for houses and towns to exist in the forest, _and_ live harmoniously with the environment: allow logging companies to come in and tend to the forest. Just regulate them.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was just at Big Basin Headquarters on August 17th for a hike and some trails were closed due to fire then.

It's hard to believe that's all gone but I am really happy the huge ancient trees survived. It's one of my favorite places in the world.

I did the skyline to the sea trail with my wife a few years ago and it was fantastic. The redwoods are really incredible.

An article about their fire resistance: [https://sempervirens.org/redwoods- and-wildfires/](https://sempervirens.org/redwoods-and-wildfires/)

A donation link to the Sempervirens Fund which helps protect these incredible trees: [https://secure.sempervirens.org/onlineactions/l2kebl2BfkqzEy...](https://secure.sempervirens.org/onlineactions/l2kebl2BfkqzEy9l0oZQcA2?ms=10ZW100_F)

</comment><comment><USER18> The fires ravaging these forests is really sad, although I was pretty meh on living in the Bay Area, the immediate access to amazing state wildlife parks was absolutely unparalleled. IMO, who cares if it's torching scrubby LA hills or hollywood mansions?

My visit to Big Basin after huge rains in 2017 (arguably a stupid decision) was basically the first time I could say I had a "religious" experience in nature. Forests are most alive after a big rain, the entire day I spent there is absolutely seared into my mind. Every conceivable part of the forest was alive, surging out of the ground and out to take a look at what was new.

It's important to note that tragedy is an all too common step in evolutionary time for forests, this is the way that they continue to evolve and move forward. The last time I visited was after huge mud slides and rivers overrunning their banks. Many of the trails were blocked by 12' diameter trees that had fallen when the soil beneath their roots became too waterlogged or washed away. I can only hope that these forests will continue to thrive beyond my lifetime.

I will say though, visiting Big Basin really made me question how we could actually cut down forests like this just to build stupid houses. And we still are, logging trucks and signs for logging companies are all over the roads surrounding Big Basin.

</comment><comment><USER19> The coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) [1]:

> In response to forest fires, the trees have developed various adaptations. > The thick, fibrous bark of coast redwoods is extremely fire-resistant; it > grows to at least a foot thick and protects mature trees from fire damage. > In addition, the redwoods contain little flammable pitch or resin. If > damaged by fire, a redwood readily sprouts new branches or even an entirely > new crown, and if the parent tree is killed, new buds sprout from its base. > Fires, moreover, appear to actually benefit redwoods by causing substantial > mortality in competing species while having only minor effects on redwood. > Burned areas are favorable to the successful germination of redwood seeds.

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

</comment><comment><USER20> Big Basin has burned before, and was "doomed" in 1904: [https://mobile.twitter.com/DustinMulvaney/status/12977663634...](https://mobile.twitter.com/DustinMulvaney/status/1297766363457400832)

</comment><comment><USER21> "Withstand" is a funny word. Forests _need_ fire. Fire is destructive to the organs (flora and fauna) but beneficial to the organism (a forest).

I'm thinking of all of the sequoia seeds, now germinated from the fire[1], that will sprout next year into full sunlight that hasn't touched the forest floor in hundreds of years.

It is sad though that it's also destructive to the lives of so many people. May everyone find safety who is now in harm's way.

1\. [https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant- sequoia-n...](https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant-sequoia- needs-fire-to-grow)

<comment><USER22> > It is sad though that it's also destructive to the lives of so many people.

Eh, maybe it's just me but I've always felt worse for the animals than the people.

<comment><USER23> People are animals and also part of nature, no matter how far above it we think that we are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you tour Muir Woods, many redwoods feature fire damage from fires ages ago.

<comment><USER25> Redwoods are adapted to fire, yes, but surely there's _some_ limit to how much they can take. Thankfully it seems this event may have been below that limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I guess 2000 is a long time biologically and I suppose those trees have seen bad fires before climate change really kicked off.

I'm sure there were very dry and warm periods before this too.

Even thought we might think we're dominating nature, I'm sure it has a few tricks up it's sleeve yet.

<comment><USER27> The concerning issue with this fire is that humans have spent most of the last 100 years suppressing wildfires in these forests. This leads to an unprecedented amount of fuel built up on the forest floor, which leads to abnormally large and hot wildfires. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be too much for the redwoods, though time will tell.

<comment><USER14> Not sure what fire plans California have, but prescribed burning is a thing.

[https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed- fire](https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire)

<comment><USER28> It's a thing, but it's not being done on a large enough scale. It's and incredibly difficult, decade long process to get plans approved on public lands. Private lands are much easier but still need extensive permitting through fire and air quality officials. We're just starting to acknowledge the former extent of cultural burning in California, and the current need for fire on the landscape. It's gotten easier to get the general public on board over the last couple years, and hopefully that trend continues!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> selective harvesting (thinning), controlled burns and other tasks are hard sells to tree hugging Californians. However, it could be someone's livelihood AND a partial solution to the issues that come up.

How much do we spend on forest firefighting? How much do we spend on "no logging" lobbying? How much do we spend on smoke inhalation property damage and all the public communications?

All that could be recouped AND an industry could be revived.

<comment><USER30> Loggers tend to clear cut large trees, which is the exact opposite of what we need.

Obviously if they wanted to thin out the smaller trees that would be beneficial but the profitability there is questionable.

<comment><USER23> Loggers would love to cut down these ancient beauties. I hope they never get the chance to, but I worry with Presidents like the current one if at some point in the future they will tell the loggers to flatten these old growth forests just to make a few bucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Original article: [https://apnews.com/ce2946afbc66040260cc76ffbbe744ca](https://apnews.com/ce2946afbc66040260cc76ffbbe744ca)

The nbcnews.com site refuses to show content in Firefox Focus on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why are there always so many fires in California?

<comment><USER33> Coastal California sees rain from about the end of October through February, then tapers off to about nothing by May. It then does not rain again until Halloween. I used to think "doesn't rain" meant "half an inch every couple of weeks" but it does not rain in fact at all, it's totally bone dry for the hottest part of the year, until late fall. Getting three inches over the weekend is enough precipitation in the bay area to warrant flood warnings for several days. Compared to Dallas Texas where three inches in an afternoon might cause very localized flooding for an hour or two. It's quite bone dry here in the summers, the ground is literally "tinder dry" for months on end.

If you look at meso scale weather, there's a high pressure zone that develops between San Fransisco and Hawaii every summer which wards off low pressure (rain) systems. Generally develops by early June and lasts through August. Research "Pacific High" or "TransPac weather routing" or "Pac Cup weather routing" it's a major component of Pacific Ocean sailing races

<comment><USER34> I reckon that 3" of rain in a day would cause serious flooding here in southern Colorado. It'd certainly set a record! I don't think I've seen so much in my entire life, so it floors me to hear it's no big in Dallas

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Let's take a moment and recognize the fear-mongering going on a few days ago where there were articles saying "this time is different because of climate change, this time climate change super fires have caused a national treasure to be destroyed"

<comment><USER36> Are you saying there's not enough evidence to associate the wack storm that prefaced this with climate change?

The Bay area NEVER gets rain for like almost, 8 months of the year. This was a freak event.

<comment><USER35> I'm just saying there was a lot of mourning and saying "the redwoods are gone".

When people responded "you don't get to be a 1000+ year old tree without being able to survive fires" the response was "yeah but that was before climate change. These trees are likely gone forever now because climate change combined with fire suppression is causing super fires that burn much hotter"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Lindy

<comment><USER29> i believe ^^ is referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)

This concept could be applied to mean that because the forest survived this event, we should expect to last much longer than previously assumed. (something like that at least...)

<comment><USER37> Correct. Not sure who these unread swine with their trigger happy downboat buttons think they are.

As well, that the tree is already 2,000 years old, we shouldn't be surprised it's survived this fire. It's survived many fires.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I mean they are 2,000 years old. Does NBC think this is the first fire in 2,000 years?

</comment><comment><USER39> "What did you think, you stupid apes? We were here long before you and we will be here long after you are gone!"

</comment><comment><USER40> Young man, do you know many fires I have seen and survived over my years?

(In other words, fires are part of nature.)

</comment><comment><USER41> Offtopic: anybody else find it hilarious how this completely serious news piece is followed by a section of spam-grade garbage "advertisements?" [1]

How the hell does a news organization decide this is a worthy way of pumping up revenues?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboola#Reception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboola#Reception)

ps. not on my usual computer, yes I know of adblocking :-)

<comment><USER42> This has been the case with most News Sites, information portals etc for the last 2-3 years. They have semi-porn pictures with click bait titles after the news story that lure users into shady sites with shady intentions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Another demonstration than ancien forests are fireproof whereas young forests aren't. This is the reason that makes centenary trees so valuable and so rare.

But each fire gnaw a little of this protection.

Arsonists should be more severely punished. Is the same as terrorism, just much more insidious, causing a bigger economical damage and a durable damage at long term. Not to mention that also kills people...

Why is so well accepted as unavoidable by the public opinion still amazes me

</comment><comment><USER44> So many on HN were talking about how these fires were so much more intense than the other fires, and that probably Big Basin would be gone forever, etc.

Just another example of how people especially on HN read a few articles and then think they are experts on the topic.

The ancient redwoods survived and will thrive, as fully expected. It's not that forest fires are great, but it's a natural process of life and people thinking "this time it's different" are usually wrong.

</comment><comment><USER45> Many commentators have blamed climate change for the fires because it is fashionable, especially on the left, to do so. The reality is that the very small change in temperatures produced by climate change isn't sufficient to produce a change in the rate of fires. We'll have to wait a long time for climate change to produce such effects, if it ever does. I would lay the blame more on our society's technological stagnation in terms of its inability to come up with better technologies than those that have existed since the 1950s to fit fires. We haven't buried our power lines, we don't have strategically positioned water storage systems, we don't have huge drones specifically for firefighting that could dump more water on the fires than an ordinary helicopter could.

I'd say this article barely meets HN's standards of something that garners intellectual interest and is more the type of thing I'd expect to see on Reddit alongside cat videos. And then of course there is the environmentalist bent that the redwoods of at most sentimental value were the important thing that burned down, rather than things of material value to people. I wonder if anyone ended up homeless as a result of the fires.

According to the theory of radical skepticism it is very tough to put a probability bound on supposedly low probability disasters like fires, and so we must be prepared for them.

<comment><USER46> Today, there's more low hanging fruit in the world of fire prevention than fire fighting. It's mostly low-tech work that just needs adequate funding and the political will: manually clearing out brush, using grazing animals like goats, controlled burns. Ultimately, the overgrowth has to go, one way or another.

Controlled burns especially have become politically unpopular in recent decades, but they're tremendously effective. With controlled burns, we can burn small amounts of brush when the wind is blowing gently away from major population centers. If we want to fund technical solutions, I'd invest in software that models the best times and places to conduct these controlled burn operations FAR before we start discussing firefighting drones.</comment></comment>


Getting things done in LaTeX (or not) - <AUTHOR> http://przemoc.tumblr.com/post/28208254393/getting-things-done-in-latex-or-not

<comment><USER2> Most people have the problems described in this blog because they try to go from "zero" to "having to write a thesis" in LaTeX. Even for someone who is intelligent enough to write a thesis in a subject requiring the use of LaTeX, that's a very, very tall order, even if taken in a vacuum.

For what it's worth, I created a series of short tutorial videos for my online students in AP & College level math and they are up and running just fine after one or two attempts at a homework set. <https://sites.google.com/a/ctyonline.net/jdinoto/home/type> The transition to more complex and lengthy documents tends to be much smoother this way.</comment>


Treating the Network Like a Teenager - <AUTHOR> http://blog.level3.com/2011/08/15/treating-the-network-like-a-teenager/

<comment><USER2> A good reminder that sometimes there's wonderful things hidden in the unknown. I'm a IT newb, but I wonder if there's a sane way for backbone providers to communicate with startups to achieve that vision he presents at the end.</comment>


Android Beats RIM – Becomes Market Share Leader in USA - <AUTHOR> http://nextparadigms.com/2010/08/03/android-beats-rim-becomes-market-share-leader-in-usa/ What will RIM do now when Android is breathing on its neck and threatens to enter its enterprise market? <comment><USER2> Call me crazy, but I think he's jumping to conclusions. There's no way Android grew that fast.

Check out this recent report from Nielsen: [http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/iphone- vs-...](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/iphone-vs-android/)

It stakes Android at 9%, iPhone at 28%, WinMo at 19%, RIM at 35%.

I can't imagine that Android has surged ahead so soon, doubly so since RIM's still leading in sales numbers.</comment>


The bar for success in our industry is too low - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1890-the-bar-for-success-in-our-industry-is-too-low <comment><USER2> There's a reason for this phenomenon. It might be misguided in this particular case, but there is a reason that it exists. It's the same reason that everyone here loves businesses based on technology. It's the same reason that VCs are willing to invest millions of dollars in nascent companies which will, in all likelihood, fail in the near future. It's the same reason I spend my evenings working on my own startup.

The reason is scalability.

My dad was always shocked that investors valued the last startup I worked for in the tens of millions of dollars while we were losing money. He's worked in construction his whole life for firms that do on the order of $100MM in revenue per year. Like all construction firms, however, their margins are razor thin. Their revenue doesn't grow much faster than their costs (employees and materials, primarily).

A construction company that loses money is not going to be worth $50MM any time soon. A tech company with similar financials _might be_. A tech company might take a while to get their technology right. But when they do, they can leverage it. Their revenues can grow _far faster_ than their costs. Software as a product scales better than just about anything I can think of. Software businesses often go from slightly in the red to huge annual profits in very little time.

Everyone in tech is trying to find the Next Big Thing. This includes us (entrepreneurs), the media, and investors. In the case of the media, they're just trying to be the first ones to break the next big story, as usual. Just like investors, if they want to succeed, they have to be willing to take risks. They have to bet on companies that look like they have potential. Sometimes they're wrong. But in those rare cases where it pays off, it usually pays off big.

Other industries lack this quality. In other industries 1 success is not going to make up for 10 failures. In technology you make money by picking winners before everyone else. It's somewhat of a crap shoot. But the bar is low because the potential reward is high.

<comment><USER3> Don't forget that there are other industries having such remarkable properties as well: another example is pharmaceuticals and generally biotechnology. Or the motion picture and music recording industries.

<comment><USER4> Biotech has startup costs that are orders of magnitude more than software - especially web stuff. People with PhD's + lab + equipment == lots of dollars. Multiply that by years for them to make anything close to being testable on people and it's a big chunk of money.

<comment><USER5> A big website or widely distributed software package is still extremely expensive to create and maintain. Less than a pharmaceutical company to start, perhaps, but pharmaceuticals don't have to be maintained once invented, and they're relatively protected from competition for the lifetime of a patent. Software companies must invest continuously in development, or their window of profitable operation will be narrow.

My point is that the massively profitable, "free" website run by three people in a garage is probably a myth. The massively profitable online retailer run by three people in a garage is _definitely_ a myth. To reach the scale where non-trivial profits are possible from the internet, you've got non-trivial expenses.

<comment><USER6> "My point is that the massively profitable, "free" website run by three people in a garage is probably a myth."

Why hello, craigslist.

<comment><USER5> You're dreaming if you think Craigslist is three guys in a garage. They have ~30 employees, and I can guarantee that they have large server, colo and bandwidth costs. They also make their money off of direct payments (as opposed to advertising), and their annual revenue is around $100 million, by the estimates I've seen. So they're profitable, but not hugely so. (By way of comparison, Netflix makes a bit over $20 million net per quarter, on over $300 million gross per quarter.)

I'll grant you that they're exceptionally small for a website of their size -- but being "exceptional" means only that they're the exception to the rule. The rule is what's important.

<comment><USER7> Actually, they are quite exceptional. Craigslist gets more traffic than either Amazon or Ebay and those companies respectively have 16,000 and 20,000 employees.

<comment><USER5> You've missed the point: Craigslist is so far and away the exception to the rule, it's practically non-reproducible. And for what it's worth, they're also not nearly as profitable as either Amazon or EBay, regardless of their traffic.

There's simply nothing about Craigslist that you can count on reproducing. If you're creating an internet company today, and you're aiming for hundreds of millions in revenue, it's 99% probable that you will need to spend more money than they do.

<comment><USER7> The thing that is reproducible about Craigslist is their simple, functional layout and organic, community-centric growth. Much like HN.

<comment><USER5> Well, of course you can reproduce their design. But reproducing their design won't reproduce their success. If it were that simple, every website would look like Craigslist.

Again: you're missing the point. Craigslist is the _exception_ to the rule. It's a product of its time. For any value of X, if you tried to say "this is the way Craigslist did X, therefore I should too," you'd very likely be wrong. And in any case, Craiglist is pretty far from the romantic notion of three guys in a garage. It's an expensive site to run, even if it's more cheaply run than other big sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> <sigh>

37Signals' products weren't profitable for a year or more, if memory serves. They took "investment" from the other side of their business (consulting). Every month, when their product revenue grew, I'm sure they were thinking, "Wow, we're going to be profitable in X months"... and eventually, they were.

Product profitability takes resources. You need:

1) Time (you can accelerate this with cash if you're disciplined) 2) Money (you can use savings, investment, or you can "buy" money/time with consulting)

That's immutable.

EverNote and their ilk ("our ilk", I should say, as RescueTime falls squarely in that world) is trying to build a business formula that works... And it looks like they're succeeding. Presumably they could cut dev staff, stop all experiments, and get to profitability MUCH sooner-- maybe even today.

But that's how business works, right? It's all about intelligent debt to ultimately maximize the metrics you care about (presumably some combo of growth, revenue, profit, and lifestyle). You hire an employee, and you are spending time and money on them for a while before they are really contributing. You take funding so that you can run the experiments that require capital. You take your consulting profits and pump them (and your spare time) into product efforts. And some businesses scale differently than others (Amazon is a great example).

That's ALL DEBT. And it can all be smart debt (like a mortgage used to be!).

Just because companies are choosing a different flavor of debt or choosing markets that scale differently doesn't make them bad. I personally am THRILLED to give up a relatively small stake in our company so I don't have to consult and can run experiments about as fast as I want to.

Scarcity FORCES you to be smart-- but the lack of scarcity doesn't mean that you CAN'T be.

<comment><USER9> Nobody is arguing those facts, and I don't think anyone at 37 Signals is naive enough to claim that you can't grow faster by spending more money (and going into debt, in whatever form).

From where I'm sitting, the point is that such a company shouldn't be called a success. Projections may be good, it may be very likely they will pan out, but until they actually _do_ , the business is not a success, it's still theoretical.

If it turns out, because of unknown factor X you completely deplete the market before you become profitable, your business model is no longer a success. There are too many unknowns to guarantee that any company which looks likely to be profitable actually will be.

<comment><USER8> I dunno. This is deserves a celebration. It's a fucking triumph! These guys made a product that no one really competes with and are making real money largely giving it away. It seems pretty clear that it scales pretty beautifully and that they could turn the screws a bit, experiment a bit, and make a huge pile of profit off of this.

I'm all for thumbing your nose at some/most free apps, but EverNote has really proven something and deserves praise. There seems to be real (reinvested profit) buried under the growth/r&d spending.

<comment><USER10> The whole point of the article is that Evernote is not making money and aren't even expected to break even until 2011.

<comment><USER8> Yeah. Same with Amazon when they were a few years in. Were they worth writing about back then? I think so.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but is Evernote currently worth using as an example of how to make a profit? I don't think so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _It still blows me away that David's talk at Startup School 2008 was met with such enthusiasm (I know David was surprised too)._

The content of his talk was not the main reason that it was met with such enthusiasm. (What he talked about was obvious and no one would disagree.)

It was his delivery that made it such a bit hit. His passion and conviction was easy to see. We could have easily read the talk on-line, but we go to these things to get the "whole story", the things that words alone do not convey. What a pleasure it was to see someone in his position so enthusiastic about his work. It's hard _not_ to get caught up in the moment.

(The fact the he's the author of Rails and his liberal use of the f word to make his point also helped.)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure many plumbers are profitable from day one. Amazon wasn't profitable for a while.

Which is the more successful business now?

I agree that you aren't a success until you are making money, but I don't think that it's important to be profitable always.

<comment><USER13> By definition there is not a single business that is profitable from day one. A plumbing business isn't profitable until the tools and vehicles have been paid for.

The important consideration is the size of the deficit (in time or money or ownership) a company accepts and what they gain in exchange. And the bigger the deficit, the higher the stakes.

<comment><USER14> I bootstrapped a consulting business, and didn't have any savings at all to do it. I had to be profitable from day one.

I did not even have a laptop at the time (for network diagnostics and the like) -- I just had my experience.

I've had to learn an awful lot about resource management as a result of doing it this way, and I'm grateful for that.

<comment><USER13> presumably there was a significant cost in time and/or money required to gain that experience.

<comment><USER15> You've got to live anyway. Might as well pay attention while you're doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> With all respect to 37Signals, havent they said it n-number of times, and we have had the same discussion on HN n+m-number of times

</comment><comment><USER17> Some one wise once told me: we humans strive for 3 things to become successful.

1\. Money

2\. Fame

3\. Making a difference

Everyone aims for all the 3 things. But you have to pick one out of the 3 - prioritize what you want. And then come up with the metrics that will help you measure your success.

Most startups these days unfortunately have no idea what they are aiming for.

<comment><USER18> I think the problem is most are gunning for number 2.

<comment><USER17> If they're looking for fame, and they get the fame they want - then they're a success - no?

But if their aim is money, but they use fame based metrics (number of page views, number of users, amount of publicity) - thats where the problem arises.

<comment><USER19> No. The fame is a delusion. If you're trying to get famous behind entrepreneurship, your businesses have to succeed, or you stop being famous --- or you wind up Scoble Famous, which may be even worse.

The subtext is good though. Fame of any sort is highly, highly overrated.

<comment><USER17> Not really.

Most authors go after fame. Not money. A New York Times bestseller status is 100 times more meaningful than the low royalty fees they may earn.

Most non-profits and social movements (eg: <http://blogactionday.org/>) aim for fame and/or making a difference too.

R. Buckminster Fuller never chased money. He went for making a difference. And (I think) he achieved that.

J.P. Morgan was one more guy who aimed for fame more than money. He made a shit load of money too. But people were surprised after his death that he wasn't the richest person of his generation (everyone thought he was...)

Different folks have different wants and measure success differently.

<comment><USER19> We're not talking about humanitarians or artists. We're talking about entrepreneurs, and their goals. I agree money doesn't have to matter to an artist. But it has to matter to an entrepreneur, even if your goal is fame. It matters the same way that being able to kick a ball matters to a punter, even if they're playing football just for the fame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of the dubious features of business journalism today is that articles tend to privilege the passive investor's point of view. Hence the emphasis on things like stock-market indices.

And from an investor's point of view, a successful business is one whose stock is going up. A "hot" company that is losing money hand-over-fist but has a slim chance of Hitting It Big may or may not be a great place to work (depending on how Dilbertesque the management is) and may or may not be fulfilling the dreams of its founders, but the investor who has that company as one element of a large portfolio has every reason to be happy with it.

And if you're a reporter or editor in the business/tech press and you're used to seeing things from the investor's point of view, why _shouldn't_ you run with a story like the one Jason F. complains about? Why wait two years publish an article about a startup that is actually wildly profitable when you can fill the news hole _right now_ with an article about a startup that _might someday be_ wildly profitable?

By contrast, a bootstrapped company that makes a tidy heap of profit for its two founders and three employees is booooring.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think this article is wrong for three reasons. Products can be successful without businesses being successful. Success is determined by meeting your own goals. Acquiring paying customers is a business success.

A piece of software can be very popular and successful, even if there is no direct business correlation.

Not everything can be easily correlated. Even 37signals own rails isn't being charged for in many situations. How much extra value has giving away rails done for 37signals? Giving some things away for free can be considered a marketing expense... an expense where you get to do what you like best - making software.

If a painting doesn't sell for a lot of money, is it a successful painting?

Seriously... there's _lots_ of software bringing joy, and helping people do stuff - not all of it has to be making money.

If the business plan is to make something cool, then eventually pay off the investment... then that's a success. Success is merely meeting of goals.

So this company, has made something people like and use, and also give them money for. They are also on their path to paying back their investment, and gotten a lot of cred, press, and _customers_ in the meantime.

Software companies almost always make multiple products. So gaining a lot of customers with early products is a great way to bootstrap things. Then the software company can more easily sell stuff to their existing customers.

They've met their own criteria for success and other peoples.

So this article misses out on how a product can be a popular success without the business being a financial success. It also misses out on how, if they are meeting their goals they are a success. Finally it misses the business goal of acquiring customers who like what they do and pay them money... in their first product.

In this case the New York Times has more of a leg to stand on than 37signals.

<comment><USER19> You're missing the premise of the article. Fried isn't ragging on open source projects which will never make money. He's ragging on the business press for pumping up _companies_ as success stories when they haven't turned a dime in profit.

There are a million ways to score a software project, but not nearly as many to rate a business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok, this one calls for just a little bit of snark:

> The bar for success in our industry is too low

As evidenced by one of the most widely watched companies as of late in said industry making lots of money with a product they constantly boast "does less"?

I'm not sure I've quite nailed it, but you get the general idea.

Actually, what they fail to point out is that they are famous enough that they won't necessarily get clobbered by someone who does what they do better, because the other guys will really struggle to get the word out, whereas they have Rails, their blog, books and so on to promote their 'does less' products.

<comment><USER22> When 37signals started Basecamp they didn't have their fame, Rails, their books or their blog readers... Just like everybody else, they started with none of that.

<comment><USER23> I remember when they didn't have any products, and were just a consultancy. They had a following even back then.

<comment><USER22> Certainly they weren't "famous". Their blog Signal vs. Noise was not that special a blog at the time, not even close to the biggest. I don't think I'd even call it "A-list", at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good old Midwestern thinking is always refreshing.

</comment><comment><USER25> Similar to Everynote there are lots of companies that have taken money from VC's and have not yet become profitable e.g Vonage.2011 is a big target though since it is 2 years away and nobody know what might happen then, there might be a much better killer product then Evernote running at much lower cost. While i agree that profitability is important but in the field of Web and according to the market you sometimes have to give away something for free to charge for something else.Even 37signals gives away tadalist etc for free.The best part is they have a bunch of products to earn cash from.

</comment><comment><USER26> Obtaining press for a new/exciting product is especially easy when its free. Journalists have to write about what people think is interesting, without it they would be out of jobs.

That being said publicity is easy, actually being successful-entirely different story. Dont judge success on publicity.

</comment><comment><USER18> A-friken-men.

Money in must be more than money out, otherwise you aren't a successful business, you're an eventual death.

</comment><comment> n-named Interesting perspective.. I'm looking forward to his talk at start-up school.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes -- for instance, 37Signals is considered a success.

</comment><comment><USER28> Summary: If you don't make a profit, you're not successful.

Enlightening. Hey, guess what? A lot of businesses have run in the negative until they got traction and make a metric ton of money. Congratulations on being profitable from day one. TMTOWTDI

That said, I despise the twitter business model...

<comment><USER18> >Hey, guess what? A lot of businesses have run in the negative until they got traction and make a metric ton of money.

I think the key point here is that while they are in the negative phase, they aren't "successful businesses"; they're struggling to survive. Jason's problem it seems is not so much that people aren't profitable, its that they are credited with being successful prematurely.

<comment><USER28> I get his point, and agree with it. In hindsight, I think I was responding more to the underlying theme of nearly every 37signal blog post.

<comment><USER19> What, that successful technology entrepreneurship isn't a potion doled out in little bottles by the gatekeepers in Waltham and Sand Hill Road? That you can apply the same common sense that bike shop owners and building contractors do, reach Internet-scale success, and not live in a sleeping bag on your friend's floor while you do it?

<comment><USER28> No, that it's easy and obvious and a certain amount of luck has nothing to do with it.

EDIT: Or maybe it's just the "We know the best way to do everything" attitude.

I admire their success, but not the condescension. I might be the only one here, but not the only one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How To Write With Style (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.novelr.com/2008/08/16/vonnegut-how-to-write-with-style <comment><USER2> I absolutely adore Vonnegut. Reading his works taught me more about writing than any English teacher and formed my world view more than any other author. I wish I could have met him before he passed, but it is hard not to feel like you're conversing directly with him through his books.

<comment><USER3> I had the good fortune to hear him speak at my university in the late 1990s. Fantastic. Notably, he talked just like he wrote - good-natured, quirky, avuncular, a little bit cynical.

For what it's worth, when you read Vonnegut, you're getting the real Vonnegut. He put his heart into his writings, leaving all of us (and future generations) the richer for it.

<comment><USER4> As someone who hasn't read any Vonnegut, what would you recommend I read first?

<comment><USER5> The Big Two are _Cat 's Cradle_ and _Slaughterhouse Five_. They're the two you're mostly likely to end up talking with someone about, or to have familiarity assumed by an article or something. If we were to make it a Big Three the third one would be _Breakfast of Champions_.

His worst are probably _Slapstick_ and _Timequake_ , and the latter's so full of references to his earlier works that you wouldn't want to make it an early read regardless.

The short fiction/non-fic collections published during his lifetime are generally great. Big exception for _A Man Without a Country_ which was pretty mediocre overall. Anything posthumous is suspect and should be deferred until you've worked through the earlier stuff, if not avoided entirely. Not that there's nothing good in there, it's just that the average quality is way lower.

Personal favorites of mine that don't generally make best-of lists are _Deadeye Dick_ and _Bluebeard_. If you're reading him for the sci-fi connection rather than as general fiction, you want the Big Two plus _Sirens of Titan_ (which would probably be #4 in a "big four" as far as importance-to- have-read) mainly.

<comment><USER6> I've read all the books you mentioned other than _Slapstick_ and agree with your synopsis and recommendations.

I'd personally start with _Cat 's Cradle_ over _Slaughterhouse Five_. _Deadeye Dick_ is strange and hilarious, but probably better after reading a few of his books first. :)

<comment><USER5> > _Deadeye Dick_ is strange and hilarious, but probably better after reading a > few of his books first. :)

Probably true about _Bluebeard_ , too. Both read almost as a review of the major themes and messages of Vonnegut's work, though _Bluebeard_ more so than _Deadeye Dick_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is good advice, but I've seen huge successes by authors and article writers who violate these rules (the recent trend of long literary fiction such as 'City on Fire', which is 900 pages). Nowadays, the trend is towards longer, 'epic' fiction with post-modern themes, whereas in Vonnegut's day (along with Heinlein, Asimov etc.) 'short' was better. Up until as recently as the 90's, 'short' was ideal, but all that changed. Look at Harry Potter and other popular books...all very long. It also deepens on the audience and the purpose...if you're trying to convey technical information , fluff is undesirable

<comment><USER8> That trend is absolutely normal and except Harry Potter nothing else is good literature. And Harry Potter is only good literature because it is a great story, a really good adventure epic. The rest are mere products, completely forgettable, in the same way modern pop is not going to be remembered through generations.

<comment><USER9> I dunno about the trend, but modern novels like Infinite Jest are 900+ pages long. Same with the works of Karl Ove Knausgård, and other, good authors.

<comment><USER10> Those Russian guys were writing pretty big novels 150 years ago too, though. I will say that _War and Peace_ was a much faster read (at least for me) than _Infinite Jest_ \- though I greatly enjoyed both, in very different ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes I think to be able to write with style, have style, and be an engaging speaker you need to have experience and have led an interesting life. No one is just born with any of this, and I don't know of any teacher that can suddenly make someone interesting. And indeed, most of my favourite authors seem to have led interesting lives.

<comment><USER12> I can think of one great example of this. Charles Lindbergh won the Pulitzer prize in 1954 for his _Spirit of St. Louis_ autobiography. He worked on it for 15 years and refused to use a ghost writer, and the result was a masterpiece. Between his poetic writing style and the mountains of fascinating details leading up to the historic trans-Atlantic flight, I wouldn't hesitate to rank it as the most inspiring book I have ever read.

[https://www.amazon.com/Spirit-St-Louis-Charles- Lindbergh/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Spirit-St-Louis-Charles- Lindbergh/dp/0743237056)

<comment><USER12> I got a hold of my old copy of the book and wanted to share an excerpt from the first page:

> Searching memory might be compared to throwing the beam of a strong light, > from your hilltop campsite, back over the road you traveled by day. Only a > few of the objects you passed are clearly illuminated; countless others are > hidden behind them, screened from the rays. There is bound to be some > vagueness and distortion in the distance. But memory has advantages that > compensate for its failings. By eliminating detail, it clarifies the picture > as a whole. Like an artist's brush it finds higher value in life's essence > than in its photographic intricacy.

I can flip to any page and find a sentence or two that I've underlined for being as well written as the page above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> '7\. Pity the readers' follows from the _curse of knowledge_ , namely that's it's hard to imagine what it's like not to know what you know. This applies in novels as much as in technical writing. For example, descriptions of landscapes are often ambiguous because the writer already has a picture of the landscape in mind.

</comment><comment><USER14> I love Vonnegut's generosity and sympathy for his readers. They have a hard job; as writers, let's try to make it easier.

Also, "have guts to cut" is great. Will hang on to that.

<comment><USER8> In the same line Stephen King says: 'Kill your darlings'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's regrettable that he ends with praise for Strunk and White. There probably is such a thing as "good writing", but _The Elements of Style_ does little to direct us to it. Its advice is largely specious. See what Pullum has to say about it: [http://www.chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid- Grammar/...](http://www.chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid- Grammar/25497)

<comment><USER16> Elements of Style hasn't always aged well, and Pullum's objections all touch on valid points. But I'll rally to EoS's defense in two crucial areas:

1\. Strunk & White got it right when they declared: "Good writing is done with verbs and nouns; bad writing is done with adjectives." That is timeless advice. It's inevitable, in our first drafts, that we sketch out our ideas with flabby verbs and then rely on gaudy adjectives to convey energy and conviction. Find the right verb -- usually in the course of editing our own work -- and both problems fix themselves. Overwrought adjectives vanish; better verbs command the show.

2\. Omit needless words. This is wiser advice than it seems. If we write first drafts in conversational English -- or corporate English -- we're likely to pad out our sentences with many empty words. Conversational English pelts our writing with "very," "that," "really," "literally," "in order to" and so on. Corporate English loads us up with "systems," "process," "viable," and so on.

If we tried to be as concise as possible in our first drafts, we'd spend all day working on two sentences. Write fast, in whatever dialect of English comes most naturally. Get a first version visible in some kind of form. Then take time to fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> From the comments I found the original and the origin in quite interesting.

[http://www.infomarketingblog.com/power-of-the-printed- word/](http://www.infomarketingblog.com/power-of-the-printed-word/)

Including:

Kurt Vonnegut: "How To Write With Style"

 _Bill Cosby_ (before he became a TV sitcom superstar): "How To Read Faster"

Malcolm Forbes: "How To Write a Business Letter"

Walter Cronkite: "How To Read A Newspaper"

And George Plimpton: "How To Make a Speech," among others.

</comment><comment><USER18> Also enjoy Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules

[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/arts/writers-writing- easy-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/arts/writers-writing-easy-adverbs- exclamation-points-especially-hooptedoodle.html)

and of course if you love Cormac McCarthy (as I do) no rules appear to apply.

[http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/cormac-mccarthys- punctuat...](http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/cormac-mccarthys-punctuation- rules.html)

And Faulkner...

[http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/seven_tips_from_william_f...](http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/seven_tips_from_william_faulkner_on_how_to_write_fiction.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> I have never read anything by Vonnegut, so my opinion is exclusively based on the linked blog post. I find his writing to be difficult to understand. Usually I can plow through anything at lightning speed but with this post I found my self backtracking several times. Is it just me? All of the suggestions are excellent. But it's ironic that an essay on how to write clearly and with style is a bit difficult to actually read.

<comment><USER20> I have a similar experience when reading his books. However, I do feel like I should be testing through them much more smoothly. The ideas in them are great though. I think it is nice how he expresses big ideas seemingly very simply (some ideas do take the bigger part of his books to be expressed so simply)

<comment><USER19> Interesting, I am going to check him out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't believe that this reference to Vonnegut comes up on HN, when I happen to come to a point in Keys to Great Writing by Stephen Wilburs where he mentions his name.

I had never heard of Vonnegut before this. Suggestion for a good book by him to start with?

Proof: [https://imgur.com/U0Z2aKp](https://imgur.com/U0Z2aKp)

<comment><USER21> _UPDATE_ : Thank you all for the suggestions. I will pick up Cat's Cradle next :)

By the way, the Keys to Great Writing is an awesome book. It has made me critique everything I write, in a good way. I even thought twice before submitting this comment.

 _UPDATE 2_ : Fix: Use the verb _critique_ rather than _critic_ (one who does that).

<comment><USER10> In the spirit of helpfulness, I think you mean "critique". :-)

<comment><USER21> Yes! Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One thing that stood out for me was: do it for the people (readers).

In my opinion more and more is done with money in mind. And the results suck. And not only does it suck for the users but also for producers because in the end it will eat on them.

Maybe all the advice could be summed up as: be human in what you do.

</comment><comment><USER23> I highly recommend Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century".

It is full of practical advice. I've read a lot of amateur (students/hobbyists) writing, so I can say his advice addresses a lot of common mistakes.

[] [https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons- Writing/...](https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons- Writing/dp/0143127799)

</comment><comment><USER24> The style described isn't a personal style or expression of your personality. It's the style of standard business or technical writing. But it's still a good summary.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think that, for technical writing which is the majority of the articles read/written by the HN crowd, _Plain Words_ is a better lead to follow.

<comment><USER26> I think even technical writing, this article is relevant. Sometimes people gloss over the important things and drill down into details that are not as relevant to the reader in technical pieces. It's good to remember, for example, to stay on subject and not ramble.

<comment><USER25> Sure, but I think reading _Plain Words_ will (take longer &) give a better framework for writing great documentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've had friends praise Vonnegut's writing. For those who have read his works, where's the best place to begin?

<comment><USER28> Mother Night is one that gets less attention, but it's a hell of a book.

<comment><USER29> I second this. I've read a lot of his books, with Breakfast of Champions being my current favorite, but I'm halfway through Mother Night and I gotta say it's my new favorite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, > which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment.

Bollocks.

</comment><comment><USER8> We are because he was.</comment>


The (broken) economics of OSS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mattklein123/the-broken-economics-of-oss-5a1b31fc0182 <comment><USER2> OSS's sustainability has a significant challenge. I think the token economy might solve it. I started experiments with npm. [https://devtoken.rocks/alpha/en](https://devtoken.rocks/alpha/en)</comment>


Variational Autoencoders in Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://www.declanoller.com/2019/11/15/variational-autoencoders-in-haskell-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-turn-my-friends-into-dogs/ <comment><USER2> Cool project, thanks for sharing it. If you don't need GPU/CUDA support, Haskell, Common Lisp, and other nice languages can make sense.

<comment><USER3> and if you do, there is [https://github.com/hasktorch/hasktorch](https://github.com/hasktorch/hasktorch)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I bookmarked that and will check it out when the stable version is ready.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists Have Created Artificial Sunlight: Real Enough to Trick Your Brain - <AUTHOR> http://fossbytes.com/scientists-created-artificial-sunlight-real/

<comment><USER3> This looks quite nice, but the cost seems to be prohibitive for all but the highest end customers. Let's face it, if you can afford a $65k+ light fixture, then you probably won't be settling for an apartment that is in some dingy back alley, which would necessitate this fixture in the first place. The video mentioned uses of gyms and hospitals won't see this for years. Private art galleries perhaps sooner, but I wonder if paintings exposed to this light face the same issues as paintings exposed to real sunlight, degradation-wise.

That said, anybody have any suggestions for natural sunlight-like lights that aren't in this same $10k+ price range? Placebo or not, having nice light available makes for a better working environment.

<comment><USER4> > _This looks quite nice, but the cost seems to be prohibitive for all but the > highest end customers._

As with all new technology, the price will eventually come down.

<comment><USER5> Correct, but I am not finding it cool it really reminds me that someday we won't have sun or open air :(

<comment><USER6> Why so pessimistic, Think about all the great use cases of this tech eg. When Elon Musk gets his Mars project going these will be invaluable to have on the spaceship. Or imagine a nyc with all buildings below ground, above ground, the entire city could be a park.

<comment><USER5> Hmm. Agree on that Elon is like the creator in Matrix Movie :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Better information on the actual site: [http://www.coelux.com/](http://www.coelux.com/)

<comment><USER8> How do they make it appear as if the actual sun is off in the distance in 3D?

Did they invent the world's first 3D display that works at all angles without special glasses?

Are they lighting up a standard hologram in a novel way?

Are they using a special lens to magnify an incredibly tiny and incredibly bright light source?

Are they using a microarray lens sheet, similar to how lenticular products such as the Nintendo 3DS achieve 3D, except that it would work perfectly from all viewing angles?

Whatever the case, I don't care about the price; I don't care about the marketing fluff; I just want to know how it actually works. It's frustrating that we aren't allowed to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Your visual system has to adapt all the way from the bluish light of midday to the reddish light at the end of the day. You can adapt to whatever light is available to you and after an initial adaptation period you can't tell the difference. There is no need for trickery as the system tricks itself.

To replace sunlight you can use any bright light with enough blue light in it to stimulate the circadian system. You can even use straight blue light if you want.

Most ridiculous phrase:

> ... it also produces the texture and feel of sunlight.

<comment><USER10> Sir, would you rather sit by this nice, blue light or here in this stuff that feels warm like sunlight?

Sure, you can do that with the blue light, but if that were truly an answer, the blue lights would be standard in fixtures instead of a bit of equpiment for greenhouses, fishkeepers, and those with seasonal affective disorder.

Sunlight simply feels different, in the same ways that a fake fire can feel different from a real one. It is warm and inviting for most people, it heats the skin in ways normal light doesn't.

And as far as texture, I'm not sure if I can explain this properly, though I can see it and draw it in: Sunlight makes the skin's transluscence light up a bit differently: Sometimes it wavers and moves depending on what is in the air and whether or not there is a temperature difference between the inside and outside. Sometimes dust sparkles slightly as it drifts in the air. It creates a different glow than artificial light and the shadows are different - <USER2> light is steady and more diffuse because the light comes from a general direction instead of a point.

I do understand that some of this stuff are things that people just don't think they see but they are the things that help make a painting spectacular instead of just good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To be convincing they need a fake room where the camera can pull backwards and you can see there is no way the sun is real.

</comment><comment><USER12> More technical information available here (looks like an EU grant report): [http://cordis.europa.eu/result/rcn/58337_en.html](http://cordis.europa.eu/result/rcn/58337_en.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Are those images CGI or real?

<comment><USER14> They claim to be unedited, real photos.

<comment><USER15> I'd have a much easier time believing that if they didn't work so hard to make them look fake.</comment></comment></comment>


Why China warned the US to stay away - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33205815

<comment><USER2> link bait</comment>


ISSE: An Interactive Sound Source Separation Editor - <AUTHOR> http://isse.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> First off - what a great idea! How am I just finding out about this?

As an audio engineer, I know the first thing I want to use this on: a drum kit. Separate the cymbals from the skins!! Separate out the room sound from the direct sounds!! Get that pesky hi-hat out of the snare track!

Secondly - why only frequencies? Why not dynamics, stereo position, phase, and transient response? If I could switch the screen to show those things instead of frequency, I could isolate all kinds of other phenomena.

For example, isolate only the transients and turn them up/down, EQ them, add reverb to them, etc (drool). Non-engineers have no idea how potent this could be.

Or isolate only the instruments appearing at 30% off-center left?

<comment><USER3> There seems to be a deafening silence with audio stuff. Probably because there's no money in it, or rather the money is all held by the recording studios / big distributors, who have no incentive to share their findings. Also Google seems to rank music-software search results really low.

Other cool projects that I only found after intensive search: [http://photosounder.com/](http://photosounder.com/) [http://www.soundhelix.com/](http://www.soundhelix.com/) [http://www.cerlsoundgroup.org/Loris/](http://www.cerlsoundgroup.org/Loris/) [http://www.klingbeil.com/spear/](http://www.klingbeil.com/spear/)

The guy who wrote this is at Apple now, probably working on Logic Pro; the latest versions have some note-editing features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that this has been out for 3 years and this is the first I've heard of it. I'll have to try out the tool to separate out sources from various recordings we make for noise control projects (for example, separating out the wheel/rail contribution and engine/motor contribution from DMU/EMU train recordings, or fan contribution and transformer contribution in electrical substation recordings).

<comment><USER5> Seeing stuff on sourceforge makes me immediately distrustful of the project. Like it feels neglected, forgotten.... Buggy. Is this generally true for projects you've seen?

<comment><USER6> > Like it feels neglected, forgotten

I feel that way about most SourceForge projects, too. If you check out this project's history [1] the last commit was in 2013. Not that working software needs regular change, but as a rule of thumb it's nice to see recent commits.

[1] [https://sourceforge.net/p/isse/code/ci/master/tree/](https://sourceforge.net/p/isse/code/ci/master/tree/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty cool!

A couple if years ago, I saw a short documentary about some commercial software that was able to take the recording of an orchestra, separate the instruments and allow the user to edit the pitch and volume of an individual note an instrument was playing, but I can't seem to find it anymore.

Might anyone here know about this software ?

<comment><USER8> You're thinking of Melodyne, by Celemony Software. It's amazing.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u573PyXo- pY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u573PyXo-pY)

<comment><USER9> That was an interesting video, thanks for linking it.

Two books are mentioned in the video, both of which I would like to read;

\- "History of Harmonic Pythagoreanism" by Rudolf Haase

\- "The Harmony of the World" by Johannes Kepler

The original title of the book by Haase, I found by jumping to the mark where it was mentioned in the original german language video, was _Geschichte des Harmonikalen Pythagoreismus_. Unfortunatelly, I have not been successfull in finding an English translation of the book. I _could_ read the German version but would only understand a few select parts so I would much prefer to read it in English. Does anybody know of an English version of the book?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice! I've been wanting a tool to do exactly this for years.

Trying it out now. One question, what does the "training brush" do? Everything else is intuitive so far.

Edit: Just tried this out on a song with acoustic guitar + vocals. Worked OK. There's lots of bleed between the tracks, but they _are_ separated to a decent degree.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Folks interested in this might be interested in ManyEars and the associated hardware projects:

[http://manyears.sourceforge.net/](http://manyears.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Amazing demo. Can it be used to separate two voices in a file?

</comment><comment><USER12> Ugh... sourceforge.net?

No, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> sourceforge isn't like that any more:

[https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and- fut...](https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-future- plans/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Showcase of OpenType Features - <AUTHOR> https://otf.show/ <comment><USER2> Absolutely beautiful website about an highly topical thing. The brave new world of Unicode and OpenType brings features to the remotest parts of the GUI.

The stunning thing about that is (as with many good design descisions): You only start missing them when they are not present. For instance, I have the beautiful Inter font installed on two computers and use it in LibreOffice on both of them. One computer has older software without ligatures support. The excel sheets look awful without proportional figures!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :D

As a matter of fact, I also discovered many notes regarding software support/compatible. I think at some time I will put it on for reference. It's may be a problem as we deliver things digitally more and more now. No more the safeness of a printed paper.

</comment></comment><comment> dan-robertson The historical forms and ligatures seem to just be wrong to me, at least for the one font which supports them. The long s should only be used when it is not the final letter in a word, similar to the two variants of sigma in Greek. Perhaps one is supposed to cleverly turn off the feature for an s in final position but then that surely means it cannot be included in ligatures.

<comment><USER3> I had a crash course on ligatures and stylistic alternates when I stumbled across a handwritten font[0]. It has slightly different glyphs for any second repeated letter or number, but the initial capital glyphs has these massive strokes that I think need to be calmed down if used more than twice in a headline.

[0] [https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/reey](https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/reey)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! That's a nice feature. I've just added it: [https://otf.show/rand](https://otf.show/rand)

Turn out it's called "rand" in the spec, but not many applications support that (including browser) so they implemented it via "calt"

#todayilearn</comment></comment></comment>