Free, three-month trial of Apple Music now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/music/ <comment><USER2> Surpised at how unusable the site is. The background video, parallax/scrolljacking, and dancing iPhones are really making my laptop choke.

It also seems like they're relying on the fact that people already know what the service does, as the copy isn't terribly informative either (at least at first glance). I hope the end product is worth it though.

<comment><USER3> What browser? I'm using Chrome on a 2011 MBP and it all of the animations and scrolling are perfectly smooth.

<comment><USER4> I'm not the guy you replied to but I'm on a newly bought MBP with Chrome and the website is laggy as hell.

<comment><USER5> Yeah 2014 MBP here and it's a horrible laggy experience on Safari. This is on El Capitan beta though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On OS X, clicking the "Start listening now >" link opens up iTunes and you get a dialog saying that iTunes 12.2 is required for Apple Music. Clicking the "Upgrade" button brings you to Apple's download iTunes web page which only has 12.1.X available.

Guess 12.2 will come out later today. Updating to OS X 10.10.4 did not come with it.

<comment><USER7> so Q: do you guys/gals think this is intentional? Or did Apple encounter a last minute hiccup with iTunes 12.2? Could be that they intentionally want to load up on iOS subscribers first... who knows why (maybe network bandwidth is more predictable than on desktop?). Guesses?

<comment><USER8> I've had this problem for years, and I think it's because I often switch my apple account between countries. The update notifications and the updates themselves come through on two different channels, which are usually out of sync.

1\. One app will think my account is "in" the U.S., sends me to the App Store for an update. 2\. App Store checks and sees that, oh, nope, this is a German account, but maybe try back in few days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a music streaming service that integrates downloaded songs into my iTunes library. That's all I needed to move away from Spotify. It'll be very difficult for Spotify to compete.

All the other features are nice add-ons.

<comment><USER10> Yes... because everyone uses the terrible piece of software that is iTunes. Even me as an iPhone user, I won't be switching anytime soon- Spotify has a sense of community and music discovery.

<comment><USER11> As someone who hate(d/s) iTunes, The new Apple Music app is pretty sweet. Though I'm still trying to figure out what the difference is between "New" and "For You."

<comment><USER12> New is new tunes (or new to the service, presumably), For You is things picked for you from your loved genres.

<comment><USER11> Yup - I eventually figured it out. Mostly because I really enjoyed almost everything in "For You", and it seemed oddly aligned with the musicians I was following, and was a small set, whereas "New" is a vast collection of tracks/playlists/music. New is really poorly named - 99% of the stuff there isn't new at all - some of it from the 70s/80s. I don't know what better name could have been used that wouldn't have been confused with the selection curated specifically for me.

Overall - _loving_ Apple Music, I'm 90% likely to subscribe for $120/year, coming from someone who spends about $20-$30 a year on a few select tracks and the rare album.

<comment><USER12> Sorry for the late reply, but as far as I can figure "New" isn't about the tracks' newness, it's about you looking for "New" music to assign to "My Music".

"My Music" is for things you own or already access. "For you" is for new things Apple thinks you might like based on your preferences. "New" is for completely new things to add to your collection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's pretty sad that they took Beats, which ran in the browser, and have somehow turned it into yet another piece of functionality bloating up the nearly intolerable iTunes. Well done Apple, well done!

<comment><USER14> I haven't had a chance to try this out yet (because iTunes 12.2 isn't available yet), but honestly, I would never even dream of using a service that required me to keep a browser tab open. Meanwhile, iTunes is open 24x7 on my computer, and is playing music for a good chunk of that time.

<comment><USER15> If iTunes ran on linux that would be great. No iTunes on linux, no Apple music for me.

<comment><USER14> Fair point. I think Apple believes, probably with good justification, that there aren't enough consumers on Linux to be worth maintaining a version of iTunes for it.

And FWIW, a quick DDG search shows that people use WINE to run iTunes on Linux (though these results are several years old). So if you really want to try out Apple Music, it seems you can do so. But I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to go to that effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a heavy Siri user in and out of the car I'm very impressed with the success rate of asking Siri to play x artist and song and her doing so 90 percent of the time.

I was a Spotify user, but the ability to bring up an artist and or any song via my voice makes for safer driving and I think it's pretty cool!

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm confused what the difference is between "For You" and "New" \- are they both just customized channels for me? Why are there two? I wonder if everyone gets the same "New" \- I clicked on a ton of Pop Songs, Artists - and under New Music, one of the first recommendations was the explicit version of "Dreams Worth more than Money".

I'm guessing it's because I clicked on Drake.

Ballsy recommendation, regardless. Also, pretty good.

But - overall, the App's pretty fantastic. Every Song I've looked for by every artist is there. Great Integration with my (extensive) iTunes library. And _Free_ for three months. I'm going to cost Apple a fortune (Well, $0.002 * a heckuva lot of plays) over the next three months.

But I'm still confused as to why there is a "New" and a "For You" tab.

[Edit - Seriously, _everything_ seems to be here. All of Taylor's stuff of course, but AC/DC, you name it. I'm guessing there is very little that Spotify has that Apple Music doesn't. ]

[Edit 2 - Holy Crap offlining is easy. You just "Add to my Music, Make Offline - boom. Downloaded onto your iPhone. I've just dumped a bunch of live albums. I wonder what the limit is...]

<comment><USER17> I think that for the most part Apple has the same streaming contracts as Spotify/Rdio/Pandora/etc.

There are still a number of albums/songs/artists missing that simply aren't available anywhere (Tool and The Great Gatsby soundtrack are two I always check).

But it seems that I should be able to mix tracks I own with streamed tracks, which is going to be the killer feature for me personally.

Having used Rdio for many years now, and Zune Pass previously, comparing apples-to-apples (no pun intended) with will be interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The latest version of iTunes (12.2) doesn't seem to be available for 64-bit Windows. So no Apple Music for me.

<comment><USER19> Also not on OS X yet. Probably later this day.

<comment><USER18> Glad to know I'm not the only one.

<comment><USER19> Interestingly the "Try Now" opens iTunes which in turn asks you to upgrade iTunes which in turn leads you to a site asking you to download the old 12.1 - Bit of a hick-up there.

<comment><USER20> hiccup.

:)

<comment><USER21> hiccup!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Well, contrary to the other comments in this thread. So far I've been enjoying it for about the hour I've had it on my phone. I enjoy the UI more than Spotify/Rdio (Although I only used Rdio for about a week.) It has artist I enjoy from Pharrell and Eminem to DJ Okawari and Major Lazer (although I guess they aren't as obscure anymore.) So far listening to Zane Lowe on their Radio channel has been entertaining. Do I think I'll leave my playlist from Spotify to come to Apple Music? Possibly, I have 3 months to figure that out, and currently I can't say I'm disappointed in the service?

Although I will say I'm hoping apple does more with the whole Music Connect and actually following artist that Spotify and other services currently don't, I'm going to hear about the new album regardless of whether or not I follow them on your service, update me with interviews they do, or if a concert is in my area, rather than just updating me whenever their album eventually hits your servers.

</comment><comment><USER23> Surprisingly good start for Beats One, although the NYC host is a bit too saccharine for my tastes.

The question becomes can they maintain the quality? They definitely need to hire add more diverse DJs and expand the number of countries they broadcast from if they want to be the radio station of the world.

</comment><comment><USER24> How easy or hard is it to rip the music without transcoding? It's legal for me to do so.

<comment><USER25> AirPlay Recorder works quite well, but it's slow because it plays and records the full songs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> First thoughts are that I like the music presented to me post-launch. Will see over time how that holds up, but so far so good.

On-boarding was typically Apple. No frills, minimal signup screen. This is followed by the Beats-style bubble genre/artists selector. That screen was fun, but I was a little confused by the search icon in the nav-bar, which I thought would allow me to add bubbles, but seemed to just span out into something else entirely. I backed-out of it and just continued with the few bubbles I had selected.

Like I said, music quality and selection seems solid so far. The app feels rather big -- this may prove to be a plus or a minus, but at the moment leads me to want to explore it a bit, which is seems like a plus for a content app.

There are some new UI patterns I haven't seen in an Apple app before, particularly the minimize icon when you're in the song player -- which is a modal rather than push on the navigation controller.

<comment><USER27> The first time I saw that pattern was in Youtube where you could drag down the video to the corner and it would transition dow.

I am just guessing that they're using a custom transition on a modal presentation and using UIPercentDrivenInteractiveTransition to let you drag it up or down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am surprised, they have also released for Android.

<comment><USER29> Apple is releasing an app for Android? I don't think that's ever happened before and I'm a bit skeptical.

<comment><USER28> [http://www.apple.com/music/](http://www.apple.com/music/) and search for 'Android'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I find it rather peculiar that they highlighted iPod when there hasn't been any kind of update to any of the iPods in over three years and no substantial update in more than that.

</comment><comment><USER31> I am, but at the same time, I'm also not surprised by Zane Lowe and the team's last minute checks that are still going on right now (Beats1).

<comment><USER19> I think that was planned... with the kick off 1h after the release of 8.4

<comment><USER32> It does sound like it, especially after the announcement that was just made, the guy was aware he's online for the whole time. That, or he's really good at impro, either way, nice feeling to have a man behind these playlists.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, Zane Lowe is really good at impro stuff - he really does know music.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sure, I'll abandon Spotify and all my created playlists, saved artists, favorited tracks and albums and all the playlists people have shared with me there from the past four years to try an almost exact similar service from you Apple. Not. The only thing they might remotely have going that's interesting is Beats Radio but you don't need a sub for that anyway...

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks pretty nice and choose some decent music for me after having gone though the sign-up process. It's gonna be difficult for Spotify

</comment><comment><USER34> FYI: Apple Music requires iTunes 12.2 and its download page currently says: "iTunes 12.2 is coming soon."

</comment><comment><USER35> Pleasantly surprised that they're planning on releasing an Android client for this.

</comment><comment><USER36> An interesting part is the sharing links at the bottom. I get that music is super social, I've just never seen Apple show other companies on their site. FB, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat. Not surprisingly...no Goog.

<comment><USER37> Another thing I wouldn't have expected: The link "Complete Schedule" from inside the Music app's Beats 1 page links to [http://applemusic.tumblr.com/](http://applemusic.tumblr.com/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm sold on Apple products relatively easily, but not so much on any of their services short of the Apple Care plans.

</comment><comment><USER39> Man, the music app is still broken as f...

</comment><comment><USER27> Some i18n strings are missing, but apart from that, pretty good. Added my songs and I'm ready for a run.

</comment><comment><USER40> Nice site. And even though I understand why they stuffed it into iTunes, I disapprove nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER41> did anyone else notice the title of this hn thread change?

<comment><USER42> It's funny because usually the title gets changed from informative to generic (like product name), but here instead of "Apple - Music" it becomes almost an ad copy.

<comment><USER14> The thread title normally changes to reflect the title of the article.

In this case, the window title of the page is "Apple - Music", but the page headline, which can reasonably be considered the title of this "article", is "Free, three-month trial of Apple Music now available."

So it seems to me that this change is perfectly in line with HN's normal policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Android

Coming

this fall.

</comment><comment><USER44> So the only people who can currently listen to Apple Music are iOS users running 8.4? Is that correct? That can't be many people.

<comment><USER45> The number of iOS users is very high, and the adoption rate for the latest iOS version is very high (yes, it's available, I just updated). That will be very many people quite soon.

<comment><USER44> I know the upgrade rate on iOS is quite high, and I'm sure driving updates is part of the reason they required it, but within one hour? You'd have to be pretty on-the-ball to be ready to listen when the broadcast first started.

And I can't be the only one who is wary of running an OS update first thing in the morning on workday. Granted, Apple have been very good about their updates, I haven't had one screw up yet, but the last thing I want to worry about is possibly having a dead phone all day.

<comment><USER46> Apple Music isn't a "broadcast". Yes, a live radio station is part of the service, but a very small part, really.

Also, you should perhaps wait to criticize Apple's iOS release timing until, you know, they actually have a problem. To be fair.

<comment><USER11> " very small part, really."

Zane Lowe is a very important part of this launch, and the Radio is a major component of Apple Music. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zane_Lowe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zane_Lowe)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Has anyone enabled "iCloud Music Library"? I'm curious to try it, because it's required in order to save Apple Music songs for offline listening, but I'm hesitant because there seems to be insufficient description of the options to "merge" or "replace" the songs on my current device.</comment>


Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/26/gatsby-raises-15m-series-a-for-its-modern-web-development-platform/ <comment><USER4> I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step approach:

1\. Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over, both by touting the genuine benefits of static sites (security, scalability, TTFB performance, etc.) and by riding the Cool Kid Front-End Stack hype train.

2\. Lock them in with an overly-complicated framework and build pipeline that requires organizations invest a lot of resources into switching. (Gatsby gets most of this for free by building on top of the Cool Kid Stack's nine- thousand-package NPM lasagna.)

3\. Sell their captive audience expensive solutions to problems they wouldn't have with other frameworks. (See e.g. another commentor's discussion of incremental builds.)

This strategy might not contribute much to society, but neither do a lot of other startups--what matters to investors is that it'll probably make them a lot of money, assuming they execute it correctly.

<comment><USER5> Did you mean "overly-complicated" as in for people who don't work in the industry and just speculate on trends?

<comment><USER6> Not OP but the mess that is node and its ecosystem is indeed overly- complicated

<comment><USER7> It's hidden away behind layers of stuff for the most part, but, I agree (and this is coming from someone who works with Gatsby every day); I recently added Typescript support as well so now, with the handful of packages we have in our monorepo, it's becoming a convoluted mess of webpack, babel, typescript, and the tooling in between like gatsby and storybook, which do configuration sliiightly different.

Honestly I got so frustrated with dealing with dependency hell the other day that I only half-jokingly said I was going to go back to writing vanilla ES5, whichever the last version that still works on IE is. It's just too much of an obscure headache, too much tooling and intermediary steps.

I can't get our error reporting tool to work properly because the source maps are a confusing jumble either.

Mind you this is aimed at the JS ecosystem in its current state; Gatsby itself has been great.

<comment><USER8> I've been writing my side project in vanilla es5. I use rollup for bundling, and nothing else. Life is great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would not recommend to use Gatsby in a project if it requires a frontend with complexity beyond static-scrollable content.

Some problems that I found after some months of integrating it with an existing CMS:

* Development complexity: depending if Gatsby is run on development or production mode, React's `render` methods are called in the browser or inside NodeJS. Having this code executed in a Node process is expected because Gatsby is a static site generator, but this big split between the environment of development and production builds, paired with a growing codebase that keeps evolving, catches new developers on our team with multiple and surprising bugs.

* Debug complexity: JSX code is hard to debug, because the code that is really executed is generated at runtime, so it is not possible for example, to put a breakpoint in a JSX file from your text editor and start a build with Node running in debug mode.

* Runtime requirements: as far as I remember, executing `gatsby build` on my development machine uses ~3.4 GiB of private RAM for the main node process, and it takes around 5 minutes if the local cache is cleared (it ends in around a minute with cache). Its important to remember this when choosing in which server the build runs.

* Integration: Gatsby does not provide out of the box integration with CMS for content authoring (like for example, page drafts).

Now to be honest, the global idea seems good (static websites built with React), but I would wait a few more years until it becomes more mature to use it again for any future project.

<comment><USER10> _Now to be honest, the global idea seems good (static websites built with React)_

Out of interest, what's good about building static websites with React?

<comment><USER7> If you're looking at purely static websites, then it's just a way to structure your application; matter of taste, I reckon, and there's plenty of alternatives on the market that go back twenty years if need be. That said, personally I'm quite fond of the component based approach to building websites - and React isn't the only player there.

But the strengths show when you combine it with e.g. Gatsby which turns it into a hybrid website + app. For first time visitors, search engines, and people with JS disabled it's just static HTML, simple. But for most visitors (browsers, JS enabled etc), after the first load it turns into a webapp and any pageview only requires a single .json file to be pulled in, which can be prefetched (on link hover for example) as well. This gives it the performance characteristics of a single-page app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A static page framework that shoves content into a client side graphql store and then extracts bits out to render a page?

It's popular, so I can't say it was a bad idea.

I guess I'll just say I must be old because it sounds like satire.

<comment><USER12> Let me offer a real-world example.

We were once tasked to build a website for a small publishing house. The site would have pages of books and of authors. Each book page would link to the page(s) of the book's author(s). Each author's page would have thumbnail(s) of this author's book(s). There was also to be an index page, which would contain various books, with names of respective authors, and links to each book's and author's page. It was almost like describing a simple relational database.

Except we wanted the site to be static, and the data about books and authors to be stored in yaml files on github. So book page, author page and index page needed to learn about each other at build time by reading the frontmatter of the yaml files.

With Gatsby's graphql data layer doing so would be trivial, and the whole developer experience would have been highly satisfying. But we weren't allowed to use Gatsby, because the size of the main javascript file that Gatsby (coupled with Netlify CMS) would output was approximately 100 kB, and our tech lead had a strong aversion to large javascript files and to what he considered an overengineered framework. So we had to use Hugo instead. Which we did. Hugo, bless it, also allowed building relationships between data files at build time; but the way it did so was so unintuitive and its Go-based templating language was so cumbersome that I hated almost every moment of working with Hugo. Besides, barebones Hugo did not have a flexible enough static assets pipeline, so we had to write our own (gulp) scripts for bundling static assets. With Gatsby, that would have come out of the box.

Gatsby may not be the technology for building lightest-weight sites (no matter how much the Gatsby team emphasises their commitment to performance), but the developer experience when working with Gatsby is unsurpassable.

<comment><USER13> I've had a lot of good experiences with Jekyll, and I'm fairly sure that the problem you've described would have worked nicely with it. Extending it is also really straightforward, you just put a few lines of Ruby in a file in the right place.

I've moved my site from Jekyll to Gatsby, and while there are some nice things, it's not been a clear win. My site is very significantly slower for first load, but slightly faster for all subsequent loads. The build is far less stable with Gatsby, there are ~5 dependency updates per day, things like Sass don't "just work" anymore, but on the other hand, there are a few more packages that do useful things that I didn't get in the Jekyll community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Gatsby co-founder here. We're super excited for this so we can make Gatsby even more awesome. Happy to answer any Qs!

<comment><USER15> You're getting questions about target market, and I'm pretty sure the answer is web development agencies, right? Any shop with a high volume of projects will need a development pipeline, stack, and ops story that is straight forward and fast to work with.

<comment><USER14> Yep! Right now we're seeing a mix of customers that's roughly 1/3 web development agencies, 1/3 e-commerce websites, and 1/3 B2C lead generation websites.

The value proposition of Gatsby to website agencies is working with modern tech & completing projects faster, and for e-commerce it's higher conversion rates which add $$ to the bottom line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is extremely surprising, right? I clicked the headline thinking it was a shame some tech company chose the same name as a fairly popular static site generator. I guess when I see things like $50/mo for them to host a site, I just assume it's an extremely small team with a couple clients.

<comment><USER16> I'm very surprised that a static site generator can raise this much capital, but it suggests to me that 1) the security dilemmas of non-static but content driven sites are still big enough to warrant adoption of this methodology 2) potentially, there is something they are doing _right_ in this space.

I'd really like to know what 2 is as there's a lot of other options in this space that are also free, open source, and seem to accomplish the same thing. What is the Gatsby sauce?

<comment><USER17> Raising capital isn't success. Profitability is success.

I think the main value of Gatsby is the community-generated recipes to plug and play...but is there value here?

If you have one very generic application, then maybe you save time upfront. But you are tied into this heavy wrapper around React that will probably cause you problems down the line. And you probably still need a backend. So I am not sure what value is being created?

If you specifically need to generate lots of sites, or you have some performance requirement (and data that doesn't change often) then maybe. But I wouldn't use it to build anything complex (i.e. that would tie me into their product) because building an app isn't that much harder. I am sure there is a niche use but I think most people aren't doing anything complicated with it (I use it that way).

I also don't really see how this could be a Wordpress killer (which is the intent of the fundraising presumably). Wordpress is totally end-to-end, it abstracts away all the right parts. This doesn't. $15m won't change that.

In theory, I think applications like Prismic or Contentful (I think it is) actually break up these tasks better. From your app, you have a (usually) simple API. And it reflects the division of labour in most companies i.e. that code and content are separate (before anyone says it: they aren't offering a different product to Gatsby, if it seems that way then that is the point).

<comment><USER18> It doesn't look like Gatsby itself is what is the main selling point, and I'd argue, the VC doesn't think Gatsby itself is either.

Gatsby Preview / Gatsby Content Mesh is most likely the horse being bet on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Big fan of static site generators and the whole JAMStack idea in general - <USER2> use Jekyll extensively - but after building a site with Gatsby, I found it too over-engineered.

React is great, and definitely has its place, but to set up React, GraphQL and all the surrounding tooling just to assemble some text files into a template seems like complexity for the sake of it.

For me, the fun of static sites - after years of building sites with CMSs like Wordpress and Drupal - is that they're as close as possible to plain HTML, lightning-fast and very simple.

<comment><USER20> Another advantage of developing close to plain HTML is that you're free from the js next-shiny-thing hamster wheel.

For example, I had thought Gatsby was the hip way to create static sites in 2019. Then another comment here mentioned it's Next.js now.

<comment><USER21> Gatsby and Next.js are both site frameworks powered by React. They can both be used for static and dynamic sites with different conventions and features around routing, data management, and general app architecture.

Both are "hip" and will likely remain as the top 2 javascript based site frameworks for now, although whether you need either of them is an entirely different question.

<comment><USER18> VuePress / Gridsome are taking over.

<comment><USER22> Which, in the JavaScript community, means they'll be irrelevant in 3, 2, 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I evaluated Gatsby, among other solutions, for our company's website. We use React in production for a large application, nothing new there, but for a static site, I thought it had an overly-complicated build pipeline. In the end, we went with Hugo[1], never regretted, huge fan of static site generators and Netlify CMS[2].

About raising that series A, I hope they have a bigger plan in mind than hosting sites or yet another CMS. If the vision is the "reinvent" the way we work on static sites, I respect that, but I don't see a business case there.

[1]: [https://gohugo.io](https://gohugo.io) [2]: [https://www.netlifycms.org/](https://www.netlifycms.org/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I really love Gatsby. It combines the best of both worlds: static sites and React.

For a very long time, I've been fond of Jekyll. It's mostly because my open source projects are hosted on GitHub and Jekyll is their go-to framework. There's nothing wrong per se with Jekyll. I was simply missing some features from React.

When I was working on React apps, the main benefits for me were: (i) component encapsulation and (ii) CSS Modules. It's easy to understand what a component does just by looking at it. If it gets too complicated, you can simply split it into another component. And CSS Modules are a life saver. The two hardest things in CSS are floats and naming things. That second part is solved now.

My issue with React however is the whole Webpack setup, and the fact that JS is required to run the website.

So when Gatsby appeared, I was pleasantly surprised to see it solved these issues. I ended up rebuilding my website with Gatsby, and I'm currently using it for 2 client projects.

My only issue with Gatsby is its reliance on GraphQL. I tried understanding the GraphQL concepts and purpose, especially with its weird syntax, but it feels over-engineered. Or at least, it doesn't feel like Gatsby _needs_ GraphQL. So I'm not sure why it's so tightly tied to it. What I end up doing for fetching/storing data is using some static JSON files. It's easy to read, to port, and to parse.

I only use GatsbyJS.org the open source project, not GatsbyJS.com the service. But it seems to be similar to WordPress.org/WordPress.com, or what Ghost does. Even if the open source project somehow died, I wouldn't feel stuck with the framework ; since most of the codebase are React components, it'd be easy to port to another platform. That's another benefit.

<comment><USER25> Honest question, but why is React unique in offering component encapsulation? I see this more of a structural paradigm than something a framework allows for or limits against.

<comment><USER24> It's probably not unique in that aspect. I just happen to have quite a bit of experience in React. And that "componentization" only made sense to me when I started using React.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > which promises that it allows these companies to do away with their old LAMP > stack and move to a more modern stack, based on modern open-source tools and > engineering practices.

LAMP stack is open source...

<comment><USER27> The implication in the sentence is that LAMP is an old open-source stack, whereas Gatsby is new open-source

<comment><USER28> Linux - Gatsby doesn't run on Linux?

Apache - Gatsby doesn't run behind a load balancer (apache/nginx) with proxy_pass?

MySql - Gatsby doesn't persist data into a database (MySql/Postgres)?

PHP - I'll give you that PHP is out and node.js is in for backend development.

<comment><USER29> Linux - <USER3>

Apache/Nginx - some web server will be used, though much as likely something more lightweight than Apache. No proxy_pass needed since Gatsby just generates a bunch of files you need to serve

MySQL - probably not unless married with a very complex backend

PHP - yeah that's out

To understand Gatsby it's crucial to understand that it's using a significantly different architecture than traditional LAMP applications and monolithic CMSes

<comment><USER21> Just about every production Gatsby instance is either using static data source (list of markdown/json files) or a monolithic CMS on the backend via API. It's more of a modern frontend site framework rather than a true self-contained app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Question tangential to Gatsby for those of you who use such static site builders as blogs: are there any good tools for writing/composing posts or are you all doing it by hand?

I have set up the same blog maybe 3 times and I always stop posting because I need to be in my coding environment to do so (and if I'm there, I might as well be working on code). I'd really like to find something that I could use to make a post on my gaming pc, for example, where I can add images easily (and have them resized properly). I feel like I should probably just set up a wordpress site, but wanted to know if I had other options.

<comment><USER29> Full disclosure: I'm a Developer Evangelist for Contentful

A "Headless CMS" is one way to achieve what you're looking to do. Contentful is one, there are others. Gatsby's has source plugins for all popular ones.

They have a nice getting started guide for Gatsby + Contentful: [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/sourcing-from- contentful/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/sourcing-from-contentful/)

<comment><USER31> I'm using Ghost + Gatsby for my personal website / blog [1].

[1] [https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com](https://www.ronaldlangeveld.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In a dozen of hours I wrote Sitio[1]. Sitio generates static pages with React templates and if wanted they also become alive React components at the client. It has a simple imperative API, no GraphQL, no Webpack, any kind of datasource can be easily plugged (in fact I did plug many).

It turns out Gatsby also exposes an imperative API that runs behind its fancy declarative API, and it's very similar to mine.

However, I wrote mine in 12 hours. Gatsby has a big team and millions of dollars and it's been in the works for many many years.

And still some weeks ago I tried to use Gatsby to generate a site with data from Trello and Instagram and couldn't, hit some bugs, but mainly hit an opaque and very complex API.

Why?

[1]: [https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio](https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio)

<comment><USER33> No webpack is a big win. Thinking Gatsby is this fun & easy thing and then realizing you're going all-in on the current npm/JS insanity is not a good feature.

<comment><USER32> I have this great badge at the repository: [Webpack free]

[https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fdcb107fde40edb15afb7e80f...](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fdcb107fde40edb15afb7e80f64349fa4fe7c11b/68747470733a2f2f696d672e736869656c64732e696f2f62616467652f7765627061636b2d667265652d6f72616e67652e737667)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Congrats to Kyle and the team. Been using Gatsby in prod for nearly a year now (v1 then migrated to v2), the team is super helpful and responsive to feedback and issues.

(DTC e-commerce)

</comment><comment><USER35> I've been playing with Gatsby on toy projects, and recently I've considered using it in prod in an eCommerce site.

Then I saw that the content preview feature was $50 / month - and it's not even integrated yet with my CMS of choice.

How can teams accept to let go of such fundamental features? I love the React dev experience as much as the next guy, but I certainly can't find a way to justify this to my clients...

<comment><USER35> Apologies for the double comment but another flaw I've seen with Gatsby in eCommerce has to do with fetching the product listings...

You basically have two options: (a) fetch them dynamically (b) trigger a rebuild on product update

With (a) you have spinners and potentially worse SEO. With (b) you have to deal with a delay from hitting "Publish" to seeing the changes deployed in prod...

Again, these are all solved problems in just about every other eCommerce framework!

If you look at some of the Gatsby eCommerce prod examples you will see a few gorgeous sites (the Flamingo one for example) but they all have very few product references and features (no user accounts, etc)

All this is to say the possible use cases for Gatsby in eCommerce seem very narrow, though I would love to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER36> I don't see a good fit between and ecommerce site and gatsby, on an ecoomerce site you may have to change your pages depending on the stock, and disable the buy button when there's no stock for an item. What are you going to do? redeploy the site on every purchase?

Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of gatsby.

<comment><USER35> Yea, essentially what I'm saying in my a vs b scenario.

> Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available > come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of > gatsby.

And you still haven't solved the issue of delays between content changes and deployment... What if someone has made a bad mistake in content editing and you need to revert it? You're exposed to the whims of your build processes and infrastructure... There's no way I can sell to anyone who's played with Wordpress or Shopify "well, your changes might take anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes to be live..."

That's why I'm asking, how can product and engineering teams justify this kind of thing? I'm not being facetious, I'd love to hear their perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have no idea how well the hosted service works, but Gatsby has been one of my favorite frameworks for a while, and I'm happy they're throwing some extra talent into making it awesome.

<comment><USER14> Thanks! We're really excited to be able to invest even more in open source. If there are particular features that would be helpful for you please open an issue on the repo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Kudos to the Gatsby.js team. Gatsby is developer experience nirvana, I really enjoy building with it.

<comment><USER14> Thanks! That's really great to hear!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> For those who like React static sites but dislike the complexity of Gatsby and GraphQL, check out react-static.

[https://github.com/react-static/react-static](https://github.com/react- static/react-static)

YouTube example: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=OqbJ5swVpDQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=OqbJ5swVpDQ)

</comment><comment><USER40> I checked their website and I still don't get what it actually is. I'm familiar with Hugo (compiles .md files to static site), Forestry (CMS for Hugo and other static site generators) and Netlify (to deploy that static site). Where does it sit, and how is it different?

</comment><comment><USER41> I love Gatsby. We are about to release a new landing version of [https://Standups.io](https://Standups.io) entirely with it. Blog and help center. We got rid of intercom guide :)

Parse.ly also just released their new landing page all done with Gatsby.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder who the market for Gatsby is.

I considered signing up for them for a somewhat simple markdown-powered blog, but ultimately ended up writing my own solution because I couldn't justify the cost. The documentation for the self-hosted solution seems designed to put you off doing it yourself.

<comment><USER43> My personal site is running Gatsby on Netlify, I haven't paid for anything except my domain. I'm not the biggest fan of Gatsby, but it's pretty decent for some projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So, a Wordpress competitor? I'm curious to hear more.

<comment><USER45> No. More closely compared to Jekyll.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Reading through the comments I get the impression there is a mis-understanding of what gatsby is. It might be my misunderstanding but ...

"Static Site generator" seems to be the confusion. If I'm reading correctly gatsby is more a replacement for webpack than for jekyll or ghost. You use it as scaffolding to help build your front end. The docs show it compiling react, jsx, using various plugins like emotion etc. It all looks like it's supposed to be a better webpack.

Am I wrong?

<comment><USER47> I think "static site generator" is a more apt description than "webpack replacement". The React code in Gatsby is SSR'ed only (in production mode, anyways) making writing idiomatic dynamic client-side React code _very_ awkward.

Also, Gatsby uses Webpack[1] and it doesn't expose compilation options in any meaningful way like webpack itself does (and it doesn't have a plug-and-play philosophy like Parcel either). I'm not a huge fan of webpack config API personally, but I certainly would never consider using Gatsby as an alternative generic purpose bundler!

[1] [https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/561d33e2e491d3971cb2...](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/561d33e2e491d3971cb2a404eec9705a5a493602/packages/gatsby/package.json#L135-L140)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The real play must be to take a chunk out of medium right? "Companies that don't like medium or Wordpress are rolling their own costly solutions, so here we are with the smooth transition".

The problem is if they want to be profitable they will eventually have to incorporate the bad parts of medium and/or the bad parts of Wordpress and then we're back to square one with some new minimal open source static site builder. This wheel is exhausting.

</comment><comment><USER49> _"Matthews says Gatsby (the company) is now contributing about $3 million per year to open-source projects that include the core Gatsby tools and the plugin ecosystem around it."_

Who should we reach out to about this funding for our open source project to integrate with Gatsby ecosystem? We have an open-source platform with tons of components like videoconferencing, events, rides etc. hosted for free on github.com .

</comment><comment><USER50> I don't really know what Gatsby is good at because I've never been target customer of it. But judging on website and docs I think its power lies in simplicity: people want to get shit together and call a day. This tool allows that. It probably won't live long, but that's not a problem, right? Most websites built with it are short lived: promotion www, sales, register forms etc.

</comment><comment><USER51> I have tutorials on Gatsby and have used it quite a bit. I don't recommend it. I can't understand why this is getting funding? People are so much better off with a CMS like Django or Wordpress. Hell, they could use static HTML, Apache and Quill.JS and nothing else is needed. Maybe sub Quill with TinyMCE or CKEditor. There is nothing overly special about Gatsby.

</comment><comment><USER52> The history of Gatsby is interesting. If my memory serves me well, it was started as an open source project. Then the developers of this open source project got funded by VC.

So the pattern is like this: open source project -> get funded by VC.

The other similar case is IPFS (open source project) -> Filecoin (get funded by VC).

Anyway, congratulation to the Gatsby team! :)

</comment><comment><USER53> If history is any judge, four years from now, it will no longer be modern. And those people who have spent time and money investing into gatsby will be looking to leave for something else.

It's one of my biggest issues with software is that software is never done. It's always being torn down and replaced with something else.

</comment><comment><USER54> What's a good, mature headless CMS that "just works" and is compatible with Gatsby/GraphQL?

<comment><USER55> Contentful

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Gatsby is great; we use it for all our marketing sites because it doesn't hide content behind JavaScript like plain React so it's better for SEO. Gatsby would be great to compete with Netlify for static React app hosting.

<comment><USER57> Don't search engine crawlers render React properly?

<comment><USER4> Google kinda sorta sometimes executes JavaScript on pages it crawls, but much less frequently and less reliably than regular HTML indexing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> So alternatively why not a less coupled system? Hasura + hyperapp, etc + ...?

<comment><USER32> Doesn't generate static pages.

<comment><USER58> Sarcasm? If not there is nothing stopping you from generating static files using build time queries.

<comment><USER32> Are you serious? Then why are you suggesting libraries? Or even languages? There's nothing stopping you from generating static files using machine instructions directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I've enjoyed using Gatsby in a hybrid approach to combine marketing and a web app for MVPs. It's allowed me to get up and running quickly and haven't run into any major issues so far.

</comment><comment><USER60> I recommend people checkout Gridsome. It's a similar product but for Vue.

</comment><comment><USER61> And we at [https://simulify.com](https://simulify.com) are making a UI for react based static sites. Pls join our alpha.

</comment><comment><USER62> I thought this was about gatsby, the hair product company

<comment><USER63> Their hair paste work really well.

And Gatsby JS work really well, as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> calcsam: How do you think about defensibility? One might think that because the underlying tech is open source, someone else can also spring up a hosting service. Is that not an issue because agencies would want the official hosting for the open source project because they want the reassurance?

Or is it for another reason this isn't an issue?

<comment><USER14> Interestingly, a lot of open-source companies have built defensible businesses -- a list is over at [http://oss.cash](http://oss.cash). Recent IPOs include Mulesoft, Elastic, Mongo, Fastly...

More specifically to Gatsby, we don't actually see ourselves in the hosting business, more in the "collaboration" business -- most websites have teams of nontechnical folks that are reviewing sites before they go live, creating and editing content, and so on. We're building Gatsby-specific collaboration tooling, starting with CMS Preview.

A good comparison here would be Github -- nobody thinks of Github as "Git hosting", they think of Github as the place where developers collaborate together on projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Does anyone know why Gatsby uses GraphQL? I don't understand how a static site benefits from GraphQL.

</comment><comment><USER66> Congratulations, now build some great things with that funding .

</comment><comment><USER67> Gatsby is popular among frontend React devs although I kind of balk at end to end solutions like this. Nice alternatives to Gatsby are React-static and next.js

</comment><comment><USER68> Gatsby is about 3 years old. I wonder how it would have worked out if in 2007 DHH and co had pivoted from Basecamp to Rails Inc and raised funding?

Of course, to be fair, Meteor is still in business after taking the same path (though it seems most efforts are directed at Apollo?)

</comment><comment><USER69> Congrats guys!</comment>


Skoar – A musical programming language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sofakid/Skoarcery

<comment><USER2> I am by no means, an expert in music, I can't even read it, so forgive me if this comes as a silly question, but why this syntax? It looks very foreign to me, but at the same time, being a programming language I would have expected something more... verbose? is there any practical reason to for something like this?

<comment><USER3> this is a live coding language, so trying to achieve what tidal and overtone are. EDM type genres have recognizable formulas for the drum and bass, and then for pads and leads above so all these environments are trying to abstract over patterns at different levels of the music.

i can't find a real tutorial, but there's lots of material to look at: [https://github.com/overtone/overtone/wiki/Getting- Started](https://github.com/overtone/overtone/wiki/Getting-Started)

and this is the 1st ref: [http://akustik.hfbk.net/publications/LiveCodingInLaptopPerfo...](http://akustik.hfbk.net/publications/LiveCodingInLaptopPerformance.pdf)

in this page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding)

___________

tidal: [http://yaxu.org/tidal/](http://yaxu.org/tidal/)

disclaimer: I've been playing synths a fair amount and i have a hard time understanding a lot of stuff on the overtone cheat sheet

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've seen so many "music programming languages" recently that I'm getting really quite confused about which one was which and does what. Has anyone done a comparison, or even just have a list of links?

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind there are actually two domains in music: instruments (sound synthesis) and orchestration. Both Skoar and Alda (which was linked yesterday) are only orchestration languages.

I've been researching about this and narrowed down by these criteria: (1) Modern and maintained (2) Open source (3) Multiplatform (4) Supports live coding (5) Not MIDI-only output (6) Text-based (7) Not Java (sorry JSyn :P)

For me live coding is important since I prefer to compose music in an exploratory fashion. Also, live performances are _cool_. Read more about live coding and resources in [http://toplap.org](http://toplap.org)

The list in no particular order (beware of the brain dump):

·

## Overtone ([https://overtone.github.io/](https://overtone.github.io/))

The coolest kid on the block is actually a frontend to SuperCollider.

\- Clojure based.

\- VJ-ready. Integration with Processing via Quil ([https://github.com/quil/quil](https://github.com/quil/quil)) and GLSL shaders via Shadertone ([https://github.com/overtone/shadertone](https://github.com/overtone/shadertone)).

\- Lots of tooling: [https://github.com/overtone](https://github.com/overtone)

·

## SuperCollider ([https://supercollider.github.io/](https://supercollider.github.io/))

\- Object-oriented functional language (similar to Smalltalk/Ruby/C/JS).

\- Basically Overtone minus Clojure minus VJ plus IDE.

\- Client-server architecture (which is what allows Overtone to use it as a backend).

·

## Sonic Pi ([http://sonic-pi.net/](http://sonic-pi.net/))

\- Ruby DSL + IDE.

\- Built for Raspberry PI (but runs anywhere SuperCollider and Ruby are available).

\- Another frontend to SuperCollider.

\- Designed to be suitable for teaching children. Teacher resources available ([http://www.sonicpiliveandcoding.com/](http://www.sonicpiliveandcoding.com/) [http://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/sonic-pi- lessons/](http://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/sonic-pi-lessons/))

·

## Extempore ([https://github.com/digego/extempore](https://github.com/digego/extempore))

\- Scheme-like.

\- Supports both audio and graphics.

\- Defines itself as a 'cyberphysical' programming environment ([http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1869526](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1869526)).

·

## ChucK ([http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/](http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/))

\- Real-time sound synthesis and music creation (real-time meant it used to take a real amount of CPU time in non-RT kernels, not sure if it's changed).

\- Time-based, concurrent programming model (they call it 'strongly-timed').

·

## Fluxus ([http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/](http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/))

\- Racket based.

\- Full-fledged environment.

\- Defined as 'a 3D game engine for livecoding worlds into existence', though it supports sound too.

\- Doesn't seem to be actively maintained (most recent release dates from April 2012).

·

## Nyquist ([https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/music/web/musi...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/music/web/music.software.html))

\- (Still researching...)

·

## Csound ([http://www.csounds.com/](http://www.csounds.com/))

\- (Still researching...)

\- Live coding added in a recent version.

\- Orchestration and synthesis are separate languages.

·

## Tidal ([http://yaxu.org/tidal/](http://yaxu.org/tidal/))

\- Haskell based.

\- Seems to support audio and graphics (defines itself as live coding of patterns).

\- (Still researching... I just came to know it in a link here.)

·

## Skoar ([https://github.com/sofakid/Skoarcery](https://github.com/sofakid/Skoarcery))

\- Another SuperCollider frontend.

\- Only orchestration, though I guess it supports different instruments created in SuperCollider.

\- Doesn't seem to support live coding? (Added to the list until I research more.)

·

## MORE

I just found these in the TOPLAP wiki (and Googling around) but had no time to comb through them. Listed in no particular order:

\- [https://github.com/edne/pineal](https://github.com/edne/pineal)

\- [https://github.com/createuniverses/praxis](https://github.com/createuniverses/praxis)

\- [http://charlie-roberts.com/gibber/about-gibber/](http://charlie- roberts.com/gibber/about-gibber/)

\- [https://github.com/LuaAV/LuaAV](https://github.com/LuaAV/LuaAV)

\- [http://hyperyarn.criticalartware.net](http://hyperyarn.criticalartware.net)

\- [http://www.renickbell.net/conductive/doku.php/](http://www.renickbell.net/conductive/doku.php/)

\- EXTRA: Live coding light shows [https://github.com/brunchboy/afterglow](https://github.com/brunchboy/afterglow)

<comment><USER6> Several months ago, I compared musical languages, writing essentially the same thing in each one:

[https://www.safaribooksonline.com/blog/2014/11/07/making- com...](https://www.safaribooksonline.com/blog/2014/11/07/making-computers- sing/)

I also wrote one myself:

[http://paulbatchelor.github.io/proj/sporth](http://paulbatchelor.github.io/proj/sporth)

<comment><USER5> Thanks! I ended moving the information to a Gist[0] for easier updating as I research more (hope to eventually settle for a few environments and actually try them). I'll check your links ASAP and add relevant info to the Gist.

Sporth reminds me a lot of [https://forthsalon.appspot.com/](https://forthsalon.appspot.com/) They'd make great partners :)

[0] [https://gist.github.com/alvaro- cuesta/dc714c06a8e672bebd90](https://gist.github.com/alvaro- cuesta/dc714c06a8e672bebd90)

<comment><USER6> I got a lot of inspiration from forthsalon.

It was only after I built Sporth that I realized how expressive a Forth can be for creative coding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not going to lie, this seems like a terrible language for musicians to compose in. Maybe I need time to get used to it, but it looks more like an esoteric programming language to me. The amount of brackets needed for it to work is just begging for typos.

Furthermore, the syntax doesn't feel "readable" like a music score. The symbolic notation doesn't click for me. I'd like to be able to hear what is going on in my head, and this just doesn't seem designed for that. By contrast, Alda (a musical language posted yesterday) is very readable to me as a musician. ABC notation and Lilypond were very good sources of inspiration.

There are some things I like about Skoar. The use of a really good audio engine to produce the sound wins in my book (there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to control the sound itself, though.) I think the way you express dynamics using hashes is pretty novel. (May want to consider using decibel scaling instead of linear scaling.) I like the fact that you have incorporated programming elements like conditionals, loops, and variables.

Both Alda and Skoar basically focus on conventional western music notation, which is perhaps the most boring part of computer generated music. Sound design plays much greater importance, and it makes me sad to see no focus on that whatsoever (Sound is uh... the part that actually makes the music).

I'm hesitant to share this on HN because it's not done yet, but I too, made yet another musical language:

[http://paulbatchelor.github.io/proj/sporth](http://paulbatchelor.github.io/proj/sporth)

Here's the code:

[https://github.com/paulbatchelor/sporth](https://github.com/paulbatchelor/sporth)

And here's what it can sound like (everything minus the outdoor ambient sample is synthesized in Sporth):

[https://soundcloud.com/thebatchelorlab/scheale](https://soundcloud.com/thebatchelorlab/scheale)

<comment><USER3> I'll watch that repo, i've been thinking of going down the maxforLive rabbit hole. never heard of soundPipe before.

The tl'dr to these languages/dev environments/whatever is that they attempt to give you textual control over some subset of what a DAW (ableton or FL studio or logic Pro) can do, so that you can compose/perform/synthesize on the fly. I think all of these would be hard to understnad for somebody that hasn't actually read a manual for, say, Ableton, or some hard synth or VST that has a lot of sound sources, LFO/envelope/delay/effects routing matrix.

___________________________

there's another notation/synthesis framework that was bandied about, audioKit

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9903760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9903760) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574558)

__________________________

also, one of those threads had a reference to music-N, which is a good (and short!) historical reference page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSIC-N](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSIC-N)

<comment><USER6> I'm actually the creator of soundPipe, so it makes sense that you probably haven't heard of it.

Sporth is definitely a language for people with experience with modular synthesis and digital signal processing. People with experience in SC or Csound should feel pretty comfortable (in fact, many Sporth modules utilize algorithms taken directly from Csound opcodes)

Soundpipe is a library which takes a very modular approach as well (sporth is a language built on top of SoundPipe).

I know the AK guys quite well, and we're actually working together to get Soundpipe working with it.

People interested in how MUSIC-N languages work should look at Csound, which is a direct descendent of the MUSIC-V language. Their syntax is very similar, and many MUSIC-N files have been ported to Csound.

<comment><USER3> check. I'm looking for rubber bands, like on my mopho and ms2000 i like to rubber band the filter, resonance, key tracking and other pots/encoders together, so... exponential/log and inverse rubber bands.

<comment><USER6> What exactly is a "rubber band"?

<comment><USER3> it's just a pot/fader/encoder that can send lots of CC's at the same time

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't see a way to do triplets with this notation.</comment>


Out of the Darkness: How two psychologists and CIA devised torture program - <AUTHOR> https://www.aclu.org/feature/out-darkness <comment><USER2> _' By early 2002, the CIA, the Justice Department, and the National Security Council were debating whether the legal and humanitarian protections of the Geneva Conventions would apply to captives suspected to be members of al-Qaida or the Taliban. After weeks of debate, and over objections from the State Department, President George W. Bush ultimately issued the final word on the matter. In a February 2002 memo, he stated that al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions.'_

This is one of the roots of the problem. Once you have a class of people without rights, you can arbitrarily identify people as part of that class and they have no chance at due process. Unless absolutely everyone has basic legal protections, no one has them.

<comment><USER3> You remind me of a scene from the movie _Lawrence of Arabia_ (based on the life of the man by that name) where he talks about "We do not let any of our people fall into enemy hands because they are considered (something something) thus not protected by the Geneva Convention." In other words, it was their policy to shoot their own people who were too injured to travel rather than let them be taken as prisoners and tortured by the enemy. It was considered a mercy killing.

Edit: In other words, they were not recognized as a proper army and were deemed to be something like internal rebel forces, subject to internal law only, with no International protections, such as the Geneva Convention. They were treated horribly when taken into custody and often tortured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Time for war crime trials.

Blatant violation of Article 2, United Nations Convention against Torture, United States Signatory 18 April 1988, ratified 21 October 1994.

To be proven by ACLU:

"...For more than a month, Suleiman endured an incessant barrage of torture techniques designed to psychologically destroy him. His torturers repeatedly doused him with ice-cold water. They beat him and slammed him into walls. They hung him from a metal rod, his toes barely touching the floor. They chained him in other painful stress positions for days at a time. They starved him, deprived him of sleep, and stuffed him inside small boxes. With the torture came terrifying interrogation sessions in which he was grilled about what he was doing in Somalia and the names of people, all but one of whom he'd never heard of. ..."

<comment><USER5> Half of the heads of state of Europe would be dragged along with the US since the convention forbids states to transport people to any country where there is reason to believe they will be tortured.

Overall 54 countries participated and cooperated with the US on it's extraordinary rendition program from Iceland to Iran. [https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/g...](https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/globalizing- torture-20120205.pdf)

This would be an interesting trial indeed...

<comment><USER6> So, the Geneva convention is basically a lip-service treaty only enforced when its convenient? Sounds like most treaties come to think of it.

<comment><USER5> The Geneva convention doesn't cover irregulars, this is the UN treaty against torture which like most UN conventions is an utter joke.

<comment><USER4> The Geneva Convention is pretty clear and the United States signed on.

Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Library:

Article 2 & 5:

"...Prisoners of war are in the power of the hostile Power, but not of the individuals or corps who have captured them. They must at all times be humanely treated and protected, particularly against acts of violence, insults and public curiosity. Measures of reprisal against them are prohibited.

: "...No coercion may be used on prisoners to secure information to the condition of their army or country. Prisoners who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind whatever. ..."

[http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/geneva02.asp#art5](http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/geneva02.asp#art5)

<comment><USER5> Of their army or country. Irregulars as in terrorists, spies, mercenaries etc. Are not protected by the Geneva convention and are not considered prisoners of war.

<comment><USER4> Interesting legal point. We never declared war on "al Qaeda" since it's a ultimately just a logo and the combatants could be labeled criminals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The actual 'torture report' by the Senate intelligence committee is worth reading at least in part (it's long...) and goes into some good detail about how the psychologists were recruited and operated.

[http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf](http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf)

Take an hour or two to read the executive summary at the beginning and you will be better informed that just about anyone. Going to the primary sources is easy enough, and it's really enjoyable (a weird word in this context) to form opinions based on the rawest information available. Of course the actual report is a political document in itself, but that aspect is as much a part of the coverage of the report as the contents itself.

<comment><USER8> It's been pulled from that URL unfortunately. There's a few copies floating around if you google the filename unfortunately they don't come from as authoritative a URL as the .gov address you provided.

<comment><USER9> Shouldn't it remain readily available to at least the citizens of the US? If nowhere else, via the Library of Congress? An initial search didn't turn up that report (as far as I can tell, at a glance, there's a couple of funding documents authored by Feinstein at least) -- but there's a rather depressing list of other documents:

[https://www.loc.gov/search/?q="Committee+Study+of+the+Centra...](https://www.loc.gov/search/?q="Committee+Study+of+the+Central+Intelligence+Agency's+Detention+and+Interrogation+Program&st=list&c=150)

Like the older:

United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Hearing June 10, 2008

"Coercive Interrogation Techniques: Do They Work, Are They Reliable, and What Did the FBI Know About Them?"

[https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/Senate- Judiciary...](https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/Senate-Judiciary- Hearing-June-10-2008.pdf)

(39 pages, some interesting points are made, among them some pretty clear arguments that torture is illegal, and harsh techniques that for some reason or other are deemed to not be torture may also be illegal...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Today, Abu Zubaydah is imprisoned at Guantánamo. He continues to suffer as a result of the torture. He has permanent brain damage. He suffers from searing headaches, sensitivity to noise, and seizures. He can't recall his father's name or his own date of birth."

\-- That is simply fucking abhorrent.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am always annoyed by the argument that torture is unacceptable AND it doesn't work. It's not totally implausible that this is true, but I think it's very likely that torture "works" in some sense and certainly everyone practicing it expects it to work.

So... for an anti-torture position to have some meat to it, you have to make it clear that you think torture is unacceptable _even when it does work_.

If you're not willing to sacrifice real lives and safety to avoid torture, I don't think you are meaningfully against it, and you certainly stand no chance of persuading those convinced of its efficacy.

<comment><USER12> Do you believe that all those people that signed confessions to witchcraft during the Inquisition were truthful?

What about all of the people that are tortured that don't have anything to do with terrorism? What sort of reparations do they receive? What sort of penalty does the US citizenry or the US government pay for those types of mistakes? It's easy to throw others under the bus to save yourself, but I'm not sure if the US can really claim to be the world's Moral Authority when they are doing such things.

<comment><USER13> the poster you're replying to is not saying that it definitely works, only that it might. and additionally (and this is the crux of that statement): even if it does work, it's still morally wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Small, but important point:

There are two APAs:

1\. American Psychological Association - PhD/PsyD Psychologists - (torture scandal)

2\. American Psychiatric Association - MD/DO Physicians - (unambiguously opposed to medical involvement in torture)

People get psychiatrists and psychologists confused all the time, and the distinction here is really, really important.

Bias: I'm a psychiatrist, and I am proud that our professional organization has been clear from the start that torture is unacceptable.

<comment><USER5> Bruce Jessen got a PhD in Divinity from Utah State so probably not even that :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How do these guys still exist? Anyone who has the opportunity to do so should damage these guys. Turn off their accounts, refuse to sell them goods or services, anything not required by law.

By no means am I suggesting anything illegal or dangerous. But it's appalling that James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen are allowed to participate in society.

If you are an engineer or executive at any company, you have a duty to check for accounts belonging to these people and turn them off. If they subscribe to your services, their money is no good. If they want to buy products, they are not for sale. No credit cards, no bank accounts, no cellular phones.

They don't belong in our society and anyone in a position to eject them ought to do so.

<comment><USER16> The vigilante approach sounds good when you apply it to people you find abhorrent. Doesn't sound so good when you realize some people find homosexuals, blacks, atheists, etc. abhorrent and think "they don't belong in our society".

<comment><USER13> much as i'd like to agree with the person you're replying to in this specific case, you're right in the general case (full disclosure: i'm black, and pretty devoutly agnostic).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reading this article, I was wondering about the logistical costs of this torture (on top of the fees paid to Mitchell and Jessen). Wouldn't it have been more efficient to arrest the suspected men and try to have an honest conversation with them in the line of "We suspect that you are part of a terrorist network that wants to harm us. If you speak, we can protect you and your family, if you don't, well we will detain you for couple of weeks - without harming you - to see if you change your mind, and then we will simply release you."

It may sound too innocent, but how is someone able to trust the information given by someone who has been driven crazy? If Suleiman forgot the name of his father due to the torture, he may as well forget crucial details of the terrorist plot he was supposed to be part of.

And on a totally unrelated note, please disable the autoplay of the videos when scrolling down to them, I think this is one of the most annoying misuse of javascript I ever came across.

</comment><comment><USER18> It remains a tremendous national shame that there have been absolutely no movements toward prosecution for those that perpetrated this incredible regression from civilization.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. The problem is that, in the public's mind, there remains ambiguity about whether water-boarding is torture, and whether torture is wrong. (Yes and yes, FYI). Without real action taken against John Brennan, GWBush, and various people in the CIA the US has lost it's principles, it's backbone.

<comment><USER20> I blame so much on the media in this area. They spread lies and confusion with the constant barrage of debates about whether waterboarding really was torture.

History will not judge us kindly.

<comment><USER18> One can opt out of "us" relatively easily by moving their personal support (i.e. tax revenue, GDP contribution, et c) elsewhere to a place that supports the universal application of human rights regardless of skin color, religious affiliation, or national origin.

In 2008 I left my job, girlfriend, friends, and family behind to do so. It's tough but it's possible.

<comment><USER21> Can you please elaborate on that? As of now, it sounds like you left behind everyone you knew in order to change how your taxes are spent.

<comment><USER22> I'm assuming they emigrated and renounced US citizenship. Would be interesting to hear how and where etc though.

<comment><USER18> I didn't renounce my citizenship because I do not have any other citizenship, and my place of residence will not give me a residence permit without a passport to paste it into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Btw, for those that aren't aware, it might be timely to mention the legendary German interrogator, Hanns Scharff:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff#Auswertestelle_W...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff#Auswertestelle_West_Interrogation_Officer)

as he is often brought up in discussions on interrogation techniques.

</comment><comment><USER23> Compelling article. I think the extended interview Jon Stewart did with John Yoo is another good document if you want to get the perspective of the people who authorized this. I don't mean that as an endorsement of what happened...

[http://www.cc.com/video-clips/flktqb/the-daily-show-with- jon...](http://www.cc.com/video-clips/flktqb/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart- exclusive---john-yoo-extended-interview-pt--1)

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow. Dark.</comment>


Come to Silicon Valley and Learn to Code for Free - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/education/come-to-silicon-valley-and-learn-to-code-for-free <comment><USER2> This really seems like the future of education. Wish the program was offered here in Toronto.</comment>


We Need Insects More Than They Need Us - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/73/play/we-need-insects-more-than-they-need-us <comment><USER2> Posted earlier today (no comments there either though): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360996)</comment>


Why is WinPhone a failure but OSX a success? - <AUTHOR>

OSX has about 9% market share and has taken a long time to get there.
i don't think it is considered a massive failure
c.f.
Windows Phone which has about 4% of the phone market and growing fast, but is considered by many to be a failure.
why <comment><USER2> For a lot of reasons.

OSX have a _profitable_ section of the market. Is not the size what determine if something is or not a failure, is your POSITION in that market.

Having 90% of all the non-paying customer VS 10% of all the paying customers is a different position for a for-profit company. In this case, you truly want the 10%.

If WinPhone have a desirable portion of the market, untouched/unchallenged by others, then could be called a success.

Le't use a contrived example: vim/emacs have a strong position in a desirable sub-set of the developer mindshare. His position is so strong, that no-IDE to date have be able to destroy it.

Then if also is growing, is something powerful.

Let's play the (almost incorrect) stereotype of the Apple users: Them are hipster, richer, more creative, select for themselves the gadgets, etc. And pay. This segment, even at %1, is valuable. And if nobody else touch it, then is more than valuable, is unchallenged. Could be say: Is bullet-prof, failure- prof.

And then android. Android is for geeks (and the masses that wanna cheap). Have the subset of geeks is desirable. Probably, a lot of android users hate so bad Apple that will never use it. The position of Android in that case is solid.

Both have solid position.

Windows phone? No have it.

</comment><comment><USER3> To preface this, I think it's unfair to consider Windows Phone a failure at this point.

I think it's a matter of business models. OS X, like iOS has Apple hardware and software, huge margins and makes Apple the most profitable OEM in both markets.

Windows Phone, more like Android (and Windows of course) allows multiple manufacturers to provide it, and all those manufacturers who also produce Android phones are doing better with Android. It's not a totally fair comparison because they pay for WP licenses, but then they pay for MS patents with Android too.

There's also the issue of Nokia, an iconic manufacturer who bet everything on Windows Phone. It's not fair, but Windows Phone has the pressure of keeping Nokia alive.

Basically, Microsoft took the Windows approach to Windows Phone, in a market Android is entrenched with a similar (cheaper for OEMs) approach. In that light, 4% against 90% or so for Windows with the same model looks like a failure.

</comment><comment><USER4> OSX is a failure compared to Windows Desktop Marketshare. And this is important because software is built for Windows first and OSX later or never. Case in point, mac users often 'need to' run VM's to run windows apps. Windows is the dominant platform for the desktop.

Windows Phone on the other hand is a failure because at 4% marketshare, Microsoft has no workable business model. They are losing money to play catch up.

Carriers have cheaper and better margin alternatives to pushing windows phones. Developers don't have the user base to justify apps for the platform. Consumers don't see the compelling reason to switch from iOS or android.

The sad thing is, the windows phone business (6.x) was doing great at 16% market share before iOS and android. Microsoft got disrupted by new technology.

</comment><comment><USER5> Mac OS X is a necessity for some users specially in media related industries and not only. It also manages to offer most of the software regular users want and Apple makes a profit from Mac sales.

As hardware and software Windows Phone is by no means a failure. Nokia creating beautiful devices with good cameras and the fact that even in low specs WP runs snappy is promising and helped a lot to achieve this 4%. But WP is not yet profitable. One of the reasons Windows Phone is considered to be a failure is that it hasn't managed to create an ecosystem where most popular apps exist at the three years of its existing form (counting from Windows Phone 7).

</comment><comment><USER6> First off, I think you are talking about iOS not OS X. If you are talking about OS X then you need to look at margins, not marketshare.

<comment><USER7> iOS has more than 9%, but I suspect your right about the margins. If your 9% share makes you the most profitable PC maker, what's the point in being the leader in market share?

<comment><USER8> If you become the market leader then you make bigger bucks.

<comment><USER7> Android versus iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a good question. I don't pretend to know the answer, however the following may be related. In print, design, photography, music etc, OSX has far more than 10% of the market. Macs are a standard in small but important markets. The (so-called) creatives for example. I don't see an area where this is true for smart phones.

<comment><USER9> I am not sure I agree. Many design companies and advertisement copmanies I know charge extra if their project has to involve anything to be done on a mac. eg if the client wants a mac compatible file, final cut project etc, because of the added overhead as macs apparently don't play nice with other systems.

also, they dont have any advantage over a dedicated windows machine anymore stability wise.

<comment><USER10> Where I went to college, The University of Alabama, their design departments in the College of Art and Art History only had Macs in the computer labs where graphic design was taught. And the Advertising department only had Macs in the computer labs across the whole College of Communication and Information Sciences - which includes Advertising, PR, Communication Studies, Journalism, Videography, etc. When it came down to the amount of computers with the Adobe CS software packages on them, the main Library on campus was about 95% Macs, and you had to go up 3 floors before you finally got to a computer lab that had Windows with CS on them. And there were only about 8 of them.

Just one data point, I know, but my college was basically training people to work on a Mac if you used any Adobe CS software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here in India, Windows phone is not only gaining sales it is also gaining market share relative to others. Windows Phone momentum has never been as high as it is now.

I think it is same all over the world.

<comment><USER12> Hmm...interesting. Which part of India is this happening?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> winphone is a failure because nokia who once had basically 100% of the smartphone market doens't exist anymore since they switched to winphone.

[http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/10/the- the...](http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/10/the-there- pillars-of-nokia-strategy-have-all-failed-why-nokia-must-fire-ceo-elop- now.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Who exactly is considering Windows Phone a failure?

When iOS came on the scene, it was mostly a different kind of animal than any other phone. There wasn't really any similar device so it got first-comer status. Android was able to compete by taking an opposite model. Be cheap and on as many devices as possible, which is more or less what Windows did back in the '80's to out compete Macintosh. Windows Phone took a very different UI/UX approach and was late into what had become a competitive market.

Considering all that, 4% market share and continuing growth is good. If it was stagnant or shrinking, that would be something different.</comment>


U.S. Intel: Osama Bin Laden Avatar Could Recruit Terrorists Online for Centuries - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/osama-bin-laden-avatar/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just posting this to HN for the pure nonsense value of the idea. ( Also some enterprising person may start to sell virtual drones to the DoD.)</comment>


Google opens up on seven years of its data center history - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/google-opens-up-on-seven-years-of-its-data-center-history/

<comment><USER2> From the linked post [1], 1/4 the power to run pumps instead of fans is a major difference!

Was curious if using local water sources would have any environmental impact from the heat or flow, and found an article talking about the first seawater- cooled center, from only May 2011 [2]. Google apparently creates a 30-year thermal model of the effect on the environment. I hope other corporations take their consideration and transparency as an example.

[1] [http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2012/11/13/google-adopts- wate...](http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2012/11/13/google-adopts-water-as-key- to-save-energy-in-data-centers-pu.html)

[2] [http://gigaom.com/cleantech/google-to-switch-on-worlds- first...](http://gigaom.com/cleantech/google-to-switch-on-worlds-first- seawater-cooled-data-center-this-fall/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how much global warming gets prevented just through everyone adopting these practices for datacenters (either directly or by switching to cloud providers with an economic incentive to do so).

Maybe a carbon tax wouldn't be so unreasonable, if it shifts more innovation like this. There's probably a "Google of Cement Production", agriculture (arguably this is Monsanto or ADM or Cargill, as much as they are reviled over IP, they are quite efficient), etc.

<comment><USER4> There already is an energy tax. You have to pay for energy.

A carbon tax on top of that wouldn't effect efficiency.

<comment><USER5> The argument is that the cost of extracting the energy and transforming it into a usable source does not match the cost it does to the environment once that energy is used. That's what the carbon tax is for. It's for the carbon (pollutants) you produce not for the energy you use. Hence why it's called a carbon tax and not an energy tax.

<comment><USER4> It's not so simple. Until the EROI of other fuels improves dramatically a carbon dioxide tax is just going to make _every_ fuel more expensive, since non-carbon fuels need carbon fuels as input.

Once the EROI goes up this isn't a problem. But until it does a carbon dioxide tax is pointless - it just makes everything more expensive.

And once the EROI does go up people will switch to those energy sources without prompting (they will simply be cheaper), so again a carbon dioxide tax does nothing.

<comment><USER3> A correctly-structured carbon tax would make a new NG plant relatively more attractive vs. continuing to operate a coal plant without the tax. (both fossil fuels, but NG is more efficient).

Also I think it shouldn't be a straight carbon tax, but an "environmental externalities tax". I personally care far more about other forms of pollution (especially localized) than CO2; I don't think global warming is a non-issue, but it's not the #1 environmental issue. Point sources of particulates, NO2, etc. should be taxed as well as maximum emissions specified (obviously a steel mill should be allowed to emit more, and pay for it, at full production in an efficient way, than a badly adjusted oil-fired school furnace, even if the school chooses to ignore economic rationality.)

<comment><USER4> Agreed!

And interestingly coal plants are already being shuttered due to the low price of natural gas. All that without any taxes - just new technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They innovated on three frontiers - search engine algorithm, intent based advertising, and data center/infrastructure technology. A startup has to be really good at one thing to succeed. Google was really good at 3 three things right from it's early days.

<comment><USER7> As much as I like google, I doubt they're as good as that. Their search and advertising is essentially a monopoly because they have such a data lead over anyone else. That's why facebook freaks them out because they know how having more data is the secret sauce. Their data center innovations don't seem all that incredibly innovative. If they had robots whirring around I'd be much more impressed.

<comment><USER8> > If they had robots whirring around I'd be much more impressed.

They kinda do. See their self driving cars. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car>

<comment><USER7> I mean in their data center. Also, I'd be more impressed if they actually got the self-driving cars out to the world. It's been 5 years now. Google has a problem executing, they're lulled by their one success.

<comment><USER9> One success being Search, AdSense, GMail, Maps, Analytics, Chrome, or Android?

<comment><USER10> You got marhallp-trolled. Check the post history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Might wanna read this one too:

[http://gigaom.com/cleantech/google-backs-iowa-wind-farm- has-...](http://gigaom.com/cleantech/google-backs-iowa-wind-farm-has-put- close-to-1b-into-clean-power/)</comment>


So if Wikipedia is the web's encyclopedia, where is the web's user's manual?  - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2010/12/11/theWorldwideWebUsersManual.html <comment><USER2> "Hi, where can I buy just enough rope to hang myself"?

For some things, simple instructions are fine - the coffee example being one of them. Once you get into complex or dangerous things (home improvement, etc.) you need to impart some safety and theory before just giving instructions.

There's a reason that they make undergrads go through the "Lab Safety" course before doing work in a science lab...

</comment><comment><USER3> Before reading the article, I thought it was going to be about a universal manual for web browsers.

Such a thing would be immensely helpful.

Say, for instance, that your site asks the user to disable their popup blocker, or install a bookmarklet, or upgrade to a newer version of IE. It would be great if everyone could just use a "how do I do this?" link that goes to a neutral site with instructions. Sort of like whatbrowser.org, but with info on how to actually do stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> One scoop per cup is the golden rule. ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.wikihow.com>

<comment><USER6> Yes, wikiHow is it. From wikiHow's about us page, <http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:About-wikiHow>:

"wikiHow is a collaborative effort to build and share the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Like Wikipedia, wikiHow is a wiki, in that anyone can write or edit a page on the site. Thousands of people from all over the world have collaboratively written 93,410 how-to articles. Over 25 million people a month read wikiHow, which makes it the 150th most popular website according to Quantcast."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The web itself is a user manual. And the index/catalog is called a search engine.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's not open, but eHow.com is pretty much a general FAQ for the web.

<comment><USER9> PLEASE NO.

eHow is Demand Media. It's a spam/scam - they generate millions of pages with almost zero content. Contributors are paid pennies to write the bare minimum to get a "PASS." Demand Media is a disease of the web.

[http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/e-media- ti...](http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/e-media- tidbits/100146/demand-media-may-be-bad-for-social-media-but-not-for- journalism/)

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/demand_media_is_a_page_...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/demand_media_is_a_page_view_generating_machine.php)

[http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/ehowcom-demand- med...](http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/ehowcom-demand- media-c295301.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who would read it?

Does anyone read user manuals any more?

</comment><comment><USER11> "Kick to restart"

</comment><comment><USER12> It's down- mirror?

<comment><USER13> Looks like it's back up. Worked for me * shrug *

If not:

>I was just making a small pot of coffee, just two cups. So I measured out two full cups of water, and guessed how much coffee to put in the basket. The coffee came out great, but could just have easily come out awful.

>So if Wikipedia is the web's encyclopedia, where is the web's user's manual? It would be infinitely expandable, aspire to cover everything, and take a practical 1-2-3 approach to doing things we humans do on this planet in the times we live in.

and try googling for "cache:url" in the future :)

<comment><USER12> Awesome, thanks for the tip! I searched for the url but the results didn't have "Cached" links below them, this is so much faster (and clearly more effective).

<comment><USER13> The cached-links seem intermittent at best, cache: finds a _lot_ that aren't linked. Searching also takes you straight to it, which is nice.

I only found out about that trick ~ a month ago, from here. It has quickly become my favorite / most-useful Google trick _ever_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> wikihow</comment>


Kyan - Quite possibly the best-designed design agency website I've seen - <AUTHOR> http://kyan.com/

<comment><USER2> what's about this large iPad behind the regular one?

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome!!!</comment>


Links of critical resources on Bitcoin, blockchain and other money controversies - <AUTHOR> http://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2018/12/24/link-list-part-5/ <comment><USER2> Lists of links don't do well on HN, which is itself a list of links. It would be better to submit the most interesting article or two from the list.</comment>


How does HBO make money on expensive shows only 3 million people watch? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/03/game_of_thrones_how_hbo_and_showtime_make_money_despite_low_ratings_.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_2 <comment><USER2> HBO works on subscription primarily and eventually, they make dvds and / or license the content.

So, the question isn't how many people watch, it's how many signup for the subscription, based-on the new show.</comment>


A Quick Prediction about Live Streaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.kennethfriedman.org/thoughts/2015/live-streaming

<comment><USER2> LTE price is still too expensive and the battery life of a cell phone still can't support long time streaming.

</comment><comment><USER3> really good points. interesting that Meerkat is moving away from the ephemeral model. [http://www.businessinsider.com/new-meerkat-features- coming-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/new-meerkat-features- coming-2015-3)</comment>


China covered up coronavirus, costing the world "two months," says Trump's NSA - sahin-boydas https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-obrien-china-covered-up-coronavirus-costing-world-two-months-national-security-adviser/ <comment><AUTHOR> What did refusing to use the WHO approved test cost the US?

<comment><USER2> You realize both countries can screw up, right? And the fact that the NSA belongs to a country that screwed up doesn't prevent them criticizing other responses?

Moreover, the Chinese government has still to my knowledge not cleanly released true figures for lethality, R0, total infection count, etc, as would have been responsible. Instead the world has had to rely on side channels like whatever publications from Chinese scientists made it past censorship. If other world powers were relying on official government numbers, like the WHO, they can't entirely be faulted for the slow response, though I'd like to think government agencies were competent enough to pick up on everything legit and unofficial that started flooding Reddit and 4chan in early January.

The CCP in typical fashion put the CCP first, and that will cost the world many lives.

<comment><USER3> China started from day zero with a small cluster of cases. Over all they've been moving mountains to squash this.

Meanwhile US three months in doesn't have anywhere near enough testing kits available. The first community aquired case was found by a hospital going around the CDC by developing their own in house tests. At the leadership level the US is still acting like the problem is with outsiders. Senator Lamar just blocked emergency relief for workers impacted by the virus.

The CCP quickly got on top of things. Meanwhile in the US at the leadership level it's all failure. Every State, City, Hospital, and Business is having to fend from themselves.

So yeah no one but people like you are buying this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This was clear from the start. In typical authoritarian communist fashion, China clamped down on the spread of information both internally and externally. Here's probably the best known example[0], but the most egregious manipulation came in the form of outbreak numbers, which are allegedly at least 10x underreported[1]. This was a deliberate combination of lack of testing, lockdown preventing citizens from seeking treatment at hospitals, misreporting cause of death by listing E.G. pneumonia, and other issues. When an authoritarian dictatorship orders no new cases, the people report no new cases.

I don't understand how people are so shocked to hear of China's manipulation. There's evidence for this kind of trickery from every major socialist state, _especially_ the Soviet Union, which formed the mold the the initial CCP.

An authoritarian state can only exist so long as the people are too respectful and/or afraid to revolt. This creates perverse incentives to save face by, say, controlling information or spreading disinformation even at the cost of citizens' lives. And speaking of perverse incentives, like any massive bureaucracy, they are pervasive in states like China. For example, factor output is measured by the government by tracking electricity production. So if the government orders factories to come back online, but you don't have goods or employees to produce anything, you run the machines empty to run up the numbers.

0\. [https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/china-li-wenliang- whistl...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/china-li-wenliang- whistleblower-death-timeline-intl-hnk/index.html)

1\. [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v1.full.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: What is the status of open source "infrastructure"? - <AUTHOR> I'm adding this link to provide context for the question: NSA hacking routers https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-router-hacking/ <comment><USER2> The state of SDN is pretty advanced, and a lot of it is open sourced (openflow, openvswitch). Lots of big enterprises still use Juniper and Cisco routers, and probably will for a long time, but as newer startups start to favor open source solutions, the open source SDN ecosystem should continue to grow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I've just learned about the concept of SDN.</comment></comment>


Production begins of new strategic nuclear weapon - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/01/28/689510716/trump-administration-begins-production-of-a-new-nuclear-weapon <comment><USER2> This writer doesn't understand the difference between strategic and tactical weapons or the difference between fusion and fission weapons.

He also doesn't understand that _multiple_ warheads per ballistic missile is the norm.</comment>


Show HN: Portia2Code — Turn Portia Spiders into Scrapy Spiders - <AUTHOR> https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2016/06/29/introducing-portia2code-portia-projects-into-scrapy-spiders/ <comment><USER2> Hey! I work for Scrapinghub. Feel free to ask any questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not familiar with portia, but is it less performant than scrapy?

</comment><comment><USER4> Sweet!</comment>