America's biggest new reading trend: obsessed with multitasking via audio books - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/924075/audiobook-readers-obsessed-with-multitasking-are-driving-americas-biggest-new-reading-trend/ <comment><USER2> I can only "listen" to an audio book when I am not multi-tasking.

Otherwise I find myself zone out of the book, and miss a huge chunk of it, then rewind to the point I thought I missed and rewind too much. Realize I have heard it before and let myself zone out again etc.

I realize how inefficient live lectures are and how much I must have missed through my life.

<comment><USER3> I think multi-tasking with an audiobook _only_ works when the other task is one you can perform automatically (e.g. highway driving). If you're doing anything that requires any thought or decision making, then you might as well not bother with the book.

Also, I think the kind of audiobook is important:

1\. Fiction usually works best, since narratives and action are easy to follow.

2\. Simple non-fiction is worse but still doable (I'm thinking bestseller-type popular nonfiction and narrative history).

3\. Nonfiction with technical or conceptually challenging content is the worst, and really requires full undivided attention.

<comment><USER4> > when the other task is one you can perform automatically (e.g. highway > driving)

Fucking hell no, please do focus your attention on driving.

<comment><USER5> It's really no different from listening to the radio.

<comment><USER4> It's not the "listening to audio" bit that's worrying, it's the "task is one you can perform automatically (e.g. highway driving)" which is scary.

<comment><USER6> Unless you're an unskilled driver, driving becomes "automatic" in much the same way that riding a bike does. When you ride a bike, are you concentrating on not falling over? Maybe for the first week or so that you're learning...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my personal experience, I have always found it that the books I've listened are the first to fade from my memory. Second came books consumed as ebooks and last, old fashioned paper books.

I believe that the act of touching the book, carrying with you everywhere, leaving it on the table, seems to make its content much more memorable for me than reading it as an ebook or listening to it.

I find it that I still remember the details of hundreds of books I have read as a teenager, while I sometimes don't even realize that I've already read a certain book that I've read as an ebook or listened to.

<comment><USER8> I've found that listening to the audio book while reading (usually in ebook format) causes things to sink in most, with reading aloud to myself a close second.

A novel or technical book, both methods seem to work. Takes longer though.

<comment><USER9> A friend of mine uses an app to read at the same time that he listens to the text for studying. He argues that in this way he doesn't loose concentration and that he can choose at which speed he wants to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lots of hate for the audio book and multitasking in the top comments here. I do the multitasking audio book thing and I really enjoy it, with some limits. There are better times of the day to listen to an audio book, and there are better subject materials for the format.

If I read a book before bedtime, the reading lamp keeps me awake. Listening to the audio book in the dark doesn't disrupt sleep as much. When I'm really enjoying a particular book, I do listen while I wash the dishes or in public transit, but this means I really like the book.

Do I listen to Tolstoy or the latest machine learning audiobooks? No. I listen to zombie trash novels and the like. Occasionally I stumble into something more worthy of a physical book. I've introduced authors I found in audiobook form to my book club.

The other thing, if a book is so uninteresting that I am constantly rewinding, then it's a shiat book and I simply move on to a more engaging book. I have 200 other audiobooks marked for reading so there is no shortage of possibly better books available to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> I want to recommend a great source of free, public domain audiobooks: Librivox.[1]

It's like the Project Gutenberg of audiobooks, recorded by volunteers.

The quality of their readers varies, but there are some surprisingly good readers on there, such as my favorite so far, David Clarke, who did a superb reading of _The Count of Monte Cristo_.[2]

[1] - [https://librivox.org/](https://librivox.org/)

[2] - [https://librivox.org/the-count-of-monte-cristo- version-3-by-...](https://librivox.org/the-count-of-monte-cristo-version-3-by- alexandre-dumas/)

<comment><USER12> Podcasts were my gateway to Librivox, Librivox was my gateway to Audible.

Librivox is fantastic; however, our copyright laws are just too restrictive. Librivox is the kind of thing that shows the immense value of a robust public domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems like such a "get off my lawn" tone for an article.

Audiobooks don't really work for me. Maybe they work for other people, if so good for them. Maybe it doesn't work as well for them as reading the actual book would, but surely it's better than not being exposed to the material _at all_ no?

Perhaps there is something to be said for people spending more time letting their minds wander and ruminating about stuff rather than self-distraction. But that necessitates an argument for silence and boredom, not an argument against Audiobooks in particular.

</comment><comment><USER14> Huh. I use audiobooks when I'm cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen, doing chores, but I don't speed read them. If you're looking for suggestions:

\- Plugged -- Eoin Colfer

\- Screwed -- Eoin Colfer

\- Half {a King, the World, a War} -- Joe Abercrombie

\- Also everything else written by Joe Abercrombie

\- Seveneves -- Neal Stephenson

Sometimes it's not about how good the book is, but about the reader. That's the difference in the audio medium. Plugged and Screwed were books I only picked up because the reader of Half a King read them. They were stellar in audio form, but I don't normally go for those types of books in written form.

This can also up new avenues for how to spend time, outside of the multitasking case. I was staying with a friend a few months ago, and before bed we laid around for an hour listening to an audiobook that I wanted to share. It was like being a family in the olden days sitting around listening to a radio. Really great experience. I can't recommend it enough.

<comment><USER15> Same here. Suddenly I don't want to stop cleaning anymore, rather than not wanting to start!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The main thing I don't like about audio is not being able to highlight or reflect on things, even re-reading portions several times to really learn something.

I like being able to cross reference materials and go deeper on things I read, and when I re-read a book, I see notes that I had forgotten about, which is near impossible with audio.

It seems its all about high amounts of shallow exposure to different concepts, good for "knowing what you don't know" but not really learning what you don't know.

<comment><USER17> With audible's app you can bookmark, create clips and add notes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have done it fairly extensively for many years now. Generally, the book should be a light read, and the task fairly mundane. If the task is very simple, then "reading" this way might be more better than listening to an audiobook sitting down and doing nothing else. For more complicated tasks I am usually expecting to skip dozens of seconds of the audiobook now and again, so I either choose a book I don't mind reading poorly, or a podcast. For tasks that require reasonable amount of attention, I sometimes do lighthearted podcasts, but that comes with accepting slower work. Sort of half working, half passing time.

Books past a certain complexity, or ones you want to read well, or quickly, are best read the old way.

I'd say audiobooks are awesome for squeezing that extra use/fun out your time, but they have to be done in a smart way.

</comment><comment><USER19> This doesn't work for me at all. Example: I'm reading the Vital Question by Nick Lane and I need to stop often just to digest what's written on the page to make sure I fully understand it. I don't even think the book is particularly academic, I'm just below average on a lot of topics. For something that pushes my capacity I can't imagine being a passive reader and getting the most out of it.

I think this works for lighter topics, but I question the point of having something in the background and just hoping to gain value from it through... luck? I'm not sure what else to call the serendipitous moment when you're actively paying attention and the audiobook also happens to be on a section that's insightful.

<comment><USER20> > _I think this works for lighter topics, but I question the point of having > something in the background and just hoping to gain value from it through... > luck?_

I hear you. I've been an Audible subscriber for over 10 years, and I love audio books. But I don't find them much less "work" than reading. It's very easy to zone out, and more difficult than a book to get back on track.

I've resigned myself to keeping the non-fiction light, and going in with the understanding I'll probably have to listen to the book a few times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Audible subscription and wireless, noise canceling headphones. Listening a book while taking one hour walk from office to home is a pleasure.

Noise canceling headphones are important for me as they cut down the traffic noise. Audible subscription makes buying easy and removes the "is this book worth this much" decision.

One problem with the audiobooks is that you can't flip through the pages or search to recall something. Would be nice if there was for example audio+kindle combo subscription availabe.

Multitasking does not work for me. If I don't rfocus on the book, I miss it completely. In a sense this is meditative experience. With regular book I just pause reading, with audio book I try to keep other thoughts away.

<comment><USER22> > Listening a book while taking one hour walk from office to home is a > pleasure.

Have you had problems being disconnected from the world around you with such a setup?

I'd like to take more walks instead of sitting more when I get home, but I'd be worried about being hit by a car or something I didn't hear.

<comment><USER23> I'm probably missing something here, but: sidewalks?

I've also been listening while walking around/using public transport for many years, you can usually just pause the thing when you're in a situation that requires more attention (e.g. crossing) but generally it's better than walking while reading. The problem is more that if many things are happening you tend to lose track of the book. But that's why apps have "go back 30 second" shortcuts.

<comment><USER22> I live in a suburb, we don't have many sidewalks and we don't walk anywhere. I've been yelled at and nearly run over for using crosswalks, and walking to get where you're going is something only the poorest of the poor do here. Sad, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Strange article. As if there was something wrong with audiobooks because of the guilt-by-association of some people using them to cram as much information as possible into their lives. And even there, there not much substantive criticism of that practice.

</comment><comment><USER25> Audio books saved my sanity when I had a 30 minute commute. I actually looked forward to the drive knowing I'd get to hear more from Off To Be The Wizard.

<comment><USER26> I had the same feeling with that same series. I used to look forward to my 30 minute commute to/from work. I'd save the book for the commute and it would always be something to look forward to. Have you found any other books similar to that?

<comment><USER27> I can't speak to that series because I haven't read that one (I've put it on my list though).

Good ones I have read:

The Kingkiller Chronicle - Patrick Rothfuss

Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson

Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn (Sadly this trilogy is no longer canon, if that matters to you)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I used to read a _lot_ as a kid, to the point that I wouldn't get much sleep. Finally my grandfather gave me a couple of audiobooks he had on cassette, and that was the beginning of an obsession that continued for decades. I've variously gotten into old time radio, unabridged audio books, copies of audiobooks that were only made for the visually impaired at the LoC...everything. I used Audible for a little while, but I like to actually have a choice of player.

I love to use them for long drives, chores, and when I played more video games I found them to be an essential companion. I have strong associations between certain games and certain books (a scene in some Ludlum novel and Grand Theft Auto III by a dam spring to mind) and it's still a pleasant way to set the mind in neutral.

That said, I tend to want to actually _read_ a book that I care about to any real extent, but I'm also the type who re-reads a lot. I found the unabridged Wheel of Time to be something special out of all the audiobooks I've enjoyed though.

Sorry for babbling, I'm a bit passionate about this, although I get a bit sad when people don't read and _just_ listen to books; although I think it's better than nothing for sure.

<comment><USER15> Wheel of Time! I'm in my second re-listen now, book 6 or so. It's such an elaborate and well thought-out world, and of course 14 books that read as a single big story postpones the post-book depression... Well, not quite indefinitely, especially if you read other things like The Martian in between (that's my favorite book btw), but it limits it to once a year and a half rather than every month and a half.

<comment><USER29> If only Robert Jordan had lived another decade or so... The Sanderson books weren't bad, it just struck me as kind of... rushed, especially the finale.

I'm becoming increasingly worried about GRR Martin. It'll be sad if the only conclusion is the increasingly butchered TV series.

<comment><USER30> I totally disagree, I thought the Sanderson books brought the series back on track after several really bad books by Robert Jordan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> People must not read fast because audiobooks in most cases are soul crushingly slow if you give them your full attention so I cannot conceive of listening to an audiobook and not multitasking.

<comment><USER32> I've been an Audible subscriber for a few years and I listen to most audio books at between 2 and 2.25x speed. The Android app alows you to adjust it right up to 3x and in general it's still perfectly comprehendable at the individual word level even at that speed.

<comment><USER33> you have to be careful how you structure your sentences, or at least I should pay more attention. There is no way triple speed was comfortably understandable. 2 to 2.25 would be a lot already. 3x is probably a ludicrous maximum that no user should could complain about.

<comment><USER4> > 3x is probably a ludicrous maximum that no user should could complain about.

Blind people tend to listen to things on fast speed because they've had more practice. I can imagine blind people listening at that kind of speed.

[https://rdouglasfields.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/extraordinar...](https://rdouglasfields.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/extraordinary- ability-of-blind-people-to-hear-ultrafast-speech/)

> New research presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego > shows that blind people can understand speech at ultrafast rates, well > beyond what a sighted person can comprehend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I find it very difficult to read physical on the subway -- too loud, too many distractions, too much shifting around when people enter/exit.

Audiobooks are perfect for public transport.

<comment><USER35> I'm afraid I'll kill my ears if I turn up the volume loud enough to hear on the subway (NYC).

<comment><USER34> I use noise-cancelling headphones. They're so effective that my volume is usually only at 20%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't understand what's wrong with multitasking in this context. It is really easy to listen to an audiobook while doing some light cleaning or during commute. I love reading and I'm trying to increase my paperback collection but I think everyone should at least give it a shot, my recommendation would be Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter - it's an awesome experience.

</comment><comment><USER12> Such a strange frame for this article: Some people like to listen to lots of audiobooks, and get more reading in that way. It must be addictive! Let's tie it to trends we like to finger-wag about, like multitasking and productivity culture!

Maybe some people just like reading/listening to books rather than watching TV and noodling on their phones all the time? And that's OK?

</comment><comment><USER37> I listen to probably 4-5 audio books a month from Audible, mostly fantasy. There's no way I could listen to that many books a month if I didn't do it by multi-tasking. (I also listen to just about every book at 1.5x speed; usually 1x speed is too slow for some narrators)

Here's things I can do while easily following my audio books: cleaning (house, car, dishes, etc.), cooking, brushing teeth, running, driving, cycling (Using a Aftershokz Bluez bone conduction headphones so I can still hear what's around me). The majority of my daily listening time is from cooking and commuting by bicycle (I spend about 45-60 minutes every day cycling).

Things I can't do while listening to audio books: programming, watching multimedia, playing a video game. In other words, things that require high mental concentration. If I try to listen to an audio book while programming, I'll either not follow what's happening in the audio book, or I'll not be able to concentrate on programming.

<comment><USER17> 1.5x is usually what I use too. I think the 3x mentioned in the article that someone uses is BS or just a way to "skim" the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Audible.com pays $50 a signup. They are able to pay so much because they're masters of screwing their customers.

Here's the magic. You get an audiobook a month for $16. But "fine print" once you accrue 6 credits, you get literally nothing for your money. You just stay at 6 credits. Every month, paying, and getting nothing in return.

Gotcha capitalism at it's finest.

</comment><comment><USER39> In his book "On Writing" (which is excellent, and also narrated by the author in the audiobook version — highly recommended) Stephen King mentions that he reads ~60 books a year and that he fits his reading into any 10-minute chunks he can find throughout his day. Waiting room, bus stop, ball game — it's all enough to get a bit of reading done. After hearing that, I decided to load up my phone with audiobooks and put them on whenever I'm walking anywhere, even if my destination is just a few blocks away. Works amazingly well, and now I'm reading a ton more than I ever have in the last decade.

Even better, I think text-to-speech is basically good enough at this point to read books without an audio version! (I've found that I need to concentrate a lot harder when I'm listening to a OSX text-to-speech recording, but maybe there are better services.)

Can't do it when I'm programming, though.

</comment><comment><USER40> I love hearing audiobooks or podcasts while playing games (RTS or action games). It's interesting that later when I play the game again it kind of bring memories of the podcast themes as well.

</comment><comment><USER41> Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on cassette tape checked out form my local library. Got lost in those audio books as a kid after reading the books themselves.

My sense is that there are certain books that can be 'performed' in audio and they are best suited for the format. For academic or theory books, less so, although anything read by the author can give additional insight (or be incredibly annoying depending on their voice).

</comment><comment><USER42> For me its simply convenience and atteniton:

\- audio so I can still change trains or do the dishes. Mostly pocket + ivona text to speech on my phone (takes a little effort to find an apk, the app was kinda unpublished at some point).

\- a bit more than double the speed to match my reading/thinking speed. Otherwise I tend to drift of in thoughts and have to rewind. If I hear a lecture and play a computer game I stick to normal speed.

</comment><comment><USER43> I started listening to audiobooks as an alternative to reading. With work and other activities it began too hard to commit to a book. I would start but never have the time to progress. Now I just take my headphone with me and listen as I travel from place to place. I take the metro 45 mins each way during the week. I'm so glad that time is spent with a book as oppose to just listening to music.

</comment><comment><USER44> Sort of a side note, but I've noticed that there are some activities I can do while listening to audiobooks and others I can't.

For instance, during my day job as a software engineer, when I am doing any kind of visual work, audio is easy to listen to. Things like building UIs with web tech like HTML and CSS.

When I am doing anything more traditionally related to software it is a 100% shift, I can't follow a thing.

</comment><comment><USER45> It is not only America; for a lot of people I know here in the EU it is the only way they consume books these days. But multitasking? Maybe it is just me, but I read much faster than those books (or youtube vids) do audio and I type faster than I talk. Audio is not a very efficient thing at least for me personally (but I know more people have that).

</comment><comment><USER46> audiobooks are the best way for me to take in information, and thankfully my weirdo brain, while very very very bad at processing written words, can process spoken words quite well. I'm usually listening to an audiobook on 1.5 speed most of the day, in fact I'm listening to The End of Power by Moisés Naím as I write this. :)

</comment><comment><USER47> I love audiobooks, and have discovered the wonderful wispersync feature to seamlessly pick up my kindle or audible audiobook, which ever is most convenient. I highly recommend the Aubrey/Maturin series read by Patrick Tull. Currently listening to The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman.

</comment><comment><USER48> I find audiobooks put me to sleep with the (usually) soothing voice of the narrator.

</comment><comment><USER49> What a strange headline. In what way could anything about audio books be construed as a "reading trend"?

</comment><comment><USER50> "When one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing" \- Pascal

The same likely applies when reading too often and too little.

My brain needs time to synthesize information. I'd be very impressed if the subject of that little anecdote at the beginning of this article--that guy who apparently reads even while brushing his teeth--recalls more than 30% of the content he listens to.

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't try to do any work and pay attention to an audio book or a podcast at the same time. Music, or generic TV in the background, sure, but that's effectively white noise that doesn't even register.

Audiobooks and podcasts are fantastic for driving, though - if I go visit back home, it's a three hour, pretty monotonous, trip each way, so I can get into a Hard-core History show or a few chapters of an unabridged audio book. I'm not sure why driving and listening go together so well, unless it is just decades of training at this point.

</comment><comment><USER6> TTS is what I use. I picked up a used old kindle keyboard, one of the versions that still had the feature. I slip that into my jacket pocket when I go on walks. It's nice because you're not limited on selection. The robotic nature of the voice fades away after an hour or two of listening to it.</comment>


Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/mac-os-x-lion-login-passwords-extracted-ease

<comment><USER2> I think the headline should be, "FireWire is insecure and can be used to dump the contents of your RAM." But that's always been true, regardless of OS.

Edit: the WinLockPwn tool has been available since 2008, you can just plug one computer into another and dump the RAM. You can then use "signatures" to search for passwords for various systems, including Windows. [http://web.archive.org/web/20090402130220/http://storm.net.n...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090402130220/http://storm.net.nz/projects/16)

I like this part:

 _I'm also pleased to note... the guy who did it by plugging a Cardbus Firewire card into a laptop that didn't have firewire, waiting for it to auto install it (while at the locked screen!) then winlockpwning it. That's awesome. :)_

So, even if your laptop doesn't _currently_ have firewire, you're still not safe.

<comment><USER3> A Debian Developer has a good set of articles[1] on this vulnerability. It's really a pretty astonishing aspect of FireWire.

Time to whip out the epoxy, I reckon.

[1]: [http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/physical-memory-attacks- via-f...](http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/physical-memory-attacks-via-firewire- dma-part-1-overview-and-mitigation)

<comment><USER4> > It's really a pretty astonishing aspect of FireWire.

Not really. Note that LightPeak/Thunderbolt has the exact same issue. I believe it can be mitigated by the right IOMMU implementation (if the OS takes advantage of the feature).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm no security expert but it was always my understanding is that once an attacker has physical access to a computer it can no longer be considered secure, no matter what. Also, my understanding is that this is a widely accepted fact in the security community. How can a website called "Security Week" ignore this very relevant piece of knowledge then?

<comment><USER6> If this is reported correctly, it sounds like passwords are stored in memory for quite a while in their unhashed, clear text form. This is not good for people that depend on FileVault as a way to assume that physical access doesn't necessarily compromise their data.

It's a little hard to believe this as there's really no need to have the password kept in memory; it could be the exploit requires the device to be plugged in while you're typing your password--which is more believable and also less interesting.

<comment><USER2> If you have the autologin feature enabled, which would you prefer: keep the password in RAM, where most people can't get it, or put it on the hard drive, which is a much easier target?

<comment><USER7> But why would the autologin implementation need access to the cleartext password ? And then why is the cleartext password stored at all ?

These seems like big holes.

<comment><USER8> On OSX, probably to unlock keychain.

<comment><USER9> Yep: <http://www.brock-family.org/gavin/perl/kcpassword.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any way to get around this? If so, is it implemented in any OS?

I'm no encryption expert, but it seems like you would need to store decryption keys (or in this case, the login password) in plaintext so they could be used by the OS.

An explanation from an expert would be appreciated.

<comment><USER11> Given that FireWire gives you direct, unsecured access to memory, the most secure solution would be to fill your FireWire port (as well as any other interface that has direct memory access, such as ExpressCard or Thunderbolt) with glue or otherwise render it unusable.

<comment><USER4> > Given that FireWire gives you direct, unsecured access to memory

FireWire asks for it, but in recent years CPUs have started implementing IOMMUs, which should be useable to "lie" to devices and sandbox DMA'd memory, preventing full memory access to even low level busses (such as FireWire or Thunderbolt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Passware says the security risk is easy to overcome by simply turning off the computer instead of putting it to sleep, and disabling the "Automatic Login" setting. This way, passwords will not be present in memory and cannot be recovered."

Hm, isn't automatic login now disabled by default in the installation process of Lion? The last install I did seemed to have it disabled by default although there was a toggle to switch it on if I so chose.

</comment><comment><USER13> The article also mentions that truecrypt passphrases can be recovered this way. Is this true? This would seem like a very major security oversight for software whose main focus is security.

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems an easier solution is to just log off your account rather than shut the entire computer down. Unless it can be accessed from the login screen...

<comment><USER11> It's possible to inject code into RAM via this method as well as read it, bypassing said login screen. With FileVault, once you unlock the disk, it remains so until you shut down. Shutting down prevents an attacker from having access to unencrypted data via this attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hands up if you use Automatic Login on your personal computer, whatever OS you might be using. Also, this hack requires physical access to the computer, and by that time no computer, no operating system, can be considered safe.</comment>


A New Kind of Computer Science:  Can we study web apps in a systematic way a la Wolfram's NKS? - <AUTHOR>

How would one conduct a systematic study of web apps to identify those with the most interesting behaviors?  Is it possible to simulate users to some extent to make predictions about the virality of an app?  Is it possible to automate our search for viral apps in some way? <comment><USER2> I am new to Wolfram's work, so I am at a disadvantage, but I find the idea interesting.

Seems unlikely that the "viral potential" for a given random web app could be gleaned by perusing the code or that there will soon be technology available to simulate a user. And if you were to reduce the randomness by somehow requiring the code or the app to conform to some standard in order to make it easier to automate the perusal, well we already have a whole SEO industry dedicated to gaming the current automated search technology, don't we?

At some point don't you think it is likely that the social networking application model will be co-opted by market testing enterprises who will design ways to entice lots of people to test software applications while having their physiological reactions captured online. With a record of human reactions directly correlated to a specific application, predictive results from automated searching would then be feasible.</comment>


Blue Apron lays off more workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-apron-lays-off-more-workers-1542148447 <comment><USER3> Can't help but feel like Blue Apron and its competitors are the next generation of Groupon and _its_ competitors. Burnt through VC funding competing with each other only to find out the actual market for their product isn't that great.

But thanks for all the free trials, VC investors! I've had a few above average dinners out of it.

<comment><USER4> I think a bigger problem which these services don't get is that if you live in a reasonably sized city then you will have a huge range of takeaway/delivery food options.

The amount of people who want to cook and prepare a nice meal is probably a lot less than the amount of people who just want to buy, eat and enjoy a nice meal.

I live in Dublin, not exactly the biggest of cities, but I can't think of a single type of food that I can't order through one of the various home delivery apps available to me. No need to cook food or be constrained by a predetermined set of menus.

It's hard to make the case for a meal in a box service when you can order just about any food imaginable from your phone and it will be delivered within 30 minutes.

<comment><USER5> The case for a meal-in-a-box service is "It's home cooking, but easier for only a modest increase in cost"

The case for home cooking over delivery food most people know already :)

<comment><USER6> And what is the case for home cooking over delivery food, in your opinion? (I may agree with you, but I don't think everyone is on the same page here.)

<comment><USER7> It being far less expensive, seems to be the standout reason. Normal people can't afford $700/month for food delivery services.

<comment><USER8> It's a little less expensive, but I wouldn't call it "far" less expensive unless you're prepared to stick to the lowest-cost ingredients like rice and beans.

<comment><USER5> In my area, cooking for myself, my weekly supermarket food bill is about £30 (~$40) and that lets me eat pretty well. For comparison, a medium-sized delivery pizza is £17 (~$22).

So I'd be looking at about 4x the cost if I ate a delivery pizza every day.

How do the figures compare in your area? Is delivery food radically cheaper?

<comment><USER8> I'm in Chicago, so $22 is almost the cost of a medium deep dish pizza, and I can stretch that to almost a week of dinners if it's just me.

A couple of footnotes: 1\. Pizza is absurdly cheap, even for takeout food. I don't really understand how that works. 2\. I prefer takeout over paying for delivery, which saves a lot. My favorite pizza places are in walking distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've used 4-5 services similar to Blue Apron, the issue with them for me is that we got tired by being limited to 3-4 recipes per week to choose from, and most of those is just different variation of pasta.

Also I don't want to pay ~$9 for their pasta dish and also cook and wash dishes after it. Even if someone who is making minimum wage - they will waste ~30 minutes cooking + ~15 minutes washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen after, so it's about $15 on top of the $9 portion, and you still have to go to grocery because their food is mostly for dinner and for 2-4 times a week because they have limited number of recipes.

On top of that I want to be able to spontaneously decide what I want to eat today, and not being forced to choose my food 2 weeks before. Maybe that works for someone, but whenever we try it just gets really boring and annoying after 3-4 weeks of usage.

<comment><USER10> I think Blue Apron is really the king of these services, on the 2-person-meals option there are now usually 8 options to choose from (they increased from 6 a couple months ago), only 2 max of which are pasta.

Most weeks there's a steak option, a fish option, or both, and there's always a couple non-pasta chicken options. I think the steak options are becoming somewhat rarer, there used to be one every single week.

A while ago they stopped charging different prices for different options. (So of course, I usually try to get the ones that look like the most expensive ingredients). I think that, along with increasing the number of options every week, was probably in response to customer feedback on pain points... but both those things also cut into their profitability. My sense is that they've been reducing the cost of the ingredients accordingly, trying to catch up.

I don't mind the time to cook and clean myself, the whole point for me is I _want_ to be cooking... it's just SO convenient not to have to do menu planning and shopping. And most of the meals cook quicker than what I'd cook myself (you can follow them like a zombie barely realizing what you're doing, for better or worse, ha). I'm willing to pay for that... to a point. If the ingredients and recipes are good. And they are correctly charging the right price for me -- in that any higher, and I'd cancel, they've got me at my max ha.

Even $15/meal is probably less than I'd pay at any restaurant/carry out that wasn't terribly unhealthy, including gratuity and tax.

<comment><USER11> >Even $15/meal is probably less than I'd pay at any restaurant/carry out that wasn't terribly unhealthy, including gratuity and tax.

15$ a meal is pure insanity for 400-600 kcals, I eat 6-8lbs of chicken a week and my weekly grocery bill is right around 50$.

I live in Indiana, the average household income is $45,943, even just one person earning that you're taking home 35,482$ a year which is about 97$ a day which makes just 1 of these meals a day 10.2% of your net income.

Most of the country is not tech workers drawing high 5 and low 6-figure incomes.

<comment><USER10> Right, but the person I was replying to was comparing it to prepared food.

I think more Americans may eat prepared food more often than you think (and Blue Apron or similar services are usually 2-3 meals a week, which is far from every meal).

But I agree it looks like the price they would need to charge to be profitable is not a price there is a sufficient market for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a Blue Apron customer, I like it pretty okay.

But I've thought for a while that:

A) I wouldn't pay any more than I am now for it (in fact, I keep looking around for cheaper alternatives, but there aren't any, probably because...)

B) I suspect they can't make a profit at what they charge.

(especially cause as time goes on, I skip more and more weeks, further cutting into their per-acquired-customer revenue. Either I'm just getting tired of it, or my suspicions that each month the ingredients get cheaper and cheaper are correct, perhaps in response to B above).

I don't expect them (or their competitors) to stay around.

<comment><USER12> Spot on with my thoughts and experience recently as well. I do like the pre prepped aspect, but I can't justify the costs and quantity of food/portions any longer.

<comment><USER10> Yeah the portions have gotten smaller too, you think?? I thought so too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To me, the real appeal to me of meal services are "long tail" nutritional preferences- For instance, if you eat a strict ketogenic diet, you can get meal kits for that as well.

It's difficult to make your own ketogenic meals solely via your own grocery shopping and recipe research... but I can now eat pretty tasty meals with minimal effort in 2018 via meal services.

<comment><USER14> That's interesting to hear; I'm not in ketosis, but have a pretty non-standard diet from an American perspective[1], and part of what's kept me doing grocery/cooking from scratch and away from meal kits and other similar solutions is that they seem pretty poorly tailored to my bare minimum of a healthy diet. A friend gave me a $30 referral discount to HelloFresh and I tried out one shipment and gave up on it, for pretty much precisely this reason. I guess I should take a deeper look at their options for special types of diets, or maybe even

> It's difficult to make your own ketogenic meals solely via your own grocery > shopping and recipe research

I'm surprised to hear this even more. Have you tried Googling "keto recipes [other search terms]" and meal-planning around it? If you've already tried this, I don't intend this to be patronizing; I'm actually relatively new to cooking most of what I eat, which means things like meal planning are actually pretty new to me. I've just found it to be a really effective way to organize frequent cooking, and once you build up a bit of a repertoire of recipes, it doesn't really take any extra time beyond putting the ingredients and Instacart order together.

[1] Which it turns out means simply "getting enough protein and fiber to not be super unhealthy"....

<comment><USER15> I've used sunbasket because it has paleo options. Happy to share a referral code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Literally eating a Blue Apron as I read this.

This is too bad, I just started doing Blue Apron and I really like it. I'm actually a good cook but I get stuck in a rut with respect to cooking the same things over and over again so it's been nice to have some enforced variety, especially when it comes to sides or bowl/hashes.

The quality is good, the prices seems fair. Just seems like a fraught model.

<comment><USER17> Just get a random recipe subscription?

<comment><USER16> It's not an issue of ideas, it's an issue of wastage and cost. And cost might even be a wash but at least now I don't have to watch a whole bottle of gochujang or horseradish or bag of farro go to waste because I wanted to try this one recipe I saw on NYT cooking and you can't get those things in perfectly sized amounts.

<comment><USER18> I feel the exact same way - maybe that's the pain point a business needs to be solving - making much smaller bottles of one-off ingredients!

<comment><USER19> So you think we need to trade the occasional waste of some ingredient you didn't use (and didn't bother to give to a friend/neighbour) for wasting ungodly amounts of plastic on small packaging?

(I know this is happening and will continue to happen - and this is how market choices contribute to the climate change and destruction of environment we live in.)

<comment><USER16> Modern landfills really aren't all that bad, the real cost being the space they take up, which happens to not be a problem in the US.

<comment><USER19> Last time I checked, modern landfills were methane emitters, which is bad.

<comment><USER20> About 60M metric tonnes annual worldwide. Energy production and livestock produce 600M. So landfills are about 10% of the problem

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the number!

Still, my concern isn't _just_ the landfill. When talking about unnecessary packaging, it's also the energy cost of extracting oil and turning it into that plastic packaging. Not all trash is created equal.

<comment><USER16> Phrased that way... what isn't concerning? Maybe enjoy Blue Apron for a year and skip an iPhone upgrade?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe I'm just not their target but I want to pick my own veggies and meat. I don't want to leave it up to a minimum wager tossing whatever in my box as it heads down the line.

<comment><USER22> You're getting downvoted, but this was an issue for me as well. I'll go through half a dozen ribeyes before picking the one I like the looks of. Same for produce - I'll pick certain onions, good looking broccoli, the non-slimy mushrooms. This is at a high-end grocery store (Wegmans), too.

<comment><USER10> When I first started using Blue Apron a year plus ago, I found the meat to be generally pretty high quality, as good or better as what I could get at the standard grocery store picking it out myself (rather than a "premium" one like whole foods or whatever), and better than Trader Joe's'. (around me, the standard grocery store has pretty crappy meat).

My sense is that meat quality has been going down, but I dunno, maybe it's exactly the same meat and the novelty has just worn off.

My sense is also that Blue Apron has historically had higher quality ingredients than some competitors, but I can't say that for sure, and am not sure it continues to be true.

<comment><USER23> Don't doubt your senses. I am certain, in the sense of my own taste experience, that 7-11 started off using higher quality meat then switched. In Canada 7-11 had a big change a couple years back and started selling fried chicken as well as pizza some of which had chicken. Initially I was really impressed with meat quality. It was tender white meat and fresh and seemed of comparable product to what you would expect from kfc back in the day. Then one day it stopped. Just never got as good. It was like they fed us their best for half a year then once in moved to a lower cheaper meat.

<comment><USER24> Like a dinner party. Excellent wines first, 8 more bottles deep, start pouring the 10$ bottle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The number of podcasts I listen to has mushroomed the past several years. Shortly ago, it seemed like half of them were brimming with Blue Apron sponsorship ads bordering on "Two Starbucks on every corner". Thankfully that's stopped, and now I know why. Perhaps their ad push didn't work as intended and/or expected.

[Of course, the new ad blitz is for someone else.]

Personally, I'm currently just not one of their target markets although on paper I probably should be. If/when I move further away than 1 block from a grocery store [I lucked out, a lot], and/or want to eat more complicated prep- time food, and/or have less time or ability to shop for ingredients [and somehow a simple grocery-delivery service just won't cut it] for some ever- increasingly complicated prep-time food, I'll might see the light.

<comment><USER26> If i didn't listen to podcasts I'd have no idea the electric toothbrush market is so big

The target market for this stuff feels so slim. Either you're in this "too time constrained to shop, not too time constrained to make food at home" sliver, or in the "don't want to menu plan" market. In the latter, you pay for this menu planning value add with, what, 30% surplus on the ingredients? Only to be replaceable by a recipe app, basically

<comment><USER27> >If i didn't listen to podcasts I'd have no idea the electric toothbrush market is so big

Made me laugh. I agree. I have yet to figure out what's wrong with the Sonicare, seems great.

Luckily I listen to podcasts (mostly electronics) that don't do inline advertisements. When I hear them in other shows I can usually tell they are coming with the awkward segue that seems to be common MO.

<comment><USER28> Quip toothbrush seems like it was born out of a pitch based on flashing the Dollar Shave Club exit numbers in front of a wide-eyed VC. Honestly hard to understand how they can compete with cheap knockoff sonicare heads from Amazon, but they'll spend a lot of money finding out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> IPO in June 2017 at ~$10 per share. Closed today at $1.22 ...ouch.

<comment><USER30> I think this means Mission Accomplished for the investors. Suck out all the value from the company and then dump it on retail investors by going public.

<comment><USER31> People keep not understanding or appreciating this point. This is precisely what Uber is in the middle of doing right now too, and to some extent probably what Spotify did, and the future value of those two is by no means clear or stable.

As long as they can can prop up the valuation for a short time, they can capitalize shortly after an IPO and externalize the losses on unwitting millions of people who came to own some unicorn stock because they were auto- enrolled in the 2055 retirement mix of some bottom scraping asset manager that charges high fees on a portfolio with loose definitions of what it can invest in.

<comment><USER32> Where I grew up "pump and dump" was a _dirty_ term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [http://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue- apron-l...](http://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-apron-lays- off-more-workers-1542148447)

</comment><comment><USER34> I like their recipes but it's just a grotesquely wasteful way to ship food around. Ultimately this business belongs in grocery stores. I'd happily drive down to Wegmans once a week to pick up 3-4 locally packaged blue apron style meals.

<comment><USER35> In the scheme of things, most likely including going to restaurants, I have trouble working up too much outrage about the packaging and shipping.

That said, I agree with your broader point. I'm not sure why more stores (some do) don't have more kits. Planning for the next week in a way that includes picking 3 meals that will involve at least a modest amount of effort doesn't work for me--and I like to cook generally.

I get that they appeal to people who like to cook but want some structure (and home delivery) around it. But it seems a pretty niche market. I got Blue Apron once. It was "OK." And, while I've thought about it, I've never ordered from any of these services again.

<comment><USER36> I used Blue Apron for a couple month. I'm hardly a "save the earth" type - <USER2> one of the reasons I've been skipping the service is the huge amount of cardboard and plastic ships with each box. I must have 8 full extra heads of garlic lying around. The "ice packs" are a pain in the neck to get rid of and it doesn't feel right to dump that stuff in the trash.

However I will admit I got tired of the selection. Usually there will only be one meal that I'm actually looking forward to eating and the other 2 are unappetizing enough for me to just eat out.

<comment><USER35> I reuse a lot of the plastic bags. But I imagine I'd run out of use for ice packs after a while. Given the amount of cardboard I have to take to recycling from Amazon and elsewhere, I'm not sure a bit more makes much of a difference.

But the menus mostly don't excite me that much. And if I'm going to spend that much effort I have tons of cookbooks and online recipes. Your experience sounds like the one week I tried it. There was a pretty good recipe. An OK recipe. And then some obnoxiously complex hamburger recipe that wasn't even all that great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I am actively job interviewing and I have talked to a lot of startups. One of things I always ask my interviewer is whether or not the company is profitable.

If you get to be that large of a company (100 workers => 4% of staff => ~2500 employees) and you are not making a profit, there is something wrong. Bringing all of those people onboard seems like a waste of investor money.

That said, I am a fan of Blue Apron and I do hope that their figure out a way to operate in a profitable manner soon.

Edit: as replies point out, profitability isn't a great indicator for the success of a company. While it is fair game to ask, there are other better indicators (churn and burn, existing customer base, etc) that give a better picture. My point was that I think a company at this size should be profitable or working aggressively to make that possible. I think Blue Apron is laying these people off to accomplish that.

<comment><USER38> Don't think that's necessarily a really good metric in this day and age, as there are "good" kinds of unprofitability and "bad" kinds of unprofitability. Amazon was unprofitable for most of its existence until relatively recently. Most successful startups are unprofitable, and these days with the "winner take all" mentality of most VCs a company would be _penalized_ for being profitable too early.

I think a much better metric, especially for early stage companies, is their growth rate, their customer acquisition cost, and very importantly, their customer churn rate. Blue Apron's churn rate coupled with their high CAC has always been a giant flashing red flag.

<comment><USER39> I think "good" unprofitable basically boils down to "only unprofitable because what would otherwise be profit is being immediately reinvested into growth (marketing, new employees, better third party software/hardware etc)".

<comment><USER40> And the bad unprofitably is usually a variation on selling dollars for .95 to try and capture a market (to charge 1.05) or build up infrastructure/scale that will eventually let you produce them for .94 cents

That has to both pan out and pan out before they run out of money.

<comment><USER41> Not my area but I get the impression Amazon has done a lot of both of what the above two posts call "good" unprofitability and "bad" unprofitability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I never understood business models like this in the first place.

Those who like to cook don't have a problem buying ingredients themselves.

Those who don't like cooking don't mind spending the same amount as a Blue Apron subscription to order takeaway.

The target audience consists of people who would theoretically like to cook, but don't know how to read a recipe book and/or don't want to go shopping or use online grocery shopping.

<comment><USER43> I think this is an often understated point when discussing meal services. In my experience with Blue Apron and Hello Fresh there were some good and interesting meal choices (often ethnic dishes that I hadn't tried before), but probably 50% of the menu boiled down to simple dishes like "some variation of spaghetti with salad" or "chicken breast with a simple sauce and basic veggies." People who already know how to cook are going to realize how much they're overpaying for these simple dishes, and people who learn to cook thanks to the service will come to realize it unless they avoid the grocery store entirely.

Ultimately the complex/exotic dishes just aren't offered enough to offset paying $10/ small portion for the more simple dishes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think there is a legitimate role for Government or Not-For-Profit here:

Rather than providing money handouts to the worst off citizens, why not just cut out the middleman and offer basic prefab housing and cheap nutritious meals instead?

Instead of shipping individual groceries to middle-class hipsters, why not just cut out the middleman and cook the food instead?

Such a restaurant scheme already operates in India (called 'subsidised canteens'), and is used by all classes there since its cheap and reliable. The meals aren't free - they cost a few cents.

I'd happily eat almost every meal at such a restaurant which offered no-frills service, a simple (and probably vegetarian) menu, and very low cost. The menu could be coordinated with seasonally and locally available ingredients, and would probably offer a single choice of food, changed daily.

It would be like a soup-kitchen - but the need to pay a buck, and the presence of the middle classes, would make it acceptable for everyone.

I think if organised well enough, it could actually be more efficient that having everyone cooking at home - better logistics for the use of ingredients, less food waste, less water wasted in cleaning dishes, etc. Not too mention the better division of labour by having dedicated cooks doing the work with professional-grade equipment, rather than everyone spending ages to do it at home (and for a lot of poor people, they lack the equipment or skills to cook proper meals).

<comment><USER45> > Rather than providing money handouts to the worst off citizens, why not just > cut out the middleman and offer basic prefab housing and cheap nutritious > meals instead?

They did this. Ever hear of government cheese?

Turns out, the g'ovt isn't a very good grocer. Thus food stamps, and later EBT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> (non-delivery) Food is a really tough space to compete in. Acquisition costs are relatively high and usually require you to give some amount of product away. Because you're trying to get people to switch from a known quantity (whatever someone buys to prepare themselves) or to make more time for cooking (over prepared food or food delivery), you need to make sure that first experience is excellent and hope that you're going to get a very good number of people to actually pay for the service when it isn't free.

From my experience (work for an investor in and did product/acquisition/marketing for a food startup), there are very few people who will say no to a free meal, but converting those people is hard and there are a ton of variables that are hard to control for. The biggest thing that is tough to plan for is each person's taste. For example, if you pick a free meal and you don't like it will you really buy another one?

</comment><comment><USER47> call me old fashion, but dinner (which is the only meal I have at home) is more than just the process to put energy into the body, it's a family ritual that provides additional value via the cohesion and collaboration required by the family members to make it happen, and this ritual starts when, after work the family members got to go out of their way home to personally select the best products they can find, which they will bring home, this part is annoying, but is part of the whole thing. And for the days when we don't want to cook, or want something different, meal delivery is super effective. These offering are in a middle ground with just a little value as a novelty.

</comment><comment><USER48> Typical problem of "path to least resistance" which is also the reason Amazon succeeded so well by recommending products ( Netflix does the same with show recommendations) We are by nature prone to take the path that requires the least effort so Cooking vs Ordering food ( which arguably has been made a LOT easier with the likes of Postmates,foodora, Uber eats etc...) means that people will have a tendency to order food instead of cook. Especially when you consider the amount of competition among these food delivery companies and the discounts/promotions they throw at users to retain their business.

</comment><comment><USER49> We signed up for Blue Apron and Sun Basket. Time after time, the actual food provided by blue apron was inferior. Often close to rotten. This isn't a complicated story( Blue Apron delivers food with instructions but the food isn't very good.

<comment><USER50> I wonder if that's a regional thing? I haven't used Blue Apron in 6 months, but often the ingredients would last probably twice as long as most ingredients from the local grocer. It also tended to show up around 10-11am and be fine by the time I got home between 8-9pm in the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Ashwin Ramdas's satirical video on Blue Apron is worth watching: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMfDwDUxKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMfDwDUxKE)

</comment><comment><USER52> What would prevent a supermarket chain from implementing their own weekly boxes and offer them in store or for delivery using their own established logistics? With the access they have to vendors they would be able to offer more range, fresher ingredients and better prices while still being able to make a profit. I don't live in the US but I've seen what they've been doing on YouTube with sponsorships and limited time offers - they must be taking a huge hit.

<comment><USER28> Nothing. Here's a photo I took of a kit in a German grocer just outside an U-bahn station, about 4 years ago:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/ktemanrhxruxi3r/2014-12-23%2014.34...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ktemanrhxruxi3r/2014-12-23%2014.34.08.JPG?dl=0)

I took the picture for a friend who was looking into a meal kit play at the time. Seeing it executed so well I couldn't imagine how a subscription service could compete. They had about 4-6 meal displays like this amongst the regular groceries.

<comment><USER53> That's amazingly well executed indeed, and the first one I've seen a picture of at that. I wish the local grocers here in Ontario (Loblaws) would do something similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I have tried Blue Apron and switched over to Green Box and I really like both of them.

I am a really decent cook, but I mostly cook for 2 people so the value of these services to me is the convenience of just-what-you-need serving-size bits of rarer oddities like a small hunk of a special cheese, 3 shoots of green onions, a small bunch of fresh rosemary, exactly the right amount of this sauce or that seasoning, etc. Often unless my partner and I are doubling- down on a specific ingredient for a week or more, a lot of random things end up spoiling before we can use them up.

I think in the end since we're paying more for the ingredients, and generating more waste/recycling, it ends up being a wash on total consumption.

</comment><comment><USER55> Everyone I know that tried these (including myself) starts getting them piling up uncooked and rotting and cancels. A month or two of product testing would have told them this model can't succeed. After that, it was just how long can we fool the VCs?

</comment><comment><USER56> I suspected blue apron would fail.

i did try it - and i had two major annoyances:

1\. Wasteful Packaging - seemed like a waste of materials / cooler / all the plastic containers. (imagine 10,000s of these shipped everywhere and ending up in dumpsters)

2\. I still have to cook! Im paying these guys more than i have to for basic ingredients and i STILL HAVE TO WASTE TIME and COOK! Where is the convenience?

Most of the people in our circles tried it for fun and recipes, 1-2-3 months then bam most quit.

This business model is a total failure. Local grocery stores did start carrying meal kits. But what i REALLY MISS is the guacamole kit from TJ! I wonder why TJ REALLY stopped carrying it...

That said thanks VCs for "free" food!

</comment><comment><USER57> Maybe -- just maybe, the market for services like Blue Apron and Eatwith just doesn't exist. They are both romantic ideas, and it's very possible that they that would have taken off in the 1940s (provided we had the same technology), but it's clear that they have been outpaced by the busy world of today.

</comment><comment><USER6> Given this downward trend with the rising trend of "luxury" apartments including more and more amenities, I wonder if the next new thing will be building-exclusive, fully-managed micro-farms with produce delivery directly to your fridge.

</comment><comment><USER58> I just saw a new meal kit display at my local supermarket, which to me makes the most sense and was always going to be a huge looming threat, if not guaranteed killer, to the meal kit startups.

</comment><comment><USER59> Good, it's a pretty useless service. Has anyone considered, um, looking up recipes and um, going to the store, buying the stuff, and cooking?

</comment><comment><USER60> Stitchfix will be here in the same boat in a few years.

</comment><comment><USER61> I considered using Blue Apron a while back but their portions are just too small. Maybe that's not a problem for most of their customers but I exercise a lot and need at least 3100kcal (with a high fraction of protein) most days to avoid losing weight. I might consider it again if they offered a larger option.</comment>


Net Neutrality isn't a debate between The People versus The Man. - <AUTHOR> http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2010/12/re-framing-net-neutrality-debate.html

<comment><USER2> I always assumed that The Internet would turn into a broadcast medium, with big media companies broadcasting to The Masses, at a highish price.

But I figured that it would happen by mandating a new, improved replacement for TCP/IP that had "client" and "server" built in to the protocol, in ways that TCP does not have. The protocol would naturally be covered by patent, and to impliment a server would require some kind of license, "internet driver's license" or patent license or some such.

I'm faintly amused that we're turning The Internet into 21st Century Tee Vee via quality of service.

By the way, I'm kinda with Techdirt on this one: if the USA had real competition, there'd be no need for "net neutrality", people would flock to the least restrictive ISPs and carriers. As a Linux user, I know I would. I don't like to lie to my carrier's tech support about what I've got going on at home.</comment>


California governor signs major civil asset forfeiture reform - <AUTHOR> http://ij.org/press-release/california-governor-signs-major-civil-forfeiture-reform/ <comment><USER2> I recall a Palo Alto nearly-always-happy, slightly-overweight, always-with-a- lady, Palestinian, neighborhood guy whom confessed PAPD took (eg legally stole) about $500 from him during an arbitrary traffic stop without a receipt under the guise of CAF. Whether it went into their personal pocket or the department team-building fund was a matter of speculation.

That's not to mention the littany of horror stories of innocent people traveling to purchase big-ticket items in cash or getting paid in cash for professional services rendered only to be legally robbed by cops looking to line their pockets and/or departments and increase stats at any expense.

CAF screams "mission-creep" beyond attacking low-level drug-dealers whom skate beyond the reach of the law by using kids to hold drugs.

<comment><USER3> > _PAPD took (eg legally stole) about $500 from him during an arbitrary > traffic stop_

A very similar thing happened to myself and my uncle…in Mexico.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good to hear when politicians improve something , and even better when it was a bipartisan effort!</comment>


A Biotech Entrepreneur Aims to Help Us Stay Young While Growing Old - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2018/06/05/how-a-biotech-entrepreneur-aims-to-make-aging-less-awful/#2d2c0f12c203 <comment><USER2> I think one of the bigger challenges facing Unity is that dasatinib plus quercetin may be just as good as anything they are rolling out. All of the animal studies of senolytic compounds fall into the category of either no meaningful effect or the category of ~25% clearance in selected tissues.

Small molecule development, in the sense of changing the parameters of your candidate in a desired direction in a class of molecules, is slow and expensive and to a certain extent reliant on good fortune. You can't just reliably and cheaply dial up the effectiveness or adjust with tissue specificity.

In a world in which dasatinib/quercetin, which costs ~$100 for a dose you take every year at most, does as well as the Unity candidates, will Unity be able to charge the high costs at a great enough volume required to keep the investors happy? Seems unlikely.

I think Oisin Biotechnologies turning up a year or two later in the clinic with a far superior gene therapy product, clearing near all senescent cells in near all tissues, and which can be adjusted rapidly and at low cost, is less of a threat. The market, every human being much over the age of 40, is truly enormous, and several large companies could operate without bumping into one another all that much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is dasatinib + querceptin approved to treat any indications unity is studying / is their clinical data? If not then would be hard for them to compete with an approved drug unless they have some really great clinical data. Also if unity is less toxic that might be better than marginally better effectiveness in the chronic indications they're pursuing

Not familiar with Oisin, what is their vector? Does it enable repeat dosing?</comment></comment>


Asm.js Speedups Everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/03/asm-speedups-everywhere/ <comment><USER2> Great seeing the improvements. I was initially a big skeptic of asm.js, but for high performance c-translated code, it seems good enough now. A 1.5x hit is a concern, but we've been paying these hits on the JVM and other languages for years.

I'm still sad there's no SMP/multithreading yet, but SharedArrayBuffer looks promising. The only thing missing is the fact that for GC'ed languages there's no efficient translation yet (e.g. Java/GWT).

<comment><USER3> You have a very fast GC'd language right there already, if you don't mind writing javascript. I know it has won me over the years, once you know the pitfalls to avoid.

<comment><USER4> In this way, the browser is the ultimate platform:

* portable low-level, static code (asm.js translation)

* portable high-level, dynamic code (JS translation)

* interoperability between the two

* single set of APIs

* supported virtually everywhere

<comment><USER5> In short, it's shit, but it's portable shit, polished with billions of dollars of effort. It's useful, but that doesn't mean it doesn't smell.

<comment><USER6> When people are eating shit for years, they stop noticing the smell and some even start claiming it has "the good parts" in it.

<comment><USER4> That would imply the whole thing is shit, which it isn't.

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_in_the_ointment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_in_the_ointment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had never heard of the term "sea of nodes" architecture before. Here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8118079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8118079) is HN discussion about it.

<comment><USER8> FIRM is a compiler library, like LLVM. Its difference is that it is written in C, and that it uses sea of nodes.

[http://pp.ipd.kit.edu/firm/Features](http://pp.ipd.kit.edu/firm/Features)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one worried about the implications of asm.js and imminent close- sourcing of the web?

I _don 't want_ bytecode in my browser. I barely like having some skiddie's javascript in my browser as it is currently. The fact that I'm about to lose the ability to even understand it is scary to me.

(Yes, I know people compile their JS currently... But that's relatively less convoluted. and can be deconstructed to a degree. This is another level.)

<comment><USER10> The web is already closed-source. You can read gmail's js but you don't have the right to modify or redistribute it.

<comment><USER9> Freedom implies openness, but openness doesn't imply freedom.

Gmail's JS _is_ open, but it is not free.

<comment><USER10> Open source means you have the right to modify and redistribute. If you want to express a different idea use a different term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In this title, 'everywhere' means 'across browsers', not 'throughout all JS execution'.

<comment><USER12> It almost means the same. Node is using V8 (from Chrome). Not sure if Nashorn has any asm.js optimizations but it will probably get it later if it is important to many organizations. Those are probably the most commonly used js engines out there.

<comment><USER13> Isn't node many, many versions of V8 behind Chrome? As far as I recall, they're on an out-of-date, unsupported version of V8 and sometimes cherry-pick patches from upstream, but that's about it.</comment></comment></comment>


So you want to offer a public API … - <AUTHOR> http://www.zemanta.com/fruitblog/so-you-want-to-offer-a-public-api/ <comment><USER2> Don't forget to offer PLENTY of immediately usable examples of the API. Like Pivotaltracker has copy/paste-able curl commands to try out the API. Have libs with consistent examples for all popular (and, if for some free PR, less popular languages). Version your API in the URL; you might need large changes to existing stuff, so you cannot trust on backward compatibility all the time while it is really annoying for devs when something works if they have to change it (or it stops working).

Edit; hire 'average' programmers from oDesk etc to build 'stuff' against it 'for clients' (threat it as a serious project) to figure out how easy it REALLY is to make things with it. Average programmers are, well, the average, so they will be the most likely consumers of your API. If they have no clue at all, you didn't go far enough perfecting everything. For instance we hired a bunch of devs to do a Windows plugin for our monitoring system and we found out our documentation and examples were completely unusable for them. We'll have to rewrite/refactor all of that and have them re-try.

<comment><USER3> You said it. I have this feeling people tend to forget developers are users too. The "don't make me think" rule still applies even if their job is thinking.

So if you really want people to use your system (API, library, IDE, programming language, compiler...) you should run usability tests, write easy- to follow documentation with examples and answers to common problems, make it super easy to download (if it's software), maybe make a web page where you can try it online (that helps a lot), have a nice, smooth user interface, make it behave similar to something users have probably already used, have a good name, a nice logo, a nice-looking webpage, take care of its search-engine positioning, offer services such as forums, maybe advertise a bit, sell shirts, give a free night at a spa to one of the users every month (hey why not)... wow that list came longer than expected. Well you get the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is bad advice for 99% of startups. It says "your API might become heavily used, so engineer for it up front".

I have an alternative suggestion: "Your API (even more so than your product) is most likely never going to be used by anyone, so engineer to get it out the door as quickly as possible and test the waters."

Authorization, throttling, quotas, and monetization are all things you can worry about in the happy-but-unlikely case that your API takes off. In the mean time, just get it out the door. There are some things you can do to future-proof yourself with zero effort:

* Require every request to submit a contact email address as a parameter. This gives you a crude way to find out who is using your API and how much, and gives you the ability to contact them when you make breaking changes. Clients who don't submit contact information have nobody to blame but themselves when you make breaking changes.

* Put your API on a different domain from your main site, ie api.example.com instead of www.example.com. This gives you more flexibility to move it around without breaking things.

* Documentation is critical, but easy - provide examples. Just a series of "Want to do X? Formulate a link like this" and make a real link that actually works.

* Don't overthink the API. Yeah, use REST principles and don't be a total idiot. But accept that your first API is just an experiment. If your API is successful, you _will_ end up rewriting it. The most important things are that 1) it works, 2) it's useful, and 3) users can figure out how to use it from the documentation. Just get something out there, even if it isn't pretty. If you need to make breaking changes, that's what the contact email is for.

We (<https://www.voo.st/>) added an API in response to a partner who asked for it. It took a day, half of which was formatting the documentation (<https://www.voo.st/developers>). Guess what? It's never been used. Chances are, your API will be the same way.

</comment><comment><USER5> Please, please don't help to persist the convention of putting the API version number in the URL. There are far better ways of doing it.

<http://stackoverflow.com/a/975394/62871>

<comment><USER6> I'm not convinced that versioning media-types is the best way. I agree it is a more correct way as opposed to basically abusing REST, but I think overall putting the version in the URL is better.

From the linked answer:

> * you break permalinks

> * The url changes will spread like a disease through your interface. What do > you do with representations that have not changed but point to the > representation that has? If you change the url, you break old clients. If > you leave the url, your new clients may not work.

Putting the version somewhere else in the request doesn't fix this. If you drop support for an old API version it is going to break stuff. It is easier to spot the issue if you return a 404 rather than a 500 or 400 error, or even correct data that breaks the app consuming the API as it is expecting something else.

> * Versioning media types is a much more flexible solution.

The main issue I have with this is I have had the "pleasure" of working with pretty stupid people implementing clients on my API. They easily get POST and GET requests mixed up, HTTP and HTTPS, whether or not the request should be authenticated. I don't want to add something else to confuse them even more...

<comment><USER7> > The main issue I have with this is I have had the "pleasure" of working with > pretty stupid people implementing clients on my API. They easily get POST > and GET requests mixed up, HTTP and HTTPS, whether or not the request should > be authenticated. I don't want to add something else to confuse them even > more...

Where does the madness end? Do you treat everything as though it were GET and stick the real method (and every other request header) in a query parameter? I think it's ok to assume a basic level of understanding of one of the best documented specs in computing.

<comment><USER6> Each to their own I guess. However personally I would rather not spend time tracking down a "bug" due to a client not consuming my API as documented. If I can make it easier for them to use, by not doing things the "correct" way, then I would rather do that.

<comment><USER8> This is often what the pragmatic/practical approach prioritizes (easier for users), as opposed to the idealistic/academic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's <http://apiaxle.com/> to look at as well, an open-source solution (no personal experience with it)

</comment><comment><USER10> I run a free service (<http://eve-central.com> \- I am not a designer ;)) which has an open API - no rate limits, no accounts, no signups, etc. Yes, technically this is bad, and has had interesting implications for support (some APIs date back to 2007 without any changes), but in this case is the right choice. It works by throwing enough power behind it, and relying on caches. The API is popular for its audience - approximately 50+ million calls per month, which easily outnumbers the (ad supported) web front end pageviews.

Due to licensing of content, it would be iffy to monetize directly (technically even the ads are in violation of that), so I don't even consider it.

<comment><USER11> Very cool :). If it doesn't make sense to monetize it might still at some point make sense to put sanity limits on some usage - otherwise some high volume users could end up making you take it down for cost reasons.

Nice problem to have though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The best API design I have come across so far is from Zencoder [1]. Their documentation is spot on and they also have a nice little API builder. I found it interesting to study while doing designs for our own API.

[1] <http://zencoder.com/api/>

EDIT: After reading [http://thereisnorightway.blogspot.jp/2011/02/versioning- and-...](http://thereisnorightway.blogspot.jp/2011/02/versioning-and-types-in- resthttp-api.html) I am not so sure anymore. They still have quite an awesome set of examples though.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting article. I wasn't aware of services like 3scale. Anyone got any experience of using them?

I developed, and am responsible for, a moderately complex b2b web API that is been in use for about three years. A b2b API embodies a contract between organisations, and it's important to understand that this is different to b2c (e.g. Twitter) which is less restrictive.

The biggest issue for me has been dealing with change. User requirements change. The underlying system changes and accretes new features that need to be exposed in the API. How to deal with this without either compromising the integrity of the API's design or (at the other extreme) breaking systems that use the API, is not easy. I don't know of any easy answers, but design your URLs and data schemas with versioning in mind and get to know the developers who use your API.

Documentation is very important. If your API exposes complex data then make sure that you have good documentation on what every data element means.

<comment><USER11> I'm from 3scale - so factor in any bias filters!) - we definitely think of it as a contract between the provider and user of the API - could be very lightweight or heavyweight - but basically it's a bunch of rights on the API v's a promise of good behavior.

Actually a lot of the APIs that use us are B2B because you often have different tiers of access rights and limits + want to have approval steps etc. for sign-ups. These are pain to code yourself.

The change part is a big deal - we normally deal with it in two ways: 1) launching parallel services for major versions so people consciously migrate their apps, 2) incremental updates - docs are versioned but all the same calls work on the same endpoint. How the version is flagged in the call is rather independent (URL, header, type).

We also use the swagger docs framework (<http://swagger.wordnik.com>) to create interactive docs to try keep questions on the API itself to a minimum (people can play with it themselves).

<comment><USER14> OT: Hi Steven, and please say hi to Josep for me! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The best way to do that is offering it up as a service – a RESTful API even."

I must admit to being a big fan of RESTful APIs, but I'm skeptical of treating any technical approach as being universally applicable. Are there any likely scenarios where a RESTful API for a web service is _not_ going to be a good idea?

<comment><USER16> When you're offering to large old-ish enterprises like banks and such you will likely want to go with SOAP.

When you have a lot of high-speed data, you will want to go with sockets and a live stream of small bits of data. Like Twitter's firehose for instance, or getting Wall Street data for your bot trader.

<comment><USER17> You can have both, and you can do it in a consistent way. Not that you can make everybody happy, but it's close enough.

For example we implemented our API with both XML-RPC and REST + JSON interfaces (<http://www.memset.com/apidocs/intro.html>). All the methods are available and work the same way in both interfaces. There's some extra work to deal with some of the types (ie. dates in JSON), but it's not too difficult.

So we have one implementation/docs, but two interfaces to access to it.

<comment><USER14> Actually, the difference between XMP-RPC and REST is not just in the format of the response, the difference is the whole approach. The way you have described (didn't go into the docs) you don't have REST at all, just XML-RPC that returns JSON. Sorry if I misunderstood.

<comment><USER17> There are two different interfaces for the same implementation. Let me stress the _different_ part. The RESTful API uses JSON to encode the responses, but that's all.

Sorry if I didn't explain it very well, the docs are clearer though.

<comment><USER18> The point is that your RESTful API is not RESTful at all. It's just RPC using JSON. REST is an architectural style that models the interaction around data and hypertext instead of actions.

A good rule of thumb is: if the documentation mentions "methods" as anything other than the uniform ones (if you're using HTTP, that would be GET, POST, etc), then it's RPC, not REST.

Note: I'm not saying your API is _bad_ ; RPC is a completely valid model. I'm just saying it's not RESTful.

<comment><USER17> That's true, we don't use HTTP methods (PUT, GET, POST, DELETE, etc) as part of the API. In fact we treat POST/GET the same for ease of use.

EDIT: to be fair, in the docs we never say it's a RESTFul API, it was MY mistake in my first comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Some more advice here: [http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Password- leak-at-...](http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Password-leak-at- meetOne-1652783.html) ...

</comment><comment><USER20> I think versioning API is an illusion. It is all source of complexity that eventually kills us. Give up keeping exactly the same behavior as actual models change.</comment>


Show HN: Devcroo – become a real programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.devcroo.com

<comment><USER2> [http://www.devcroo.com/](http://www.devcroo.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> and: [https://github.com/devcroo/ideas](https://github.com/devcroo/ideas)

</comment><comment><USER3> You're linking to your own thread.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's strange. I thought I provided the correct URL for it (must've somehow broke).

[http://www.devcroo.com](http://www.devcroo.com)

<comment><USER3> It's fixed now, the thread rehit my RSS feed too.

I've signed up, I always like a rethinking of teaching code online. Honestly, I haven't see anybody do it in a really good way that doesn't just target passive learners or already active professionals. I'm excited to check it out. :)</comment></comment></comment>


What happens when you type an URL in the browser and press enter? - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/what-happens-when-you-type-an-url-in-the-browser-and-press-enter-bb0aa2449c1a <comment><USER2> Except HTTPS. Now the whole thing gets an order of magnitude more complex. Plus this is only for the initial request - never mind the complex dance of prefetching, pipelining, keepalives and CDNs that happens once index.html is retrieved (/while it is being retrieved).

This is my favourite intro to the subject: [https://github.com/alex/what- happens-when/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/alex/what-happens- when/blob/master/README.rst)</comment>


App.net, like I need another bug tracker - <AUTHOR> http://kerr.io/app-net-like-i-need-another-bug-tracker/

<comment><USER2> The Svbtle branding here is A Bad Idea.

I got halfway down the page, to the part where he appears to have picked a bug tracker project at random to call "me-too" and compare to a "Pascal for Dummies" exercise (there's a Pascal book somewhere that mentions Twitter? there's a high school that still teaches Pascal?) --- and started asking how something like this had managed to make it to Svbtle.

Then I realized, "oh, it's wp-svbtle, whatever the fuck that is".

This is a design whose entire purpose is to mimic the Svbtle blog network and confuse readers. Every design choice in it, from the duplication of Curtis' (pointless) "Kudos" thingy to the stroke width of the rules, is made not for its own sake but to duplicate the branding of someone else's site.

It's a jerk move all around, not just to Curtis, or to anyone else who has decided to write for Curtis' network, but to readers, who deserve to know at a glance who an author is, or in this case isn't, affiliated with or endorsed by. And because it's an irritatingly obvious jerk move, it does a disservice to the author as well, making their words a sideshow on their own site.

<comment><USER3> Not only is it a pixel-for-pixel duplication of the design, but now they're copying my front-end code, too.

<comment><USER4> People copying things they like on the internet? _Never!_

Seriously, what did you expect? You created something beautiful. You formed a visual brand that associated itself to good writing. You made it exclusive.

People wanted in. They copied it. You can see examples of this from nature (animals imitating visual properties of other animals to make themselves more scary etc) to modern design strategy (using similar colors / fonts to create a subconscious mental association with something).

<comment><USER2> Yes, this is human nature. But... now what? It's still irritating and disrespectful of the reader, the people actually involved with Svbtle, and even of the author's own content, which is obviously not important enough to be posted without a totally unrelated provocation.

If you look carefully at Svbtle or _almost any other modern blog_ , it is not hard to reverse engineer the rules that make these things look good: it's simply font size, line width, leading, and minimal ornamentation. Just make a new blog template that follows the same rules. Leave the "Kudos" thing out while you're at it.

This isn't about sticking up for Dustin Curtis' exclusive rights to minimal, readable blog templates. As approximately every detractor of Svbtle has pointed out approximately always, Svbtle isn't the first site to use minimalist black-on-white breathable sans with a faintly ruled sidebar.

This is about sites going out of their way to pretend an affiliation that they don't have. IBM's blog template is horrible. It would be equally annoying and disrespectful to clone it and change the "IBM" to "IBN".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My problem with App.net is I just don't care.

I don't _need_ another social network. I don't _need_ ads removed from my current social feed. I don't _need_ app.net.

If twitter died tomorrow something else would pop up. That's the nature of the space. We don't need it and so we go where there is less friction. Ease of use, ease of joining, and ease of finding those I care about most. That's all that matters.

I see App.net becoming something much like svbtle. A highly curated space much like a country club where only those willing to pay the entry fee are allowed in.

Cool.

As long as the data is available publicly through feeds and other api's it won't matter too much. It's still blogging, it's still tweeting, but now your participants have been restricted. Not as much as Svbtle but enough to encourage a certain atmosphere.

<comment><USER6> I agree. Doesn't anyone who is bugged enough by ads just use Adblock?

<comment><USER7> I suspect that you don't understand that this is not about the ads being visible, but the ads being based on your data, and your content.

<comment><USER6> OK, I understand a bit better now. I do like the idea that I am the customer, not the product and that my data is mine to do with what I please, not something I give away freely.

I guess my only quibble about App.net is that I've never personally seen the appeal of the micro-blogging/twitter social model. I don't like to "follow" people, and I like to say things to other people in more than 140/256 charters. I believe that there is a generally correlation between the length of people's comments/text and their quality.

I would like to see a more integrated real time feed, i.e the music people listen to, the movies they watch, where they eat so that developers can use it to make recommendations to me. That would be awesome as long as I can have fine grained control over who get access to what information.

I am excited to see if App.net is going to go in this direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Once those two companies get their act together and improve their developer > programs, the market will quickly loose interest in App.net.

isn't the point that Twitter and Facebook's shitty developer relations are a symptom of their desire to monetise and therefore there is never going to be a time when they have good developer relations?

<comment><USER9> Right, at one point, the developer interactions were the primary focus. Well, secondary, right behind growing the user base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _If your senior high school computer science final project wasn't building an issue tracker or Twitter clone, then your high school either a) didn't offer computer science classes or b) you were a jock and didn't take computer science._

I think this is the first time I've actually been filled with hatred towards a blog post.

</comment><comment><USER11> Dalton has managed to convince 8000 developers to cough up cash. He's got a working alpha with a high level of community engagement. Those are substantial accomplishments.

I wouldn't write it off just yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> God... what? First off, which Pascal textbook would be both old enough to include a floppy disk, yet new enough to include a Twitter clone? I simply don't understand his main argument. App.net will be unsuccessful because it's just a clone of Twitter and people won't support a Twitter clone? App.net is certainly not and will not be a Twitter clone, and anyone who has spent more than five minutes looking at the platform, its roadmap, its API docs, etc., would know that.

</comment><comment><USER13> Regardless of your opinions on whether or not app.net is a worthwhile endeavor, I think Dalton is proving that the "pay for service" business model still does exist and can be applied to internet services. For so long, the norm was "build service people use for free, get a million users, figure out business model" which inevitably leads to a) selling user info or b) targeting people with ads.

Constantly trashing app.net is not seeing the bigger picture. Thankfully, people like Dalton aren't as short-sighted.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, I would love for something like App.net to succeed, but unfortunately it probably will not. Even if every developer supported it, its the consumers who always have the last word. Consumers outnumber developers by at least 500:1, and 99 percent of consumers do not care about the issues that developers face. If you don't get consumers (i.e. non-developers) on your platform, it will die (unless of course you are building B2B tools or something).

</comment><comment><USER15> There isn't really any useful content in that rant to comment about, so I'm going to go off topic a little bit:

"If your senior high school computer science final project wasn't building an issue tracker or Twitter clone, then your high school either a) didn't offer computer science classes or b) you were a jock and didn't take computer science."

Is this really true? My brain immediately turned off when I read this, but then I realized I have no clue what people in high school usually program.

I'll go first: around 14 or 15 I wrote a bytecode compiler for some god awful language that looked like the bastard child of Perl and Javascript... I guess around late high school time I was mainly working on Smogon, a competitive Pokemon website (still around and making money!) and NetBattle, an online simulator for several Pokemon generations (now defunct and replaced by www.pokemonshowdown.com)

So HN, what was your "senior high school project"?

</comment><comment><USER16> You can't compare something that requires a critical mass to be useful (app.net, Facebook, Twitter) with issue tracking software.

B2B products, like bug trackers, can carve a niche and do rather well with just a few hundred or thousand paid customers. Yes, they're not going to all be Atlassian, but a solo founder charging 1,000 people $30 a month can live _very_ comfortably. And you can drift along for a while and not ultimately give up because "the big guys" are 1000x your size.

B2C products, like app.net, exist on an entirely different plane.

Disclaimer: I run a fairly new project management tool / bug tracker that already has already replaced a considerable amount of my monthly income.

</comment><comment><USER17> Developers flock to platforms where users are. Twitter and FB has users. So devs write apps for FB and Twitter.

App.net, from where I see, looks like a platform with more developers than users.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would consider App.net successful if it pushes Facebook and Twitter to adopt some of what App.net is setting out to accomplish.

Would it be great if App.net flourishes to the point of being a continued relevant tool and site for years? Of course.

But its goals are worth keeping track of and working towards. No need to get so worked up about it against it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Twitter was crap when it started, something happened which caused it to be useful. App.net is crap, but maybe something useful will come out of it and then we'll find it useful.

p.s I'm in the app.net alpha.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's not always about the idea. It's the execution.

</comment><comment><USER21> Something about using a svbtle clone and ripping app.net on it doesn't sit well with me.

<comment><USER22> What is svbtle in the first place (never even heard of it, and I bet 99% of people haven't either)? Is it a theme? I have no clue why this needs to be mentioned. WHy not just criticize his words?

<comment><USER2> Svbtle is a blog network. Go to SVBTLE.COM to see who's writing for it; it's the first thing you see on the site.

Whether or not something is part of SVBTLE is about as important a point as whether it's written for Ars Technica, or for ZDNet: that is, not the most important thing about the piece, but by absolutely no means irrelevant.

Also, had this been an actual Svbtle piece, it would have carried the frisson of being a contrarian take on the work of another Svbtle author, since Svbtle is where Dalton Caldwell announced App.net to begin with.

<comment><USER22> ok so it's an elitist old boy's club? And this blog isn't part of it? Still do not get what's the big deal.

<comment><USER2> "Elitist old boy's club"? What does that even mean?

Are we really that insecure? That any time anybody chooses to affiliate selectively in a new way, we have to cast aspersions?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>