The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-blockchain-will-do-to-banks-and-law-firms-what-the-internet-did-to-media <comment><USER2> I do not buy this for a minute and to be fair the headline misrepresents the much more sober tone of the actual article, to the authors' credit.

I am not a fan of cryptocurrency in general (that is another argument for another day) so I am just going to focus on one claim regarding law firms: the rise of the smart contract. I do not believe it is a realistic expectation, and here is why:

The vast majority of contracts do _not_ have syntactically testable conditions. They just don't. Whether the conditions in a contract have been met is very often a matter of huge debate - this is what "law suits" are about. Unless you can create a condition that is testable by code, you cannot have a contract that self-enforces with the block chain. The conditions set forth in contracts are extremely complex and reasonable people can differ. I cannot imagine how you would have a contract be triggered on the insolvency of a privately held corporation - good luck defining insolvency and good luck getting access to the underlying books. Copyright infringement is also a preposterous idea - the amount of semantic judgment that must be made to determine if a work is infringing is enormous. Only the very simplest of conditions - comparing numbers, checking the time, can be reliably automated, and if you are getting a lawyer to write your contracts, odds are there is substantially more complexity in the agreements than this, which is why you hired the lawyer in the first place. In addition, a fair portion of contracts that can actually be set up to work this already are - and the blockchain is not necessary. They are things like credit cards and they work pretty good without the blockchain.

This aside, are you going to trust your lawyers to write blockchain enforced smart-contracts? Every time I post my code to the world I get reamed and I spend a _shitload_ of time writing code and learning about it, far, far in excess of [edit/deleted: any other lawyer] the vast majority of lawyers I know [edit/insertion: a handful of exceptions have come to mind, but I know literally hundreds of lawyers and practice in NYC] - among lawyers I am a giant and on HN I am beneath contempt. Why on earth would you trust lawyers to write code-based contracts? Nothing about that seems right.

Who knows, however. If 2016 taught me one thing it is that all bets are off and the points don't matter.

<comment><USER3> You haven't heard of Law 2.0. The slow rise to financial dominance is coming to an end for the big Amlaw firms. A disruption event is on the horizon where lawyers will need to be replaced with technology/law expert hybrids who will program the legal systems which will act autonomously with as little intervention as possible. Hands on law will eventually become a thing of the past. I've been working in legal for 25 years on the IT side. I've seen it go from ALL paper to 'paper on demand'. Nearly everything is digital with ETL warehousing acting as the data conductor. The clients are fed up with $1000 an hour corporate lawyers and want another cheaper and faster solution.

<comment><USER4> Where is this happening

As an individual if I want a lawyer for anything right now, I am most likely going to wind up with a complete technophobe who is barely computer literate enough to copy and paste the boilerplate legal document they make for me.

<comment><USER5> For 99% of the things I want a lawyer to do right now I'll fill out a form on LegalZoom and never see a human. Someone wrote a chatbot that helps people in NYC walk through the process of fighting their traffic citations. Automation is coming for sure.

<comment><USER6> Unless something goes wrong then you'll probably regret your canned contract for not dealing with the specifics of your needs.

Canned contracts are great and a wonderful money saver until they are needed. It's just lucky that most contracts individuals are involved in are never needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every time I see someone claiming that no one thought the internet would succeed by pointing out that newsweek article I wonder if they are even old enough to remember the mid 90s. I get that it would be regional but in the Toronto area in the mid-90s everyone I knew wanted to try the web and email it was often just expensive or a pain in the ass to do so.

Having scanned through the article they basically point out why their premise is wrong. "lawyers argue that regulation through code alone is inflexible and doesn't permit any role for useful discretion".

>In the case of cryptocurrencies, we're seeing far more aggressive investments of venture capital than we did for the internet during similar early stages of development.

Also this is provably wrong. Blockchain VC sits at around 2b over the course of 8 years and it has basically all but dried up. Internet companies had passed that by 96 after 2 years. 8 years after the start of the commercial internet was 2002.

<comment><USER7> I agree that there are plenty of differences between the technologies. But the investment comparison in the article seems accurate; a public Internet can be traced back before the 80s, and "early development" to the 60s. A public blockchain opened in 2009. Wasn't VC investment in the former comparatively late?

<comment><USER6> There were BBSs earlier and if you were lucky you worked for a company or university with access but commercial internet access and usage was restricted before the early 90s. So comparing VC to before that point isn't accurate it also doesn't take into account how the internet itself has accelerated the distribution of ideas and tech dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Blockchains cannot understand intent like a human courts can.

The idea that _intent_ is an important part of determining the punishment/morals of the crime came out of the French Enlightenment. I'd really rather not roll back this. The difference between _an accident_ , _manslaughter_ , and _first degree murder_ are non-trivial and __VERY IMPORTANT __.

Also fuck you if you want to train an ML bot to that job. You clear don't _get it_.

<comment><USER9> Alternately, you could start up a prediction market on how likely the accused is to commit crimes in the future based on potential sentences, sell shares of their future income in order to incentivize proper rehabilitation, weigh the various registered values of voters to determine how much money and time should be sacrificed for the sake of seeing the guilty punished, get the case analyzed by various remote contractors who have proven records on predicting verdicts, and various other ambiguously utopian/dystopian "improvements" to the legal system of today.

And how long until you can train the ML bot to do better than a randomly selected jury at predicting what a larger jury would make of a case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe. If so, only on a much smaller scale. A lot of the automation in Blockchain tech might actually help the banks and law firms make even more money by having to employ fewer people.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wouldn't say 'Law Firms' \- however I would say notary public may be severely affected.

</comment><comment><USER12> First we need to figure out smart contracts and educate folks on how capability security works.

<comment><USER13> What portions of Smart Contracts is there left to figure out?

<comment><USER2> Literally all of the important stuff.

In a recent contract I worked on the definition of "material adverse effect" took up a page of single spaced 12 point times new roman text and had about two dozen other definitions involved. Each one of those terms, at its root, comes down to a judgment call that is subject to disagreement among reasonable people. This is why we have trials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> yeah... just like the "sharing economy" was going to take over the world.

<comment><USER15> You mean like Uber, AirBnB &c? Give it a couple years. The internet is ~30 y/o. "The Sharing Economy" isn't even a decade old.

<comment><USER16> Uber is fucked and AirBNB is facing lot of resistance for making cities unaffordable by incentivizing landlords to rent to short term travellers vs people who are contributing to the local economy who aren't able to move closer to work due to lack of supply.

Not exactly what the internet ordered.

<comment><USER4> and it is going to take a long time for the legislative bodies to catch up to modern realities.

thank the internet.

<comment><USER17> What makes you think that legislative bodies are capable of catching up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> said the blockchain expert.

</comment><comment><USER18> Allow new monopolies to emerge?</comment>


A first for physics: Fundamental quantum physics problem proved unsolvable - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v528/n7581/full/nature16059.html <comment><USER2> Companion article to original paper:

Paradox at the heart of mathematics makes physics problem unanswerable: Gödel's incompleteness theorems are connected to unsolvable calculations in quantum physics.

[http://www.nature.com/news/paradox-at-the-heart-of- mathemati...](http://www.nature.com/news/paradox-at-the-heart-of-mathematics- makes-physics-problem-unanswerable-1.18983)

Toby Cubitt, a "quantum-information theorist" at UCL should win this years relevant username contest ;)

<comment><USER3> A great example of nominative determinism.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, his name only collapsed into a determinative state once we looked at it in the context of this article. /pun

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The proof combines Hamiltonian complexity techniques with aperiodic tilings, to construct a Hamiltonian whose ground state encodes the evolution of a quantum phase-estimation algorithm followed by a universal Turing machine._

Just when I thought linking quantum mechanics with Turing completeness was cool, they went one step further and linked them using aperiodic tilings.

<comment><USER6> So if I'm understanding this right, they proved that you can't calculate the bandgap of some class of systems of arbitrary size in any predetermined finite period of time, right? I guess when you really think about it, the opposite finding would be much more surprising. (That you could calculate the bandgap of any system of any size in some finite time period, however large).

<comment><USER7> It's not a constant period of time. The amount of time is allowed to increase with the size of the system. In fact it's allowed to increase quadratically, or exponentially, or factorially, or whatever - it will never be enough. Whatever algorithm you come up with for calculating the rate of expansion, you will always underestimate the amount of time (for a sufficiently large system).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver#Non- computability_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver#Non- computability_of_.CE.A3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Long version: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04573](http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04573)

Short version: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04135](http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04135)

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't determine what the postulates are that this proof is based upon. If someone has a relatively succinct explanation, I'd appreciate it.

<comment><USER8> Mathematically, this is in the land of linear algebra (complex vector spaces.) The particular question at hand concerns the spectrum of a (Hermitian) linear operator, known as "the Hamiltonian". The "gap" refers to a separation in the lowest two eigenvalues ("energy levels") of this operator.

It seems plausible that one could easily encode a turing incomplete problem into linear algebra (think of tensor networks, constraint satisfaction, etc.) but what these guys have done is place very strong restrictions on the form of the linear operator (in jargon: two dimensional, nearest neighbour interactions, translational invariance). This now comes near to a class of physical systems that one may hope to build, or at least understand theoretically, and the result of the paper puts a stark upper limit on what we may hope to achieve in this vein.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This might be an ignorant question, but can one still force a decidable solution by assuming a stronger set of axioms? And if so, does this undecidability have any physical significance?

<comment><USER12> Yes, you can add more axioms, but your new system with more axioms will have other undecidable statements.

I don't know much physics, but my interpretation is this: we have a mathematical model of physics in which we have found a "naturally-ocurring" undecidable statement (scare quotes because most famous undecidable statements were specifically constructed to be undecidable). This does not really say anything about the natural world, merely that our mathematical modelling of it is incomplete, but it always must be incomplete.

<comment><USER13> Is it really impossible to have some system of axioms where most statements you care about (ie. can make a physical experiment out of) can be decided? If you can't measure something (ie., decide it someway from your theory or leave it as a free parameter), it's not science, string-theory nonwithstanding.

<comment><USER12> > Is it really impossible to have some system of axioms where most statements > you care about (ie. can make a physical experiment out of) can be decided?

Of course it's possible. Most statements we care about are decidable. Otherwise, mathematics would be pretty hopeless. :-) It's just that any system has undecidable statements, as long as it's strong enough to do arithmetic. That's Gödel's theorem.

<comment><USER13> I know due to Godel in principle that a logical system can't be complete, but science is a little more specified beyond just logical consistency, it has to be experimentally verifiable, which is a constraint that the mathematics used by science doesn't have. What I'm hinting at is there is a subset of logical statements that the _mathematics_ of science contains defined by the set of experimentally testable statements, and this subset is decidable given independent axioms and free parameters.

EDIT: to expand upon this further, things like the continuum hypothesis are interesting from a mathematical perspective, let's say I'm Godel and I assert that CH is false and there is some set A "in between" the reals and N in cardinality. However, if my friend Enrico Fermi wants to do experiments and he wants me to do a calculation, I won't use elements from A because it wouldn't be useful for his experiments in with particle physics. Worse, I can't even use all the real numbers, because he'll need numbers he can compare to his measurements, so I'm restricted to a countable subset of even the reals, and of course, I'm restricted to using statements from the decidable subset of mathematics.

There's a big difference between what mathematics is capable of saying and what we observe in the real world. Even if the real world had a set of undecidable facts, the fact that the only way science can understand it is by experiments restricts _falsifiable scientific statements_ to a subset of mathematical statements which is incomplete (because of the need of axioms and free parameters like the mass of particles or their charge, fundamental constants, etc), but _decidable_ within it's axioms, because otherwise, it's not testable and it's not science.

<comment><USER12> As Einstein said, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."[1]

Forgive me for not addressing directly what you said, as you seem to be using "countable" to mean something other than "in bijection with the natural numbers". I don't really understand exactly what you mean. But it appears to me that you're trying to perfectly reconcile mathematics with experimental reality. This is impossible. Also, a lot of mathematical physics is very distant from experimental reality.

\--

[1] [http://www-groups.dcs.st- and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Einstein_g...](http://www-groups.dcs.st- and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Einstein_geometry.html)

<comment><USER13> I might be confusing this thread with another. The posters there claimed that when considering the infinite number of possible systems that you end up with undecidable statements. Probably countability has nothing to do with this.

Also, the popular article linked elsewhere seems to imply that this has very real implications on experiment, which is upsetting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't tell how much of this is "quantum physics" and how much is "mathematical theory that also arises in quantum physics".

As in, I doubt their construction allows "building something" which then allows solving a conventionally unsolvable problem. With new physics you may be able to build machines that can compute more; however I don't think they are talking about such physics here.

But, they do quote: Marian B. Pour-El and Jonathan I. Richards. Computability in Analysis and Physics. Springer, 1989.

M. B. Pour-El and J. Richards have earlier results:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00018708819...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0001870881900013): The wave equation with computable initial data such that its unique solution is not computable (1981)

[http://philpapers.org/rec/POUTWE](http://philpapers.org/rec/POUTWE): The wave equation with computable initial data whose unique solution is nowhere computable (1997)

The Spectral Gap authors seem to call these results "easier" (page 8 at [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04573v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04573v2.pdf))

</comment><comment><USER15> It's nice that they showed this for the problem of finding the ground state of a Hamiltonian, but we already knew the axioms of quantum computing encode undecidable problems because it includes all of classical computing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of an adage I once read and have taken to heart (but I can't recall the source and I'm paraphrasing): what is impossible in theory is often not nearly as interesting as what is possible in practice.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wait,

Does that imply that it could be possible to construct a system which gives uncomputable results?

Does it assume an infinite plane or something? (Assume might be the wrong word)

Because, if there's something uncomputable, due to halting problem, how does that fit with the bekenstein bound?

<comment><USER18> But spectral gaps do occur in nature. Does that mean that even though it is impossible to compute if a spectral gap will occur or not, we could just observe such a system in nature and that way we could build a computer which would compute uncomputable results?

<comment><USER19> In nature it does not matter if the spectral gap is really tiny. It's de facto without spectral gap if it's just small enough.

Whereas for this particular decision problem the mere existence of spectral gap matters.

<comment><USER20> Who says? Graphene gaps, (it must gap) even though its so small it's impossible to observe in practice. This had very important consequences for topological materials theory...

<comment><USER19> This is exactly what I meant.

Even if it has theoretical reasons to have a tiny gap in practice it works as zero gap.

<comment><USER21> Except that in our result, the spectrum is either continuous, or the spectral gap is guaranteed to be >= 1 (in natural units). It does not become arbitrarily small in the gapped case.

The reason you can't use this to compute the uncomputable is that real systems are finite, and the spectral gap is always computable in principle (maybe with a lot of effort) for any finite system. A real (possibly very large but still finite) system will either have a gap or not, and you'll be able to measure it. This definitely doesn't solve an undecidable problem.

However, the undecidability in the idealised infinite lattice limit "shows through" to the experimentally accessible finite-size case, in the form of some rather unusual finite-size physics. This is discussed in more detail in the paper itself (the relevant section is quoted verbatim here [http://mathoverflow.net/a/225905](http://mathoverflow.net/a/225905)) and in the comments on Scott Aaronson's blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've wondered if this can go the other way as well:

e.g. "If Golbach's conjecture is true, then FTL signalling is possible. Since physics says FTL is impossible, then GC must be false"

[If you could reduce GC to a scheme for moving information via quantum entaglement. I use GC as an example because it is famous and an unproved, but maybe a better example is the Erdos Discrepancy [0] which makes statements about aritrarily long sequences in {1,-1} just like sampling quantum states!]

[0]: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05363](http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05363)

<comment><USER23> I think most mathematicians would not accept something like that as a proof. Our understanding of physics is based on real-world observations and experiments in a way that math is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Since physical states exist in reality, it makes no sense to me that a physical problem is not mathematically decidable.

The only way a problem is mathematically undecidable is when it's malformed (i.e. non-sensical).

<comment><USER25> But surely, any physical state would be available to you only as a _representation_ , and not directly. Meaning, that in order to make it decidable, you'll probably have to look at it differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Uncomputable or unsolvable?

<comment><USER27> Undecidable.

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

See here for a concrete example of a similar problem (props to adrianN for the link in the first place):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile#Domino_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile#Domino_problem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The post and linked article titles don't match at all (??).

</comment><comment><USER29> Such a statement just means they can implement computation in this formalism. Not a huge surprise as you can implement computation with many other structures.

<comment><USER30> This is being downvoted, but I'd like an explanation of what the alternative is. Can someone to explain how this result differs from a claim "I can build a computer which turns a light on when a given program terminates, so therefore 'light on-ness' is undecidable".

<comment><USER31> Whether a light is on or off is contingent. This is more like proving the light would always be on as a fundamental fact of basic physics. Even if it were done by showing that the existence of a computer connected to the light, proving that from first physical principles would be a big achievement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> But, but, but - what if I use a D-Wave machine to solve it? ;-)

<comment><USER33> I know you jest, but is there a proof (or good hypothesis) that allows one to convert a formula to an appropriately sped-up version quantum optimized algorithm?

Compare the Sieve of Atkin to Shor's algorithm, for what I am referring to.

<comment><USER30> My understanding from reading Scott Aaronson, is that his belief is that most algorithms will not have significant speedups as a quantum algorithm, and that the currently known algorithms with large (exponential) speedups aren't very useful in the sense that they're just breaking cryptographic problems which were used solely because they were hard to break. In other words, don't expect everything to have a Shor's algorithm analogue.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cronhub – Painless Cron Monitoring - <AUTHOR> https://cronhub.io <comment><USER2> Funny how a human mind works. Mine is apparently ruined by the internet. I would consider a different name if this is meant as a serious product.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have seen [https://cronitor.io/](https://cronitor.io/) in the past. Are there any differences from this service?

<comment><USER4> No free plans? How about [https://healthchecks.io/](https://healthchecks.io/) though?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a free plan!</comment></comment></comment>


O'Reilly Media has stopped retailing books directly on its ecommerce store - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/were-reinventing-too <comment><USER4> Sent this to Support at O'Reilly after reading their (to me, insane) e-mail.

Hi O'Reilly,

Just so you know - you've completely lost a customer. After years - <USER2> really - of a highly dedicated customer (whose friends have written books you have published) you threw it all down the drain in one e-mail.

I will never purchase another book published by O'Reilly, or any company associated with O'Reilly, or associated with O'Reilly himself or any of the executives at O'Reilly. I sure as heck am not going to buy any technical books from O'Reilly by Amazon.

The things I liked from O'Reilly, now gone, are:

1\. PDF, ePub and Mobi formats, all DRM free, so I could read them in the ideal format for each device I read them on. And, I have a lot of devices: several Macs and PCs, several iPads, several Kindles (used almost exclusively for fiction as technical works are horrible in non-PDF), several phones of various kinds. I could put both the ePub and PDF into iBooks (not my favorite app, but it does sync) and read the ePub on the subway if I wanted, and the PDF on the desktop and iPad (cause, as I said, ePub is terrible for technical books). I like my fully properly typeset color, indexed PDFs!

2\. Buy it once, own it. Did you ever see me subscribe to Safari? No? Ever wonder why not? For the same reason that I don't use Adobe products anymore except Lightroom (which is still a purchase not a subscription), and why I dropped JetBrains when they moved to their subscription model and then re- joined them when they went to "Subscription + keep your start of subscription version forever". I don't rent stuff. I buy it and own it. Plain and simple.

I'm glad that there are other publishers out there like Pragmatic Press and Apress that have been publishing good content, because you just lost a highly dedicated customer who always shopped O'Reilly first even for non-O'Reilly books. Congratulations, and shame on you.

<comment><USER5> > Buy it once, own it. Did you ever see me subscribe to Safari? No? Ever > wonder why not? For the same reason that I don't use Adobe products anymore > except Lightroom...

I like subscriptions, to be honest. I don't need to "own" all this stuff (whatever "own" might mean) -- tech books and specific versions of software tend to have a relatively short shelf-life and I like both O'Reilly's, Adobe's, and JetBrain's models of paying a predictable fee every month and having access to _everything_ they provide. To me it's very freeing.

The last time I purchased an O'Reilly book, digital or physical, was probably... 2002?

<comment><USER6> I don't mind subscriptions, but a key difference between O'Reilly's subscription model and Adobe/Jetbrains is that my Jetbrains and Adobe subscriptions (both of which I'm happy with!) get me access to the exact same thing I used to pay hundreds of dollars a year for, just on different terms.

Safari is quite radically different from the O'Reilly products I used to pay for. I'm forced to use a browser or their proprietary mobile app to read the books. Only the mobile app support offline reading. It's a completely different value proposition - it costs much more than I would normally spend on O'Reilly ebooks each year, but it would get me access to many more tech books than I'd normally buy or read. Unlike ebook purchases, if I stop subscribing I lose access to everything.

I think it ends up being a good value if you reference a wide variety of books and a very poor one if you have narrower interests. I'd be more interested if they offered a plan that fit my usage profile. I don't care about access to thousands of books with no restrictions, I'd be happy to have access to maybe two to four full books (of my choosing) at a time for a more modest monthly fee. Maybe a credits system like Audible? I think there's a lot of ways to design an ebook subscription service that are more customer-friendly than forcing everyone into an expensive all-or-nothing choice.

<comment><USER7> For me it was even worse, their mobile app's cache would bork fairly frequently, and the app would misbehave until I cleared it, and on android, it isn't exactly an accessible option, you have to go through layers of settings menus, scroll forever for the app you're looking for to finally clear it. Third time it happened, I cancelled my Safari account.

I _want_ to like Safari as an option, but it's way too limited for me. Frankly I'm only buying 2-3 books a year now, mostly relying on technical articles or online documentation (bad as that may be). I may go through another burst reading 8-10 books over a summer again, but not at the moment.

Although this change doesn't affect me, I mostly bought print books via Amazon anyway, because I find digital copies harder to recall/work through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is devastating ... I don't have the income to justify $399/yr for Safari subscription.

"the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com"

... that doesn't explain why the two options couldn't co-exist.

"In addition to giving our customers the choice and convenience they expect"

... no, they just took away the choice and convenience I expect.

Over time, I've favored different formats based on what devices I have owned, and bugs in the apps themselves (OS X 10.11 Preview had terrible PDF rendering for non-retina devices). So there goes my choice on what I want to buy when, and what format to use where.

I hope this doesn't encourage InformIT, Manning, PragProg or RockyNook to go down these roads. Until then, I guess they will get my money.

<comment><USER9> We (Manning) are in the process of diversifying our options :)

<comment><USER10> Just wanted to add, I absolutely love manning tech book's quality. After buying few books from packt, I'm never going back to them.

<comment><USER9> Always good to hear positive feedback :) Thanks! Any particular books you've enjoyed recently?

<comment><USER10> I'm in first few chapters of Relevant search book. So far, great!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One other thing worth mentioning: Publishers (and authors) were notified of the change _today_. It's akin to an app store suddenly announcing a major shift in the business model and payouts to app developers, effective immediately.

For my company, the single-title sales are often greater than Safari subscription income, and I am not sure sending visitors to Amazon is going to make up for the lost sales on O'Reilly. I would have much preferred if O'Reilly sent customers directly to my publisher's website, for people who want to purchase PDFs or ebooks from other vendors besides Amazon.

Reading utility nonfiction/technical titles are not the same as binge-watching Netflix or plugging into a Spotify playlist all day. Readers have very specific needs and learning priorities, and the all-you-can-eat model doesn't work for everyone.

<comment><USER12> I actually really like Safari books online, the all-you-can-eat subscription style matches my usage perfectly. My experience has been that most technical books aren't worth reading cover to cover, but many make for great references. When researching certain technical topics, I just open dozens of books and skip straight to the relevant sections.

<comment><USER8> But even if you like the subscription model, you are forced to consume the content a certain way. If I wanted to read on my Android tablet, presumably I'd use the Safari app ... which barely has a mediocre rating.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.safariflow...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.safariflow.queue&hl=en)

<comment><USER13> The app has been half-crap for a long time. Bugs that have gone unchanged for years.

For example, the page you (re)open to has a tiny font(s) size(s). Scroll away from it, and you get a readable font size. Scroll back, and that page is tiny, again. Sometimes, it takes scrolling to the start of the next section to get the normal font size. Or the previous section, or page. Anyway, everytime you relaunch the app and pick up where you left off, that page has a tiny, unreadable font size. My fix for it now is to pop the table of contents popup/list, find and go to the previous section, and then scroll forward to the page I was at.

I also like to read on it with a dark background and light text. Sometimes the border is dark, as well -- as expected and desired. Other times, it's white -- its brightness decreasing readability. Solution for this? Kill and relaunch the app. I've noticed some vague sense of correspondense of this behavior with how I'm using/opening/reopening the app at the moment the undesired behavior occurs, but I haven't defined it fully and keep forgetting what I do happen to notice.

There are other irritations -- also longstanding ones in the web interface. Those are the ones I happen to remember, at the moment.

Anyway, I like having access to the library -- although more and more new titles seem not to be O'Reilly nor Addison-Wesley or the like, but what seem to be more "second tier" titles.

At the same time, if I'd taken the dollars spent on Safari and just bought titles, well... I'd have a lot of titles that will never "go away" on me.

P.S. I have the "traditional" O'Reilly subscription. I gather there is now a second type of subscription and app. Unlimited local downloads (accessible only through the app), unlike the 3 or less at a time that the "traditional" subscriptions provide. And some sort of epub or somesuch format that may allow some more formatting choices O'Reilly wanted or somesuch. But a more limited selection of titles, and no titles that insist upon other formats, such as the Addison-Wesley titles. So I gather, second-hand.

Anyway, I'm talking about the "traditional" subscription and corresponding Android app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is very disappointing. When discussing the space, I liked to point at O'Reilly, Manning and the Prags as examples of tech publishers that did a good job directly selling ebooks. I've bought many books from all three of them.

(Disclosure: Manning author twice, Leanpub co-founder.)

Now, at Leanpub we're going to be rolling out our own courses in the next couple months, so we agree with O'Reilly that there are lots of great ways to produce and distribute learning material. However, the book is the best, most general and timeless way. We're committed to selling DRM-free ebooks in PDF, EPUB and MOBI directly from on our own site for the long term.

The ebook world should not just give up and sell everything through Amazon. I like Amazon--they do a great job of focusing on customers, I have Amazon Prime, and I'm really happy that Jeff Bezos is a good owner for the Washington Post. But we should not let Amazon become the only seller of ebooks.

Stay tuned for something else we're planning in this regard in a few weeks...

<comment><USER15> I stopped using Leanpub as soon as you started charging author's an upfront fee of $99 PER BOOK to even start writing a book on your platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This really sucks.

It was my favorite place to buy books. It seemed like the one place that had the model closest to being right.

\- They used to have an ongoing discount of 45% and more on special holidays.

\- They were DRM free in multiple formats and they gave you discounts on ebooks if you had purchased the print books.

\- They had regular updates to ebooks posted in one single list that you could keep up with.

I wish I had purchased all the books on my wish-list before this was announced.

The Safari subscription model makes no sense to my use-case.

I guess that makes Informit.com and No Starch Press my goto book stores. Also Manning and Apress, but their selection is weaker.

<comment><USER17> Packt is also worth considering, with a similar lack of DRM and multiple formats.

As a nice bonus, every day, they make one title available free - a good means to dip into new technologies just out of curiosity:

[https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free- learning](https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning)

<comment><USER18> Packt is very hit or miss. Some titles are awesome, and others read like a collection of SO answers and out-of-date official documentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's something interesting to know - O'Reilly's online store wasn't an in- house operation. They contracted with an ecommerce company called MarketLive, and then all the ebook stuff was an extensive (and, as far as I know, tightly- coupled) customization. But all the add-to-basket and order-processing and order-confirmation-emails stuff was through MarketLive.

This is significant because early last year MarketLive was purchased by private equity, merged with some other ecommerce companies, and relocated to Texas. So it's quite possible - and here I have no particular knowledge - <USER3> the MarketLive platform is being deprecated or entirely abandoned, and this was a more attractive option for O'Reilly than trying to rebuild all that stuff on a different platform.

<comment><USER20> O'Reilly have always been pretty transparent with their readers; I'm sure if they'd come clean on this people would have given them the benefit of the doubt. "Sorry, in a few months we are scaling down the website because our supplier is borked, bear with us." Man, I'm sure someone would have helped them for free / cheap.

Trying to cover a supplier issue with bullcrap about "market trends" is not great; doing it from one day to the next is just terrible for customer relationships.

<comment><USER21> Why can't both things be true? It could very well be the case that they would have been happy to carry on with the market if it still all worked, but they didn't feel like they could justify the trouble of migrating it to a new platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The last couple of O'Reilly books I purchased from Amazon were of poor quality. The content was fine but the physical item was shocking. They were probably print-on-demand books made on the cheap. But the retail price was what you'd expect from a high end tech publisher. I should have returned them. The books look like they were printed on a consumer grade inkjet. I had heard that the books purchased directly from O'Reilly didn't have this problem. They've even taken away that option now. Looking back, this had to be expected. The writing was on the wall when they switched from a lay-flat binding for most or their titles to the cheaper, much hard to read while coding, perfect binding.

<comment><USER23> Yes, they're print-on-demand books, printed by Lightning Source (the last time I checked). They're not cheap to print, at least not at the list price; I don't know what deal O'Reilly might have. However, they're vastly more convenient because Lightning Source will ship them directly to retailers so publishers don't need warehouses. If I'd have to guess, I'd say that O'Reilly might be printing a small initial batch for each book, switching to exclusively POD once the run has depleted.

Source: I also use Lightning Source for my tiny publishing operation. Yes, the quality is not the same as the traditionally printed books, although personally I don't think they're that bad (those I've seen, anyway). In my case, as a small publisher, I would never be able to afford to operate warehouses profitably, because we only have a couple of books. We actually tried, but it was too expensive and time consuming at low volumes. We also stopped selling paperbacks, because it's very difficult to complete on the shipping costs with the likes of Amazon.

<comment><USER24> My "JavaScript Definitive Guide" ordered from Amazon.de (and printed by Lightning Source UK, if I recall correctly) was of shocking quality too. I returned it and got a more expensive copy from my local bookstore, printed by Lightning Source International. Very sharp type.

<comment><USER23> That's generally a big problem with print-on-demand: they literally print one copy at a time, so you have to rely on the printer to do quality control well. Even if you're checking regularly (as we did in the early days), you can never know if the next copy they print will be bad in some way. Not to mention that they also have multiple facilities, so you'd have to place orders all over the world.

There's also a separate problem of pirated printed books, which are of very poor quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Amazon is a terrible place to buy books. Its difficult to discern which books are encumbered by drm and further even if the publisher provides the book drm free its damn difficult to get at the unencumbered ebook file. I bought such a book and spent an hour of my life and talked to 3 separate employees and the best I could do was a refund after talking to 3 apathetic employees.

As far as I'm concerned there is not one thing good about the entire platform. I hate the reader, I hate their tablets, I hate their ebook store, I hate their reader app.

They don't provide a damn thing that isn't inferior to other options and have no particular benefit to helping you use their wares in an open fashion. They are only interested in options which lock you to their platform.

Its as if walmart was only interested in selling you dvds that work only in terrible walmart branded dvd players that require you to use walmarts subscription service instead of netflix.

<comment><USER4> I don't mind buying pure-text books from Amazon. That basically means novels. I don't even mind the DRM so much, as I read the book once and then don't really care, and because I have almost never had problems with the fact that I have literally over a dozen Kindle devices and Kindle-app running devices.

However, technical, computer, electronics, physics and math books are almost all uniformly terrible from Amazon (or even epub). These are long-term references that need a proper print layout option (PDF) and be unencumbered by DRM. A 2002 edition of Mastering Regular Expressions is virtually totally applicable today, 15 years later - but imagine if I had bought this in a DRM'd Sony version, or a Palm .prc (now part of Amazon)? I'd be SOL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm a Safari online subscriber myself, but I think this decision is a huge mistake. I also own books that I purchased from O'Reilly and I still use those books. Just because I don't continue to re-purchase them doesn't mean I don't use them or will never purchase another. I use them on a daily basis. I also use Safari on a daily basis. Why can't they see that there is a need for both models?

I rent things, _and_ I own things. Just because I rent some things doesn't mean I want to rent _everything_. By the same token, just because I buy things every day doesn't mean I never want to rent anything.

We are truly living in the Idiocracy.

<comment><USER27> Online reading enables tracking, the data has value.

<comment><USER9> Data has value, but not as much value as repeat customer loyalty.

<comment><USER27> Yes, the comments in this thread provide valuable data, if the O'Reilly marketing department has the appropriate parser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm terribly disappointed, and that's putting it mildly. I have bought many eBooks from O'Reilly and have also provided feedback repeatedly that the main reasons I buy from O'Reilly are DRM free books in different formats (especially PDF and ePub, which I use).

It's the same set of reasons I buy books from Apress, Pragprog, NoStarch, Packtpub and Manning (to name a few others).

I have tried Safari Online through an employer subscription, but I just cannot get used to reading long books on a browser and hence don't use it (don't even talk about apps on other platforms). I need my books in specific formats that I can use in book reading apps across different platforms. I don't like being connected all the time just to read a book. For me reading books is mostly an offline-like activity (except if I have to search about something online).

Books are also very different from other kinds of media that are more of an ephemeral nature, like music, movies, TV shows, etc. Though many technical books might become outdated quickly, there are many books that do contain almost timeless pieces of information and wisdom. _I don 't buy books on Amazon. I don't buy books in Apple's iBooks store. There is no way to know upfront if something has DRM or not. I don't like supporting DRMd content for books._

O'Reilly, if you're reading this, your decision to stop selling eBooks like you used to is a very poor one for your readers. You may end up making more money from unused Safari subscriptions, but you won't have the fan following you had before.

As for comparisons with Pluralsight, I despise such models that are filled with DRM and restrictions.

To Apress, Pragprog, NoStarch, Packtpub, Manning and others - please do not change your models and remove DRM free eBooks in multiple formats from your stores. I, for one, will stop buying whenever something like that happens. Subscription models are very poor in user experience and don't provide adequate freedom to read whenever/wherever.

<comment><USER9> We (Manning) have no intention of ceasing DRM free book distribution. If anything, we're in the process of diversifying ways you can consume our content :)

<comment><USER29> An idea by the way: i would love to see more conceptual books at Manning. This is great to have content on a specific tool or library. It would be so great to also have more classic teaching books :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> O'Reilly author here. This is the email we got today. Sounds like they also plan to offer courses through Safari as well.

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

I'm writing to let you know about some changes—including new opportunities for you—at O'Reilly.

First, as of today, we are discontinuing fulfillment of individual book and video purchases on shop.oreilly.com. Books (both ebook and print) will still be available for sale via other digital and bricks-and-mortar retail channels. Plus, every book and video will still have a product page on oreilly.com, offering customers two options for getting the content they want: Safari membership (starting with a free 10-day trial) and, for books, a "buy from Amazon" button.

Why the change? It's clear that we're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use content. Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We've already seen this in our own business—the growth of subscribers on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That's the reason for the change.

And with Safari, O'Reilly is uniquely positioned to give our customers the choice and convenience they expect. When we launched Safari back in 2001, we knew we were investing in the future of publishing, and today, that future is here. Since 2014, when O'Reilly became sole owner of Safari, we have refocused our business around its potential as a membership platform. It's working—just this week, Outsell Insights published a report on Safari that gave us a "Strongly Positive" rating and noted that, "Safari shows that continuous reinvention through the addition of new tools onto a solid content base provides an extremely strong foundation on which to build a business. As an example, it also shows the kind of timescales necessary to build a strong reputation for quality content, one on which a more tools-focused solution is possible."

That's where "new opportunities for you" come in. We've developed successful new products like Live Online Training and video Learning Paths, available exclusively on Safari, and we have more in the works. We'll be in touch soon with more information about these new ways we can work together on Safari. And of course, we will continue to publish books and videos that are available both as stand-alone products and on Safari.

<comment><USER31> Netflix and Spotify operate completely different business models, and their customer base has completely different needs and requirements.

They're also much cheaper.

Safari has always been an also-ran side platform. The "growth of subscribers" on Safari may exceed direct sales, but what's driving that growth? Is it really because Safari is Just That Awesome? Does the management team have any idea?

This is a classic example of a business with a reputation for treating its customers with respect deciding to trash that reputation by treating its customers and content developers as livestock that can be farmed and sweated.

<comment><USER32> I mean, "much cheaper" doesn't mean much. I pay $199/year for Safari. It's more expensive than Netflix or Spotify, sure, but still only $17/month.

And regarding Safari being an "also-ran side platform", I'm wondering if maybe you were thinking of the old SafariBooksOnline platform. They switched to Safari a couple of years ago which is definitely more modern and cheaper, although it does do away with the tokens you would get every month to download whole books or chapters.

For me, this doesn't trash their reputation or otherwise make me think less of them. They've obviously decided that direct fulfillment was too much of a hassle and that other retailers could do a more efficient job. I guess I might feel different if I bought a lot of books from them, but having used their subscription service for around 8 years now, I just don't need to buy tech books anymore.

<comment><USER33> The current price is $400 per year not $199, if you get a discount or have a grandfathered rate that should not be used as a talking point to defend their pricing as a person signing up today will not get that rate. So you have to base the argument on today's prices...

<comment><USER34> You'd think they'd use this opportunity to run a sale for Safari to ease the transition for people who aren't yet on the platform. Maybe they didn't expect this to cause any problems?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Giving the authors zero prior notice - that's rude!

As a long-term buyer of lots of O'Reilly ebooks - it's disappointing, but it's their prerogative if they want to exit the market. It's not like we entered into some lifetime contract where they agreed to sell me ebooks forever.

From O'Reilly 's point of view, this looks rational though.

Joel Spolsky [1] and Jeff Attwood [2] called it in 2008:

>What is stackoverflow.com?

>Nothing, yet.

>But here's the concept:

>Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers.

Then they made doubly sure by making SO a huge success!

In music publishing, most of the money in the mainstream has moved from music sales to live performances, with streaming subscriptions bring up the rear.

Isn't the same thing likely happening here with O'Reilly's conference business probably dwarfing everything else?

[1] [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/04/16/stackoverflowcom/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/04/16/stackoverflowcom/)

[2] [https://blog.codinghorror.com/programmers-dont-read-books- bu...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/programmers-dont-read-books-but-you- should/)

<comment><USER36> frankly I've found the utility of my oreilly membership has definitely increased over the last few years as the utility of Stackoverflow and Google searching on an issue has declined. However it's true that I don't buy physical books very much anymore, and definitely not physical technical books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Deeply disappointing. O'Reilly had some really good things going for it, and it just decided to flush it down the drain.

This is on par with Apple moving to butterfly switch keyboards across its entire laptop line, or Netscape deciding to ditch its browser and rewrite it from scratch. Tragic, user-hostile blunders. And it wouldn't completely surprise me if this marked the beginning of the end for O'Reilly.

<comment><USER38> You remember a different Netscape than I do. Netscape was the kind of browser you hated to recommend to a loved one. The experience was truly subpar. When Firebird was announced, the user experience improved significantly over what Netscape could have ever hoped to attain, though it still took some time before recommending it to a loved one would turn out not to be a mistake.

<comment><USER37> You're talking about the change from Netscape Communicator 6+ to Firebird and eventually Firefox in ~2003. That was a positive change.

I'm talking about the the change from Navigator 4.x to the MAS-based buggy crashy slow XUL monstrosity in 1998-2000. That was a terrible change, it killed Netscape as a company, almost gave Microsoft complete control over the future of the Web, and ended up necessitating Firebird/Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've bought well over a hundred O'Reilly books over the years, and after 2002 or so, I bought almost all of them as DRM-free PDFs. But in recent years, I've only averaged an O'Reilly book or two per year, because they've been slow to publish books on new technologies I cared about.

I find that, with few exceptions, Kindle programming ebooks are annoying and unpleasant. Some of the "textbook"-mode ones (where you can highlight diagrams and not just text) are tolerable on a Chromebook in tablet mode, but just barely.

And there's no way I'm going to pay $399/year for Safari, not when I'm currently spending $0-50/year, and certainly not for the privilege of using what people tell me is a mediocre mobile app. So going forward, this means that I'll buy maybe one O'Reilly book every other year through Amazon.

Does this also mean that O'Reilly is no longer going to be offering "early release" books for people who don't buy Safari? I think that something like 90% of my technical book purchases in the last 10 years were early release.

</comment><comment><USER40> The $399/yr doesn't make sense for a lot of people. It definitely is too high a price point for me as I only read 1 or 2 O'Reilly books a year at most. It's nice to have a copy lying around for reference years later.

On the flip side, I totally understand them going DRM-only for digital publishers. O'Reilly PDFs are way too easy to find for free with minimal Google-fu.

<comment><USER41> Only thing that will change with DRM is less Google-fu and more Pirate-fu which people with good google-fu also have in abundance.

<comment><USER42> Yeah there's absolutely no way I would ever pay for something with DRM.

This will end up going the way the textbooks went.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I just posted this on another thread:

I just got this via email and I'm very disappointed too. DRM issues aside, Kindle is still terrible for tech books. Code samples, data tables, etc. They all look crummy. The pdf ebooks from the Oreilly store had far superior formatting.

<comment><USER40> Google Play store offers O'Reilly books DRM free in both PDF and ePub format.

<comment><USER25> Its amazing that a company whose main product is search has such a worthless search for their store. Its absolutely worthless unless you already know exactly what you want.

You have to use their general search product to find enough info to bring up the exact title you want to buy.

For example you can't on the play store find all the oreilly books that aren't drm encumbered or find all the books on a certain topic in a certain range of years directly via its interface.

<comment><USER44> Not only the store, Youtube and Scholar do not provide a good search experience either.

I wonder why.

In fact I remember that when Youtube got adquired by Google search got worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I am a Safari subscriber, however I use it only for quick reference or for watching videos.

I've never read a whole book on Safari only for one reason: the HTML formatting in the browser (as well as in the Queue app) is terrible. It still amazes me, how a publisher such as O'Reilly, who by definition should be aware of importance of such things as typography, almost entirely neglected this in Safari. Books in Safari are just stream of text, without a proper layout. I truly wonder, if Safari employees have read a whole book on their platform themselves.

If I needed to read a whole book — I would still buy the paper version directly from the publisher or Amazon.

The news, that O'Reilly is gradually switching towards a subscription-only model in the future, are very disturbing for me.

<comment><USER46> I'm puzzled by this. I'm reading /Introducing Elixir, 2nd Edition/ online right now in Firefox on a Mac, and it looks fantastic. Beautifully formatted.

<comment><USER45> I've just checked this book on Safari — it seems it indeed doesn't have the issues I've experienced while reading on Safari, like spacing between the letters in a word, tons of whitespace in weird places and poor image quality.

That means that overall quality of books ranges on the platform.

May I ask you, would you still prefer a Safari version of this book over, say, a PDF?

<comment><USER46> Tough call. I'm not at all unsympathetic to the variety of very good reasons why someone would prefer a pile of DRM-free files they own and can do with what they please. In this case, for me, it doesn't matter much; I have a Kindle on which I'd never try to read a technical book, so whether I read a pdf in Preview or a website in Firefox I'm kind of indifferent to. All else being equal, it seems to me that the web offers much more flexibility in design than a pdf, which must, at the end of the day, have standardized "pages," that don't necessarily correspond well semantically to the content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So, no more DRM free ebooks, no more multiple format ebooks and Safari subscription cannot be used offline and cannot be used out of their apps.

349 euro is a very steep price

Difficult to buy more O'Reilly books

From the blog post:

> That's clear even among the largest, most stable corporations: a few years > ago, a study predicted that 40% of today's Fortune 500 companies won't exist > in a decade.

Perhaps this move is the first step to be one of the 50% disappearing

</comment><comment><USER48> One of the things I'll miss is the "upgrade a registered O'Reilly print book to an ebook for $4.99" option. Always nice to have both the print and [affordable] ebook versions. Bummer.

<comment><USER49> Manning gives that you for free

<comment><USER50> That and their daily half-off sales have resulted in me spending far too much money on their books... At least they generally have good editing and a pretty high quality bar, better than I've seen with Packt or Apress.

<comment><USER9> Glad to hear you've enjoyed our stuff. We really do try to do a good job with it! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm sure I'm not their biggest customer, but I have bought in the hundreds of dollars worth of books each year from O'Reilly for the last few, consumed as DRM free PDFs. Definitely going to re-evaluate that. When I want to buy a book on a topic I used to Google "O'Reilly <insert topic here>" as my first port of call. That just ended. I'll look to other publishers first instead, and cease recommending O'Reilly.

<comment><USER52> Why would their Safari service not be suitable for you if you prefer to consume their content as PDFs anyway?

<comment><USER52> Oh, looking at their site, I now see that it's a substantially different cost and set of constraints than those that applied when I allowed my subscription to lapse. Disregard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Folks, www.eBooks.com is still selling O'Reilly titles without DRM. Prices might be less competitive than Amazon, but we're not Amazon. [http://www.ebooks.com/subjects/computers/](http://www.ebooks.com/subjects/computers/)

<comment><USER54> I just looked up my own O'Reilly book on ebooks.com. [http://www.ebooks.com/95729334/designing-data-intensive- appl...](http://www.ebooks.com/95729334/designing-data-intensive- applications/kleppmann-martin/) I can't see anything about DRM on the page, but under "supported devices" it says "e-readers with Adobe Digital Editions installed". Isn't that DRM enforcement software? Could you clarify please?

Edit: this page explicitly says that readers need to be compatible with Adobe DRM [https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en- gb/articles/214119286-Guide...](https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en- gb/articles/214119286-Guide-to-ebook-reader-devices)

<comment><USER55> I am not sure if your book is DRM protected – if you browse the books at ebooks.com, you will see that ebooks.com is selling books in "EPUB/PDF format" and "secure EPUB/secure PDF format". Furthermore please take a look at [https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en- gb/articles/205639205-Insta...](https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en- gb/articles/205639205-Installing-Adobe-Digital-Editions-ADE-on-your-computer): Most of the ebooks available to download from eBooks.com (but not all) are protected by Adobe DRM…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> This sucks. I've been a subscriber to Safari Books Online for a couple of years. Whilst I like being able to reflow text, and in general the reading experience is good, some books just looked screwed up when reading them in the Queue app or the Safari web site.

For example, some of the equations in 'Hands-on Machine Learning with Tensorflow' aren't rendered to images properly. They probably look fine in the print and PDF versions of the book, but I don't get those as a Safari subscriber. I get an HTML version with equations rendered to images, without anyone checking the quality.

Amazon does sell 'print replica' editions of some books, which are as good as PDFs if you are OK reading within the Kindle app, but IIRC that's not the case for O'Reilly books, which are only available as HTML-ish versions.

</comment><comment><USER57> That sucks. Especially when "Amazon or your favorite retailer" is not even available where you live.

How many technical book does one read in a year anyway? The $399/year subscription model doesn't make sense unless your employer is paying for it.

<comment><USER58> Even with subscription, you can't read these books on Kindle if you want. I bought a lot of books from them, that I often load to old kindle to read during vacation, without having access to internet, or other distractions

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> "Seeing as 40% of our customers buy pink things, we are reducing costs by selling only pink things."

The whole point if going to O'Reilly was DRM free books that I can use on my various devices (iPad, Sony Reader).

Guess it's off to Apress in the future. Can't load Kindle or Kobo books into the Sony.

<comment><USER60> FWIW informit.com has the same model. We have regular holiday sales, update our eBooks, and offer the different DRM-Free formats including PDFs.

Informit.com is a Pearson owned site and sells the following tech imprints: Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, Pearston IT Certification, Big Nerd Ranch, Peachpit, Adobe Press, and New Riders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> O'Reilly, your SafariBooksOnline pricing for folks outside the US is insane. Great content, but the pricing is too much for someone who isn't earning US dollars. Well, I guess it's just a matter of time someone came up with something more democratized, and cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER62> I watched premier computer bookshops die -- SoftPro's disappearance in the south Denver area was so sad for me. This was a somewhat long process; there was a period where we were wringing our hands about the physical computer book stores disappearing.

But there was O'Reilly, other smaller but equally good online vendors, and also rans.

I think now we're seeing the start of the same decline and disappearance of online outlets.

That smile on Amazon boxes is starting to look like a smirk.

</comment><comment><USER63> It's clear O'Reilly is struggling. I personally know some authors, and they have made some great books, but I've not bought much from them for around 10 years. They seem to have dropped from my radar. I no longer hear from my friends that they are publishing their books with O'Reilly.

Also, O'Reilly produced and ran a number of excellent quality conferences (ETech anyone?) These disappeared a long time ago. I also remember them sponsoring a whole range of meetups and smaller conferences with books given out for free being quite common. O'Reilly has changed, and they need to change too.

Perhaps the internet and search engines have overtaken technical books in general? Perhaps in seeing their market share decrease over the years they need to make drastic changes to adapt?

</comment><comment><USER64> I've cancelled my Safari subscription and moving everything over to Apress. This is definitely a very sad day. I own every O'Reilly book ever published DRM Free and still had Safari, but never again.

Apress, Informit, and Packtpub you are now #1, BE #1, stay customer first.

</comment><comment><USER6> I used to buy a lot of O'Reilly ebooks, always DRM-free directly from them. I thought they had a great business model and they published quite a few excellent books. They've slowly lost me as a customer over the past few years as those two characteristics have disappeared. Other publishers have more consistent quality, better coverage of new tech and better pricing. This just adds "access to DRM-free downloadable files" to the list of things that other publishers do better.

It'll be interesting to see how having all of their digital content locked behind Safari will affect their ability to attract authors. Maybe it'll work out well for them overall, who knows.

</comment><comment><USER65> Tim O'Reilly mentioned on twitter that he's not opposed to selling PDF's via a third party bookstore.

[https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/880472045137670144](https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/880472045137670144)

I can only hope that a statement like this isn't used to pacify the masses until this issue is relegated to obscurity. In the mean time, I'm looking at other publishers (thank GOD that many of them I heaven't heard of are discussed here) for content and refuse to pay for a $400/yr safari subscription while NEVER REALLY OWNING ANYTHING.

</comment><comment><USER25> In case it might help anyone many libraries pay for a subscription to safari books. For example the Seattle library system provides free access to safari books to all card holders.

Seattle library cards are available not only to anyone in who works, lives or owns property in seattle/king county but also those who have a card in one of several surrounding county library systems. Further non-resident cards may be had for $85 a year.

Unlike having a personal account you cannot download items for offline viewing, can't access video training, and can't access books in progress.

Still this provides access to the bulk of the material you may want to read.

<comment><USER66> Can you essentially only read the books from the library website?

<comment><USER25> Years ago I wrote up a quick script using imacros and calibre to create epubs based on the documents available from safari.

I would consider this fair use format shifting. Legal opinions probably vary but this was essentially indistinguishable from just reading the book so long as the script didn't grab a page per second and pretty easy to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Music and film (a.k.a. Spotify & Netflix) are entertainment means. Books are not - especially the technical ones. You can buy a Netflix and Spotify subscription and stream them 24/7 without the need for paying attention. How could they expect people to buy a subscription for $399 and be happy/ok/cool about it? You cannot "stream" books. I'd feel I have done a dead investment. I doubt it will be a successful strategy even for half of the current subscription cost.

</comment><comment><USER68> I contacted customer support and they had this to say:

> We currently have the Kindle versions of our title available on Amazon.com > and the ePub version at Google Play or IBooks for your mobile devices. We do > not currently have the DRM free PDF versions available from any online re- > sellers.

</comment><comment><USER69> Horrible news. In my experience tech books tend to be horribly formatted in ePUB and MOBI format. They don't have to be, but they usually are.

When I have bought from O'Reilly in the past, I have always defaulted to PDF.

Now, not only does that option go away, everything will be DRM going forward.

</comment><comment><USER70> I don't know how the math works, but ACM members currently get free access to Safari. You can sign up for ACM for $99 a year.

<comment><USER71> Isn't this a subset of the full safari library?

<comment><USER70> It used to be, but currently it seems to be the complete catalog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I can understand their decision to stop selling print books, however, since they are still selling safari, why not continue to sell individual ebooks? Is the infrastructure and maintenance that much different?

<comment><USER73> This is surely the unspoken element of O'Reilly's change here, piracy of technical PDFs is rampant.

<comment><USER74> The thing is, by making pdfs harder to get through legit channels they are going to increase traffic through illegitimate channels. It's not about how many files are available, it's about how many people are looking for them.

<comment><USER75> Not if they stop making PDFs full stop

<comment><USER41> Yeah stop book photocopying by not publishing books is the best way to do it. Then they are no longer book publishers just another website with a premium subscription.

<comment><USER76> People like me will just publish directly to gitbook

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Does anyone know why they're killing PDF? Seems insanity to me, it's the only digital format I find suitable for consuming technical books.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are O'Reilly PDFs available through retailers? Through Safari?

<comment><USER78> I can't tell for sure but it seems to be on the bandwagon of; pay for what you don't use and what you pay for you don't actually own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> A few weeks ago O'Reilly sold its interest in the Pubfactory platform and the developers who work on it to Sheridan, a printing services company (presumably Sheridan wants to beef up its own digital portfolio). Whether this is cause or effect here, I couldn't say, but it would seem to be related.

One makes a guess that as digital delivery becomes a bigger part of the pie for them, the cost of managing physical inventory becomes more burdensome to them. So they said, screw it, we'll join the Borg and be assimilated.

(Personally, I get access to the Safari online service through the library at work, so I don't have to worry about it too much).

<comment><USER47> > One makes a guess that as digital delivery becomes a bigger part of the pie > for them, the cost of managing physical inventory becomes more burdensome to > them

But they also are ditching selling ebooks

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Completely threw me off when I got the email. Safari Books Online is really expensive, and I dislike seeing private entrepreneurs reinventing public libraries (and even selling it as an innovative concept).

</comment><comment><USER81> Very disappointed by this decision. I have been a customer of OReilly for about 20 years, buying ebooks since 2009. I really liked DRM free nature of their ebooks, so that I could read them on all of my devices.

Maybe decision makes sense from economic perspective. But they really have to consider who their audience is. These are the people who still complain that Google Reader was killed and loss of good will and PR consequences of this decision will come to haunt them for years, regardless of the current financial reality.

</comment><comment><USER72> Does anyone know how this will affect previous ebooks purchased via O'Reilly?

Will you still be able to login and access the digital books or do you need to download all of them before a certain date?

<comment><USER82> They say you will still be able to access stuff you already bought for life. You certainly already can access them as I logged into my account to check.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Sad news. O'Reilly were one of the few publishers that used my preferred model: buy the paper book and add the eBook version for $10 extra or so. Best of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER84> Well, O'Reilly seems to be focusing on the large, corporate market, with a broad array of topics, so from that perspective this move makes perfect sense as a small, simple optimization on their part.

At Pragmatic Bookshelf, however, we focus on the individual, highly skilled developer looking to improve their skills and those of their teams. We don't offer a broad array of tech topics, just the ones _we_ feel are important.

We focus on readers who like to collect and own their books, DRM free in epub, mobi, and PDF formats (you get all three for one price, and can re-download forever, or as long as we're in business ;)

It's a different market, and a different approach.

So don't go hating on O'Reilly for this move—if it doesn't suit you, you're not their market. And that's okay. It's a big world.

/\ndy Publisher, Pragmatic Bookshelf

<comment><USER85> Question: do you consider giving up on the soft-DRM (watermarking of PDFs) too?

Lack of DRM (both soft and hard) was for me the biggest feature when buying from O'Reilly. It's what made it quite unique and why I bought most of my tech-related eBooks there. I had a somewhat unpleasant surprise when I bought books directly from your website and found them to be watermarked. Didn't see that written anywhere on the site before I purchased...

<comment><USER86> The watermarking is the sole reason I don't buy ebooks from PragProg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Have had Safari Books Online for about a year now, got it 50% off last August, love it. There have been several books I started reading in SBO and then ordered physical copies on Amazon. Never even occurred to me to order the books from Safari directly. The books I order are about broad topics and themes (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Enterprise IoT, etc.). Rarely would I order a book about a specific Language or Framework, they have a limited shelf-life, but I'll absolutely reference the online versions to grab the info I need (more valuable format, can have open on monitor, search, etc.). Their process for alerting authors of this change may not have been great, but it seems like a smart business decision (assuming my use case if fairly typical).

</comment><comment><USER88> This is disappointing. Amazon doesn't let you buy pdfs, which I prefer over epubs.

</comment><comment><USER89> well i mostly bought their titles from bookstores in deadtree format so it does not really affect me. as long as they continue to publish good stuff and the bookstores have their books (which has become more of a problem lately) i will probably buy a few once in a while. still this is a most unwelcome deterioration. it just puts them in the category of companies that like to squeeze every dollar out of their users, which is not good because they used to enjoy a very good reputation which justified their high pricetag.

</comment><comment><USER90> Lots of outrage but the important thing here is they'll still be available from other retailers. They're not forcing you to buy a subscription to get the books.

<comment><USER91> The problem is other retailers don't offer the DRM-free ebooks that O'Reilly was. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. all DRM them to heck.

Going forward, the only time I'm gonna be buying O'Reilly ebooks is when they're on Humble Bundle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> This is disappointing, but I guess it the way most companies are going.

Subscriptions are fine, but they quickly add up. I'm in the process of cutting out stuff I don't use. As it's quick to forget you have been paying for service "X" and haven't actually been using it to get your moneys worth. Safari would quickly fall into that category for me.

However there are plenty of online stores which sell DRM free books, so no big deal really.

</comment><comment><USER93> For those of us deeply disappointed at O'reilly discontinuation of PDF ebooks, I've started an "idea" on O'reilly's support website to bring them back:

[http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/bring-back-pdf- ebo...](http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/bring-back-pdf-ebooks)

Hopefully, if it gets enough upvotes, they'll consider it.

</comment><comment><USER60> I am writing from Pearson and have seen a lot of queries about where can folks find DRM-Free PDFs of technical books now. I want to share that informit.com, a Pearson eCommerce site, sells DRM-Free PDFs from our imprints Addison- Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press, New Riders, Que, and Peachpit.

informit.com/store/eBooks

<comment><USER85> Are the PDF eBooks watermarked?

<comment><USER60> Yes they are watermarked for security

<comment><USER86> A digital watermark is automatically inserted customer information into a purchased product to restrict it's usage only to the buyer of that product. To me that's exactly like Digital Rights (Restrictions) Management. Calling something that contains digital watermarks DRM-free is deceptive to the customer. But long story short, if it contains watermarks I don't buy it.

<comment><USER60> The watermarks are discreet w/ no other information than your name. The PDFs require no passwords and can be loaded on up to 6 different devices. We have tried to come up with a solution that provides for the customer, but protects our authors' content as well. But certainly I can understand your point of view.

<comment><USER86> They don't protect anything. Probably 90% of your catalog is out there on the net and findable with a bit of googling. In the end it's just a bad business decision. You scare away potential customers and your stuff gets pirated anyway. You're degrading your own product and artificially creating a situation where the pirated product is actually a better one (one without a watermark) than the one you are legally selling. You've got to realize how insane that is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> I would love a subscription service -- if they offered a books-only option with PDFs at a reasonable price.

I don't need tutorial videos or any of that other crud, I need books.

If I could get all the high quality programming books I want for $15 I wouldn't think twice.

</comment><comment><USER95> This does not come as a surprise. Packt now has Mapt, and subscription based services such as Pluralsight are showing far healthier profit margins than O'Reilly.

This is just their attempt to get in line with what other publishers are offering.

</comment><comment><USER96> Having purchased many books thru O'Reilly, and now using Safari Online - I'm a huge fan of this move. Feels to me like going from iTunes to Spotify, or Netflix DVDs to Streaming.

<comment><USER57> I'm not. I purchased many books from O'Reilly as well, but the number is more like 4-5 books a year. Even with just 4-5 books a year I still usually end up with a book left unread or unfinished every time.

Spotify/Netflix makes perfect sense for a subscription model because of the way we consume musics/videos. The same can't be said for technical books. Not for $399 a year anyway. With that price point, seems like they are hoping to get employers to pay for it.

<comment><USER96> I guess I'm an anomaly in that I read far more books than watching movies, but I agree that most consumers will want a variety of music and shows, unlike books. However, isn't the price point ($35/month), which is 4x more than Spotify, roughly in line with the price for a single book, which is roughly 4x an album.

I guess the main difference is not that the price ratio between subscription and individual items is off, but rather that most consumers don't want 1 book a month. It's a bummer that they don't give people an option, but I'm still a fan of Safari...and I hope this move will mean they drastically improve the Safari app, much like Netflix has doubled down on Streaming now that they don't do DVDs.

<comment><USER57> I read books far more than I do watching movies or tv shows as well, but I don't include technical books in my count. I read general books for entertainment, and maybe learn one or two mundane things that I don't know before. I read maybe 2-3, sometimes 4 books a month for entertainment.

When I read technical books, its going to be because there is a specific thing that I want to learn, and when I'm done with the books, I expect to have a new skill under my belt that I can start polishing. I certainly don't do this at a rate of 1 book a month.

Yeah, the fact the pricing is offered at rate that is way more than most people's (including mine) purchasing habit is a bummer, but the inclusion of DRM meaning that you lose access to your "purchase" once your subscription ends is the deal breaker for me.

The fact there is a lot more content in the Safari offering may look like a good value in the marketing copy, but that just means more noise to filter through for me. I only have limited amount of time to spend on consuming content after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Is there any alternative to Safari Books Online which has both beginner and advanced content, video and books ? (If yes, I want to move away from Safari on grounds of principle)

<comment><USER60> Informit.com is a Pearson owned site and we sell the following tech imprints for all levels: Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, Pearston IT Certification, Que, Big Nerd Ranch, Peachpit, Adobe Press, and New Riders.

We have regular holiday sales (including a 4th of July sale starting tomorrow), update our eBooks, and offer the different DRM-Free formats including PDF, MOBI and EPUB.

<comment><USER53> The same is true of eBooks.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Maybe if we all start sending tweets to @timoreilly he will reconsider this very unfortunate decision...

<comment><USER98> From what I understand he hasn't been making day-to-day decisions for O'reilly for at least 10 years. He's just the owner and figurehead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> This is dreadful and such a disappointment from a company I'd praised to others for their service.

</comment><comment><USER100> I'm reading some comments here that are disappointed, but I'm impressed.

O'Reilly navigated itself through two major contractions in tech book publishing. Practically every other company would have packed it in or found some really horrendous way to screw customers.

The first contraction was the dot.com crash. During the boom, O'Reilly was so flush with cash that they did things like put Larry Wall (creator of Perl) on payroll, just because. And right before the crash they built two new office buildings and a warehouse. So they were screwed when business went away and somehow they wiggled their way out of that.

I joined the company right after the crash and stayed for 2.5 years. Every employee meeting included an update on our negotiations with the banks-- literally the CFO was begging banks to be able to stay in business. She's now CEO of the company.

I get a constant reminder of how lean things were then when I check my 401k account from that time. There was one all hands meeting where O'Reilly announced they were going to match contributions. The execs were so happy--I think they thought it was a signal that the tide had turned after waves of layoffs. (Even though I'm pretty sure the money came from a one-time windfall from being investors in Blogger)

The thing though about that matching contribution is that it wasn't much. It definitely wasn't one to one. I can't remember the exact rules for how much they were going to match. But my current 401k statement breaks out my contributions vs. O'Reilly's. After twelve years of compounding interest, that employer contribution is now worth $128.24. (In other words, things were so bad that they were celebrating contributing about $40 to my retirement).

And then, there was the second contraction. Up until about 2005, every single programmer had a library of O'Reilly books on their desk. That time is gone. I haven't seen a programmer who worked that way at any company recently (I'm sure there are some).

Most companies would have just packed it in. Tim O'Reilly had a good run and cares about other things, like politics. Dale Dougherty could do anything and has by starting Make Magazine and Makerfaire.

But there are hundreds of people at O'Reilly and they kept plugging away and finding ways to be relevant. Those ways just aren't books anymore--at least not like they used to be.

The company found other ways than books to make a difference. The O'Reilly conferences are cutting edge because O'Reilly still picks cutting edge people as conference chairs. And OATV, in venture capital, is another great example, which continues to experiment with things like Indie.vc.

So, to take it full circle. I'm impressed that O'Reilly is still in business at all, and more so that they are relevant at all. And when I look at their print business, I think, well, they're doing the best they can with a format that has declining importance.

I think about the context above when I hear about things like removing some book features or letting print quality slip. Those seem like reasonable adjustments that are much better than the alternatives which I think were probably go out of business or sell to Pearson.

</comment><comment><USER101> Good luck O'Reilly!

</comment><comment><USER102> Here's more about why O'Reilly stopped selling books on the site: [http://oreil.ly/2t9RnXP](http://oreil.ly/2t9RnXP) (disclaimer: I work there!)</comment>


Scapegoat Hunter - Jon Stewart on Gun Control - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-8-2013/scapegoat-hunter---gun-control <comment><USER2> I don't think this is the right forum.</comment>


When Does Mortgage Refinancing Makes Sense – Chase or Bank of America? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What does "Chase or Bank of America" have to do with anything? There are probably _hundreds_ of other options.

So: When does it make sense to refinance? I am not a financial advisor. But I will ask a question: What is your criterion for "worth it"?

Do you care about monthly payments? Total cost? Total inflation-adjusted cost? Length of time to pay it off? For whichever parts matter to you, run the numbers on refinancing vs not refinancing, and decide.

Then, with whom? Some local lender? A big bank? Box? Homie? I have no idea how to answer that question. Look into a couple of lenders from each category, and compare what matters to you.

</comment><comment><USER3> One way to measure would be to test if the net present value of the reduced interest (after taxes) is more than the closing costs. Assuming your closing costs are after tax

<comment><USER2> To answer that question, you're going to have to project how long you're going to continue to own the house...</comment></comment>


A new approach to monetizing social networks. - <AUTHOR> http://www.new.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=21614925101

<comment><AUTHOR> Monetization finally comes to the Facebook application platform with the new Wishlist application. Powered by Amazon's e-Commerce API, it enables users to share their gift desires on Facebook. By leveraging the social aspects of facebook and its increasing popularity as a place to plan events, the application hopes to capture some of the important wedding registry & wish list revenue.</comment>


Cross platform desktop apps in Ruby, HTML and JS - <AUTHOR> http://bowlineapp.com <comment><USER3> I love that the idea of cross-breed HTML/JS/? is coming to the forefront, and this might be a great solution one day. But, right now there are many such projects.

They all fall on a spectrum from super specialized, like this project, and full blown browser. If you found this interesting you should also check out.

<http://fluidapp.com/> <http://fluidium.org/> <http://prism.mozillalabs.com/> <http://www.adobe.com/products/air/> NativeHost described here: [http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/05/13/nativehost-run- your...](http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/05/13/nativehost-run-your- cappuccino-applications-on-the-desktop/)

I really would love to know if there are any other apps like this out their, I am trying to catalog them all. I think containers like these have a big future.

<comment><USER4> Do any of these have anything close to the table Grid support you can get with a .net control. It seems like there isn't a good way to load a ton of data in a table (100 K +) and work with within an app built with HTML and JS yet. Am I wrong? I hope I am ;)

<comment><USER5> Not exactly, but have you seen the Spry stuff? I've used it for (admittedly smaller) datasets and been impressed.

<http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/home.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, I can't get the initial installation to work right, because access is denied to a zip file it tries to download off of AWS (I don't know why it's necessary or denied).

I do think, however, that this is a step in the right direction. In my opinion, GUI apps on Linux are for the most part extremely uninspired, and in spite of popular opinions to the contrary, I still prefer to use a native application in lieu of a web-based one. I think that webkit could be an awesome platform for desktop apps, both in ease of development and quality of finished product.

I don't think that this is quite a big enough step towards that though. For one, it makes the developer write html, css, and javascript. This means that ultimately the applications produced aren't going to really feel native on any platform. Rather, they'll feel like quick web app running in its own window. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it could be better.

In my ideal world, this would be somewhat closer to a traditional widget toolkit, but built on top of webkit. It would still be html and js at its core, but from a developers perspective it would be closer to using something like SproutCore.

As I said though, I can't get it to run properly, so I may be way off base from just looking at the code for the sample applications. I think it may also be possible to get what I'm describing on top of Bowline. There's definitely some potential in this area though, and I'm going to mess with it some more and keep and eye on it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone give any opinions on this vs Appcelerator?

<comment><USER8> Appcelerator Titanium is more of a platform than a framework. I guess it's like comparing CGI.rb to Rails. The other major issue with Ruby support on Titanium is that Ruby 1.9 isn't supported, c exts aren't supported, and Threads aren't supported. In other words the UI locks up whenever you call out to Ruby. Bowline used to sit on top of Titanium, but I made it standalone for those reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice. Wonder what's needed for packaging and distribution. Does the end user have to have Ruby 1.9 installed already?

<comment><USER8> No, the end user doesn't need anything extra installed. Ruby 1.9 (and WebKit if needed) is bundled.

<comment><USER10> How, if at all, are you going to protect the ruby source code?

<comment><USER8> I'e written something called rbyte which byte compiles Ruby 1.9.2 code: <http://github.com/maccman/rbyte>

Eventually I'll integrate it into Bowline so your source code will get compiled automatically.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for your answer. I'm very excited about the project, esp. with a future server sync api (as mentioned in the roadmap). Perhaps I then could finally write a decent evernote client for linux. :)

<comment><USER8> The sync API has already been released: <http://github.com/maccman/syncro> \- I'm also just about to release the JavaScript version of the client (so you can have realtime sync between web and desktop apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If it doesn't support Windows then it shouldn't be called "Cross Platform", no?

<comment><USER12> No, the definition of "cross-platform" is not "supports Windows." It works on two different platforms, so it's cross-platform. Much like how Photoshop is a cross-platform application even though it doesn't support Linux.

<comment><USER13> But given that Windows is still the dominant platform in the desktop space it would be disingenuous to claim this it's "cross-platform" if it's not coming to Windows soon.

<comment><USER12> It isn't disingenuous for them to use a word exactly as it is defined. If this were a framework that allowed normal Linux apps to run natively (i.e. not in X11) under OS X and they said it allowed "cross-platform compatibility between Linux and OS X," would you say that's disingenuous too? Calling it disingenuous seems disingenuous to me — just because it would be nice if it did Windows doesn't mean Windows support is a requirement to be cross- platform.

At any rate, the Bowline site says Windows support is coming soon, so I don't see the problem at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No offense, but web tech on the desktop has been tried before (a la Java) and the user experience sucked everywhere. I'm not convinced this will be any different from the user's perspective.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm wondering if I can use HAML with this. If Windows support really comes, it would be very handy as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> I got really excited until I saw that it didn't support Windows yet and required Ruby 1.9. Nice looking setup at least though.

Anyone know how soon Windows support is expected to arrive?

<comment><USER17> Good luck having that one perform. Ruby on Windows is slower than the dog-dust in my mother's urn above the fireplace.

Tongue in cheek aside - this would be really cool if it actually ran in a browser. Linking to external content, having resource based URLs, etc - <USER2> the good things about web development - are taken away once you leave the browser.

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't expect performance to be a problem. For computational tasks, Ruby works just as fine on Windows as on a UNIX platform.

Windows perf suffers because (1) in some rare cases, the needed primitives aren't provided by the kernel, and (2) Windows does some things differently, and Ruby library authors don't have the incentives to design and maintain a separate codepath for Windows.

The issues above don't usually arise in desktop applications. They're seen most often in server code -- fork is missing and that sucks, asynchronous I/O works differently, file monitoring and pipes also work differently, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do while compiling? - <AUTHOR> I tend to get distracted and check hn, reddit when compiling. This disrupts my thought line & I sometimes stay on these sites after the compiling is over.<p>What can I do to stay focused when compiling? What do you do to solve this problem? <comment><USER2> Figure out why compilation takes so long and if there's any way to improve it.

Get compile times down to more reasonable levels. Use the shorter breaks for checking on things in your issue tracker to start on whatever is next in your queue.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can use [https://freedom.to/](https://freedom.to/), [https://selfcontrolapp.com/](https://selfcontrolapp.com/), or /etc/hosts to block reddit when you want to work.

You can also listen to Lord of the Rings on audiobook[1] to occupy your mind while you wait. You're probably familiar with the storyline, so you don't have to worry about missing something important when you aren't paying attention to it. Trying to make that time productive is going to lead you to feel frazzled as you keep context-switching.

[1] [http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Classics/The-Fellowship-of- the-R...](http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Classics/The-Fellowship-of-the-Ring- Audiobook/B004FTVZFG)

</comment><comment><USER4> Technically I spend time waiting for tests to run rather than for compilation, but same problem.

It's a good time for a trip to the restroom or to refresh your beverage, but you can't do that every 5 min.

I'll often deal with email (our issue tracker sends email for comments, so there's usually something to deal with there) or catch up on slack.

There's always something that needs code review.

I'll check some monitoring dashboards for servers I'm responsible for.

And I have project management responsibilities along with the code-related ones, so I can take care of some of that.

Of course, all of those other than the first require significant context switching, but so does reading HN.

</comment><comment><USER5> As we all know, office chair sword fighting. [https://xkcd.com/303/](https://xkcd.com/303/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Make a coffee for yourself. This allows you to get out of your desk and moving and has the added benefit of keeping you away from your computer.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com](http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com)

</comment><comment><USER8> I switched to go, which has blazing fast compile times and increased my productivity at least 10-fold. YMMV

</comment><comment><USER9> I generally try to write comments and documentation while code compiles.

</comment><comment><USER10> Walk around. Go outside. Enjoy life.

</comment><comment><USER11> This.

</comment><comment><USER12> IRC (not focused).</comment>