christianpbrink

We haven't explored the Kindle Singles world as much as we'd like. How does a person hear about a Single? How does one of them catch fire and become a big seller? Is it up to the author to promote them, or are there websites/periodicals/Twitter feeds/whatever that have a lot of influence on sales?

The Power Broker, am I right?

You, sir, are my people.

Pretty sweet concept! We have ideas for a lot of stuff like this, but it might be a ways down the road.

Thanks for making the case for this. We don't disagree.

Thanks for this feedback and encouragement! We'd love if you would give us a try and then share any additional thoughts you may have about the difference between our narrators and VoiceDream.

A few partnerships like you describe are in the works. Stay tuned.

Great feedback. Would you email us at support@audm.com with 'HN' in the subject? We'd love to give you a longer free trial!

Thanks! We do partner actively with each publication, and we encourage them to use the audio versions we produce on their own websites and other platforms. That's where The Atlantic's audio comes from ;)

We're glad you tried the app and hope you will try it again -- our whole focus recently has been on signing additional content partners, so that there's even more overlap between what you want to read and what we let you listen to.

Are there any particular publications we could add that might make the subscription price worth it for you?

Awesome :D

Great question about voice. Yes, we do have plans for Alexa etc. We're really excited about that.

Great observation about how to narrate code snippets. None of our narrators are technical (as far as we know!), but part of our job is to provide a narrator with a script describing the way they should narrate any text (or non-text figure) whose spoken equivalent isn't obvious. One recent example of this, a little different from the code example, involved 64-character hashes. You want to convey the palpable sense of randomness that one experiences looking at a hash string, but you also can't force your audience to listen as all 64 characters are read aloud.

Of course, even if we provide the best narration imaginable, it's not obvious that many articles about code would be valuable in audio form. Some things you just need to stare at for a while.

All this said, we're definitely into doing more tech content. It just has to be very well-written. Unfortunately, just as in any other content vertical, most tech content just... isn't.

Other apps' read-aloud features make good temporary solutions, but sophisticated content really needs to be handled by the best narrators.

Our current core roster includes a dozen narrators.

Definitely -- both are in the works. We think the car's an awesome place to listen.

Can you say more about using your PG Commander license? I have one too but don't understand the connection with Postico.

edit: I figured it out. Sorry for the noise.

This headline should mention one of the study's central conclusions: a great way to maximize these 'ingredients' is to include more women in the team.

Hey whoever's building this -- please give me a shout. christianpbrink at gmail. If you haven't built it yet, maybe you don't need to, as I already have and may be interested in a partnership.

Are you guys using LevelDB off the shelf or have you forked it?

I agree that that's his point. I just wanted to put in a plug for Haskell being appropriate for many, many application development use cases, because there's a misconception that it's only useful in mathy or academic scenarios.

Again, this guy didn't argue as much; he basically just said it's reasonable for someone developing systems code, code with I/O on every line or something, to conclude she isn't going to be able to reap the benefits of writing pure code in Haskell.

But I think a lot of folks read anything of the form "Haskell isn't appropriate for use case X" as "Haskell's generally impractical". So I wanted to share a different perspective.

I think catnaroek has this right.

Neither that nor my original comment is meant to suggest that it would be straightforward for Rust to borrow from Haskell. Just that the post's comments on Haskell seemed to reflect misconceptions.

Since this author is reasoning through proposed purity in Rust by comparing it with purity in Haskell...

- I personally have never felt constrained by Haskell's purity. During development I use `Debug.Trace` to do any debug printing I need to do in pure functions, and I design a program so that in production code I can do appropriate logging before and/or after any calls to pure functions.

- Managing monad stacks in Haskell isn't that tricky. This is the kind of thing that people get scared away from not because they actually tried to learn it and couldn't, but because people make it out to be so hard.

- The Haskell STM example the author links to is actually really simple, especially in terms of monad stacks. It seems dense at first glance only because of the `forkIO`, `timesDo`, and `milliSleep` calls, but you would need these functions' logical equivalents no matter what language you wanted to implement this example in.

Now the analogy is complete.

"If Chomsky had focused on the other side, interpretation, as Claude Shannon did, he may have changed his tune. In interpretation (such as speech recognition) the listener receives a noisy, ambiguous signal and needs to decide which of many possible intended messages is most likely. Thus, it is obvious that this is inherently a probabilistic problem, as was recognized early on by all researchers in speech recognition..."

This is the money shot especially since speakers are aware of the interpretive activity of listeners, and effective speakers play constantly on the ambiguities in their statements - structural (i.e. grammatical) ambiguities as well as semantic ambiguities. Listeners in turn are aware of speakers' awareness of this.. There is, effectively, an infinity of mutual awarenesses of structural ambiguities. In any instance of communication.

I think most technologists and (especially) businesspeople see this intuitively. I think many academics do not. Not sure how to articulate what I mean but I think I am saying something non-trivial about academics and their perspective on language.