Hacker News Reader

joanofarfon Mural Raises $23M to Reimagine Visual Collaboration

I used Miro for years and loved it. Now my company has Mural, which is better for creating presentations, but not as good as Miro at being an actual collaborative space.

joanofarfon The history of humans trying to reduce one another to a personality profile

I recently had to ask 5-8 colleagues to fill out a TRACOM "Social Styles Assessment" for an upcoming training program at work, so this is something I've been curious about as well. It appears that TRACOM's Social Style Model is more "effective" than the leading Meyers-Briggs program [0], but I'm not clear on how that compares to people who do not participate in any training/assessment at all.

edit: from the linked journal article:

> In addition, 73% of these professionals believe that interpersonal skills training is eﬀective despite the lack of empirical evidence for such a claim.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227809050_An_empiri...

joanofarfon Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

I've been using Workflowy for several years and recommend it very highly.

The ability to expand/collapse, zoom in/out, and do everything via keyboard shortcuts makes it very pleasant to work with.

joanofarfon Is Pop Music Evolving, or Is It Just Getting Louder? (2012)

True. I wonder if now, six years later, more older music, not just the biggest hits, has been digitized as well, so that the sample does not skew so heavily.

joanofarfon Is Pop Music Evolving, or Is It Just Getting Louder? (2012)

I do think pitch content is a useful metric. A lot of popular songs reuse a handful of common chord progressions. While the key and timbre may change from song to song, the tension and resolution of the chord changes, which can often be heard to have a certain feeling or emotional content in Western music, remains the same.

joanofarfon Is Pop Music Evolving, or Is It Just Getting Louder? (2012)

Further down in the Scientific American piece, one of the researchers does respond to this:

>Serrà acknowledged in an email that a bias due to the “test of time” effect is possible but argued that its influence should be small. For instance, he noted, the long-term patterns and trends that he and his colleagues identified also hold over relatively short—and relatively recent—time periods (say, 1997 to 2007), where the “test of time” effect should be minimal. “The same happens with close and not-so-recent time periods (e.g., 1960 and 1968), where both years could partly incorporate such an effect,” he wrote. “Since the trend is consistent in short time spans where you assume the ‘test of time’ bias is minimal and, furthermore, the trend is also consistent for longer time spans, we can assume it is a general trend and, thus, that the ‘test of time’ effect is really small.”

joanofarfon New data on college majors confirms old trend: technocracy is crushing humanism

>I think schools need to do a better job requiring humanities majors to take STEM classes in the same way I was required to take humanities.

This. And incorporating more technology/computing into the humanities themselves.

joanofarfon Ask HN: Do you cover the camera/mic on your computer/phone?

I block the camera on my work machine, so that if I accidentally have video turned on when joining a meeting I don't embarrass myself.

joanofarfon How Musicians Make Money, Or Don’t, In 2018

> While there is still innovation, there aren't dramatic changes happening as often in the past two decades. There are many popular songs today that could have been popular in 00's and vice versa.

> Some rap seems to still be innovating, but rock, pop, and a lot of electronic music seems to be stuck in a rut.

Now that everything is available on-demand via streaming services, new music is competing not just with a glut of contemporary works, but with the ever-increasing body of prior works.

Why try something new when you can listen to your old favorites at any time? Unless the new thing sounds a lot like the thing you already really like.

joanofarfon How Musicians Make Money, Or Don’t, In 2018

>I don't think that virality being required is a problem

Look what that has done to "Online Content-with-a-capital-C" at large.

If you launched an ad-supported website today and wanted to make any real kind of money from it, how many page views would you need? And how would that number impact the type of content you created for that site?

joanofarfon Show HN: Pay-for-results publicity marketplace for startups

A couple of questions:

Do the freelance publicists go through any kind of screening process before they can get on the site?

How does a business user's wish list of media outlets work? Can publicists suggest additional outlets for a given story? Or are the one's the business user preselects the only ones that will get you paid?

Which media outlets have your freelancers successfully placed stories in?

joanofarfon Ask HN: I want to write a Sci-fi book. Where do I start?

Check out the Writing Excuses podcast (http://www.writingexcuses.com/).

They're all published and commercially successful genre fiction authors, and the podcast is consistently high on quality and low on BS, unlike at many other sites offering writing tips, tricks, strategies and advice.

All the episodes are ~15 minutes long, and most have a writing prompt or exercise at the end that can be completed in roughly the same amount of time.

Block out 30-45 minutes of time in the morning to listen to an episode and write on the prompt.

joanofarfon How Bitcoin Can Save Publishing

You'd have a hard time setting a monthly price that is acceptable to both consumers and publishers. The New York Times runs anywhere from $16 to $30 per month, depending on which level access you're willing to pay for. The Washington Post is $9.99 per month. You'd likely need to bundle in at least one top publication to sell people on the subscription, and every site you add will jack the price up based on the price they can demand for access to just their site.

I think a better solution be an E-ZPass equivalent for the web. Subscribers add credits to their accounts ($1.00 = 100 or 1,000 credits), and publishers can set the tolls for their content however they want, i.e., 1 credit per article, 5 credits after your 10th article, 1,000 credits for a week on the site, etc.

I'm not convinced that micropayments can't work in combination with other revenue models.

joanofarfon How Bitcoin Can Save Publishing

Netflix replaces DVD rentals and purchases, not the initial product, which is the release in theatres or the initial broadcast on television. You can still make money in the box office and on advertising. For news outlets and periodicals, their websites replace their initial product, the publication itself. Spotify falls somewhere between the two: streaming music can replace the intial product of a CD, LP or download, but it's also allows you to offer a new product to people that would never purchase the initial one.

Another point to consider is that piracy has had a huge impact on the music, movie and television industries. They had to compete against free. Netflix and Spotify may make less money for labels and producers than DVD and CD sales did, but it's more than they get from everyone who would torrent their stuff instead.

If you bundled unlimited access to multiple publications for a monthly fee, and distributed payouts to publishers based on their share of views/reads, you'd just end up reproducing the current situation, where the competition for pageviews is a race to the bottom.

joanofarfon How Bitcoin Can Save Publishing

Sort of Spotify for written content.

Wouldn't this end up leaving even more money on the table? Spotify pays artists based on their share of total plays.

Say two sites (X and Y) join up to offer a $10/month pass for unlimited access to both sites, with the say pay scheme as Spotify. Site X has 3 times as many articles/videos as Site Y. If every user reads/watches 100% of Site Y's content, Site X may still receive an equal or larger share of the payouts even though users consumed a much lower percentage of it.

joanofarfon Linus on "acting professionally"

On what basis do you decide to contribute to one open-source project over another? On what basis do you decide to work for one business over another? Are your answers to those two questions the same? No? Then there's the difference.

>Also, you're wrong, because Linus's job and greatest skill is in managing people.

He doesn't manage people. He manages their contributions. Why are they contributing? Because they want to make it better.

In general, businesses don't have volunteer employees who work there solely on the basis of wanting to make the product better. Their decision to work there is also based factors like the salary, the benefits, the culture, whether they like the people they work with/for, etc., some or all of which will vary from person to person.

joanofarfon Why DRM-free comic books are a big deal, even if you don’t read comics

Tor Books, a subsidiary of Macmillan and the biggest publisher of Sci-Fi and Fantasy fiction, went DRM-free on all of its ebooks last year. They've observed "no discernible increase" in piracy since making the change.

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/no-discernible-increase...

joanofarfon Text of letter to Edward Snowden from his father and father’s attorney

"Bolivian minister says Evo Morales' plane was rerouted to Austria on suspicion that Snowden was on board."

Here's the story on NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/07/02/world/americas/ap...