vkb

Very powerful. I read this article at the same time as this one [1] this morning, about the powers and limitations of content platforms. Both say the same thing to me: many people think the web today is inherently broken by middlemen, like the music industry was up until very recently. But as of yet, there is no solution to middlemen, because they are where the audience is, therefore,where the money is.

[1]http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/in-no-charts

There is a lot of focus and discussion around the $1.50 figure I mentioned, and perhaps I was wrong to include it in the post. The $1.50 is not the point. I would pay $1.50. I gladly pay for Pinboard, Newsblur, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, and many other online services that provide exponential value to me. And, as I mentioned in the post, I am more than happy to pay $10 a month for SoundCloud because I use it so much.

My point is that instead of even offering the option of a subscription, SoundCloud immediately went to ads that are annoying and hostile and started deleting music, forcing me to scramble to other options that are just as hostile (where hostile == "first world problem" of paying with a credit card to multiple unknown vendors) because music distribution online is broken.

It was via credit card, but it was a smaller site I'd never heard of (I'm into music but not enough to know this place..maybe they're legit and I just didn't spend enough time doing research) and I was weighing the responsibility of thanking the artist the cost of buying a single track on a fairly "random" site and watching my credit card like a hawk for a month. It wasn't worth it to me in the end, ultimately. Typing this out, it seems a bit harsh, but I think a lot of consumers go through this same mental process. When I wrote an ebook, I put it both on Amazon and through a Shopify-type store where people could buy the DRM-free version. 99% of those people chose Amazon, and with good reason.

Everyone is chiming in on this point, so I don't think I wrote it clearly enough. I would be willing to pay $1.50 for a song if it were through a known party, like Amazon Payments or PayPal. I've bought lots of music through Amazon. I'm not going to risk $1.50 to an unknown website. Additionally, my expectations as a consumer have been set to pay 99 cents per track, so to me, in the current atmosphere, $1.50 seems like it's too much, even though to the artist it might not be. The other issue I didn't touch on is DRM. Do I get the MP3 to keep forever if I pay? Most times, no.

What I also thought was interesting as I was reading it (surprisingly my first time being exposed to this piece) was how strange the rituals described sounded, even though it was supposed to be a lighthearted parody of ordinary life. For example, "When pregnant, women dress so as to hide their condition." A quote comes to mind: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

Nice writeup. I may have missed this, but how did you get the data? Did you scrape the site?

Yup, you can run printcp, plotcp, and fancyRpartPlot on it to make it look nice.

The author writes, "Before I started looking for an apartment, I never gave much thought to the cumulative identity I had been presenting, or even performing, on the Internet. "

This is completely the opposite of my (also a millennial) experience. I blog on a regular basis, post things on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, what have you. The amount of thought that goes into each post ("could this be misconstrued by an employer?" "if I post this, will it offend one of my friends?" "Could this retweet become viral?") is paralyzing and exhausting, but not sharing is just as hard.

I've written a post about this feeling [1], but I don't have any solution. As someone who enjoys sharing ideas through writing and meeting people online, but is also very aware of how mob-happy our online civic society has become, it is a hard position to be in.

[1] http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2014/01/the-snarling-crowd-in-th...

Agree. I've done a lot of decision trees in R lately and the two packages I've seen with the "most" documentation are rattle and rpart. I've found rpart much easier to use and understand, and it has pretty involved documentation. [1]

[1]http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rpart/vignettes/longi...

I don't understand...are you saying that just because you are at a fledgling business, you can act however you want?

Great analysis. A post I wrote recently[1], called "Use percentages" reinforces exactly why your post and Tim's comment are important. Absolute values, especially where some are growing more exponentially than others, will always mislead the human eye.

[1] http://veekaybee.github.io/use-percentages/

Based on what I read of the article (about 2/3), it seems like the question this article is answering is, "In which entertainment medium can you make the most money in a least-hard way? "

The best medium for a storyteller will be, as others have said upthread, whatever they want to use. I am a writer in my non-work world. I have played around with podcasting, vlogging, blogging, and comics, but the best way for me to tell a story is through words, no matter how hard it is to distribute those words. I was writing even before Amazon KDP democratized that medium, and I will be writing even if it becomes hard again, because I love to write and I get the most joy out of storytelling that way. I think there are some people who are medium-agnostic, but most are not.

I really think a lot of this is driven by $$$, although some part of it probably is, yes, the CEO trying to gain control of Reddit, although judging by Yishan Wong's exit, that hasn't been possible for this site previously. As someone mentioned in another HN comment about the issue (I forget which thread), advertisers are scared of content they can't control, content that is in the hands of users who could go off-message at any moment. That's why small, "indie" sites never make money and why the most popular sites, such as Buzzfeed, as I mentioned, are so bland and universal as to offend as little of their demographic as possible.

As to the first part of your question, I'm hoping some people more qualified in historical analysis than me can jump in :)

I've been waiting for this with not a little paranoia, given Google's propensity to dump products.

I have over 2k pictures taken since the birth of my daughter in January, 99% of them with my Android phone and uploaded automatically to G+ or Google Photos or whatever this is now called. In order to ensure that they are not just in this one space (which used to be Google Drive and Picasa before that, I believe), I periodically download through Google Takeout, save on a separate hard drive, and also upload to an S3 bucket through Arc so I have redundancy. Then I print the best ones physically through Snapfish.

I would love to stop doing all of this b.s. and just leave them where they lay on Google, but Google has given me no guarantee that my photos are safe. What a nightmare preserving memories is in 2015.

I've seen this type of article come up at least once a year for the last five years now, but banning PowerPoint will not happen in the short-to-medium term in most large (and small, even) companies . Why? Because it's a default app installed on most office machines and because PowerPoint is the language managers speak. If you don't have a PowerPoint or email that managers can physically take to meetings with their managers, it's hard to understand what you're working on. I don't say this cynically; I say it truthfully, because it's human nature.

Tufte suggests banning Powerpoint and giving people handouts to read at meetings; I don't see this getting a lot of traction in most places, simply because people have a lot of other stuff going on.

What I do see as a possible are classes on visual design at both the grade school and college level. Even just one a year can make younger people better at presenting information and will eventually trickle up.

Anyone interested in a more thorough and context-ladden history of Aralsk, Uzbekistan, and the transition from the Soviet Union to a sovereign country should check out Tom Bissell's great, great book, Chasing the Sea [1], about his time a Peace Corps volunteer there and afterwards. Great writer, really interesting topic.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/233072.Chasing_the_Sea

Yes. Or, again, I don't know. That's the terrifying part. But given that we know the surveillance machine is much deeper than we anticipated, I can't come up with a worst case scenario anymore, which is what scares me the most.

That's the thing...I [we] don't know what keywords trigger deeper searches, or how exactly our browsing/typing history is tied together in which database. If I type 'Bin Laden' in a chat, does it flag me somewhere? Or is it filtered out as useless?

If I write, 'I had a blast at a party last night' (a really simplistic example, but you get the point) or 'Check out this story about this guy who wanted to kill Obama..he was crazy!',does that do anything, or are those keywords ignored?

What's considered a false positive, and what's a true positive? The algorithms do the filtering, but the humans write the algorithms. What's the error rate?

I think I am most afraid of what I don't know about how this works.

Speaking as a writer and blogger, I can say that this has absolutely been the case for me over the past year. Whereas before I used to blog about anything that came to mind (that wouldn't negatively impact my employment), I now weigh each blog post, Facebook post, tweet ,and non-OTR encrypted GChat (for friends who are too lazy/clueless to install OTR) carefully, employing an amount of self-censorship that I never would have thought possible before. I am even now different over text messages. I've lost my writing voice.

I was afraid to write even this post [1], which sounds ludicrous, but it's amazing how much hearing the revelations impacted me.

The irony of this situation is that, even before the Snowden leaks, I had been (and am) working on a novel about 1936 in the Soviet Union, the year before the largest of the Great Purges, and had been struggling to get a handle on how people felt about information censorship and how people found out that their government was not what it seemed.

[1] http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2013/06/being-american/

One might, but how many books to read is that? Taleb compresses these ideas very concisely and in a relatively easy-to-read manner.

Two:

1)Antifragile by Taleb. It has given me a whole new framework with which to think about the world. He is consistently one of the only "modern thinkers" that I trust, and who delivers no b.s.

2)Confessions of an Economic Hitman by Perkins. Not a new book, and I didn't read it this year, but when I did read it, it made me realize that the world works much differently than I understood it to on the surface, and that you should never trust any business or government at face value.

Data scientist here. It really depends on what kind/size of data you intend to work with. If you want to work with enormous data sets, focus on Hadoop and Machine Learning. You won't be able to learn a lot of Hadoop on your own since it really requires having a working cluster and breaking it, but you can get some idea.

For smaller data sets, R will work, and Python acts as glue. In general, on a daily basis, I spend about 70% of my day finding and cleaning data (a lot of data scientists will say the same) and getting it in the shape I need, and only then running algorithms over it.

I work with fairly small-to-medium sized data (now..previously I was at Hadoop scale) and my tools of choice are: SQL for getting the data I need (you will need to become really good at SQL..almost everyone uses it everywhere, really great universal skill to have), Python (pandas) for cleaning the data and making that cleaning process reproducible, then high-level algorithm analysis in R, and presentation either in R or Tableau.

This might be good for developers, but I'm not sure how it's helpful for either heavy users or beginners. For business analysts, it's just another layer on top of SQL, which slows down processing time, and for beginners, it's now two types of syntax and order they have to learn instead of one.

Yes, if you're selling subscriptions. SEO is not meant to maximize subscription revenue, but to get people to click for free, aka ads. Which will it be for them?

Two recent pieces are leading me to believe that NYT is floundering around, without a real cohesive online strategy, still:

[1]http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_new_york_timess_digital_li....

[2]http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_new_york_times_cant_abando....

In that case, it sounds like you should probably hire a native Russian (and Spanish, etc.) speaker to vet your dictionary.

There's no real differentiation between moose and elk in Russian, since elk is the only one of the two indigenous to Russia and moose is a North American thing, so there's no real need to "split hairs" so to speak if you're talking to someone who grew up in the Russian language. They'll assume you're talking about elk.

You could theoretically call both лось and have it sound ok to a Russian speaker. It's not something you'd pick up from the language as much as from knowing Russian culture/flora/fauna.

What really strikes me here, aside from the technical aspects, is the note on p. 21 about how the project was supported from the top because SEO was lagging as a result of site load time, and this line especially: "NYT became an e-commerce site since the last redesign."

Once you are focusing on e-commerce and SEO as an executive team, are you still committed to journalism?

Yup, I've done that in 2011 when I had less work obligations..it was a great time.

Finish writing my novel. Sure, I write after/before work (as did many famous writers as described in the really great book[1]), but it's HARD, and it's taken me 2 years to finish a first draft.

I daydream about my schedule: up at 8, exercise, write/edit from 9-12, then again from 1-2,then do the rest of the mundane stuff that builds up in a day. 100k polished words in 6 months, easy peasy.

[1] http://masoncurrey.com/daily-rituals/

I read at least 20 novels/non-fiction books a year, but usually I don't talk about it on Facebook because the nature of Facebook discourages these kinds of posts. I have a few other friends on Facebook who love books and are interested in talking about them, but I view FB mostly as a cocktail party full of topical conversations. Talking about literature and ideas seems to me some days to be like the guy in the corner droning on about astrophysics to an audience of socialites checking their watches.

Where do people talk about books and reading substantial? Book review blogs, publisher accounts, Goodreads, Longform, literary blogs (The Rumpus, HTMLGiant etc). These are all niche categories that "pop culture" isn't necessarily interested in.