181–189 of 189 posts
It selects the best long form essays across publications like The Guardian, The Economist, WSJ, NYT, etc and presents to you in a nice clutter free format
Otherwise I also Desktop AMP Chrome extension which shows a AMP version of a news page where possible
(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amp-accelerated-mo...)
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I agree there's good journalism being done but Chricton's observation is not completely off either. The nature of _most_ reporting requires that journalists talk about stuff without being adequately informed. They have to produce stuff on demand and there's little penalty to getting stuff wrong. In any field there's going to be variability in quality and it's not fair or wise to tar the whole field with the same brus…
Sometimes they're talking about becoming experts at linear algebra† and we roll our eyes and fair enough, but sometimes they're talking about becoming "the" expert about disability compensation for West Virginia coal miners, and they aren't fucking around, that is for real. But popping a couple frames back off the stack: the argument that most of what's in the NYT is superficial or "bullshit" is silly. Though maybe s…
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Sometimes they're talking about becoming experts at linear algebra† and we roll our eyes and fair enough, but sometimes they're talking about becoming "the" expert about disability compensation for West Virginia coal miners, and they aren't fucking around, that is for real. But popping a couple frames back off the stack: the argument that most of what's in the NYT is superficial or "bullshit" is silly. Though maybe s…
I have to admit, since I'm tut-tutting at other people, that I like spoken-Gladwell much better than written-Gladwell. And it's the same style and the same stuff. It's disturbingly subjective (although it would have kept him out of Igon trouble).
I agree with you, I think. His writing is fantastic (just, like, as a deployment of the English language) but his podcast is better than most of his New Yorker stuff and definitely than his books. I've re-listened to the university funding stuff a couple times.
1/ Usually through an evolutionary process the whole CMS structure for a paper becomes rather cumbersome with many patches and suboptimal services that nobody really knows about in details. Especially if the tech team rotates. And this leads to the next point.
2/ Bad administrative control of who put what on a page--sales, marketing, editors etc., and this results in a crappy experience with 50-100 different tracking garbage on every page.
As a result, almost every paper becomes a pretty ugly monster that nobody wants to touch not to ruin everything. Any potential change could lead to the whole system collapse.
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No, TV is dying not because of commercials, but because other formats of access to the content are easily accessible. There's simply no point in checking if there's anything interesting on TV now, when you can just pick a movie from a streaming service or read news on the website. After all, free online services also show a lot of ads, but this doesn't prevent us, say, from watching a music video on YouTube (one of t…
There are many ways of watching TV; a lot of people I know want to have something , not necessarily a particular thing, running "in the background", as they do their chores. TV would be absolutely fine for this use if not for the ads. Also, free on-line services "show" a lot of ads, but everyone I know deals with it using ad blockers.
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> bloggers/commenters who ... have no incentive to misrepresent the story Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation. Just look at HN comments; they are among the highest quality available, but still it abounds. > bloggers/commenters who are ... subject matter experts And orders of…
> Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation. I suppose the idea I'm trying to communicate can be also expressed as navigating towards localized pockets of lower misrepresentations levels in the cesspool of Internet. I'm arguing that regular news outlets have high concentration of m…
However, I still think it greatly underestimates the prevalence of misinformation in specialized communities (e.g., I have never found a valuable subreddit), and greatly overestimates human ability to know when they are being mislead. And the latter is far more difficult when trying to understand, as a non-expert outsider, experts in conversation about their domain. I fear what someone outside IT would walk away from HN thinking about some things. Even I have a hard time identifying the BS sometimes.
Subreddits are the answer to the philosophical question: 'Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what they're talking about?'
I actually did some freelance website development for a local newspaper website around 15 years ago. I can't speak for larger newspapers, this was my experience with a much smaller one. The biggest challenges I found were: 1. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, not a full (and expensive) engineering departmen…
> 1. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, not a full (and expensive) engineering department. I agree with the rest of your points but this one doesn't really make sense. My guess is it would take fewer engineers to make these websites better. The horrible parts of newspaper websites are the pop-ups and broken…
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> Apple and Facebook want walled gardens where they control the content and give the providers whatever revenue they consider "fair", with the huge benefit that the stories would be fast to load and provide a friendly, uniform interface. Funny, this really looks to me like you just described Google and AMP.
> where they control the content and give the providers whatever revenue they consider "fair" AMP doesn't give Google any control over content or revenue. It supports hundreds of different ad networks, not just Google's: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ad#... > and provide a friendly, uniform interface AMP doesn't enforce a uniform interface. Its restrictions are primarily technical; not styl…
It gives Google control over serving the content and how it's ranked when users search for it. That's quite a bit of sway, I'd think.
> AMP doesn't enforce a uniform interface. Its restrictions are primarily technical; not stylistic.
Most AMP pages look very similar to me. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does suggest that there might be some sort of technical hurdle to make content that deviates from the standard layout that Google recommends.
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> where they control the content and give the providers whatever revenue they consider "fair" AMP doesn't give Google any control over content or revenue. It supports hundreds of different ad networks, not just Google's: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ad#... > and provide a friendly, uniform interface AMP doesn't enforce a uniform interface. Its restrictions are primarily technical; not styl…
> AMP doesn't give Google any control over content or revenue. It gives Google control over serving the content and how it's ranked when users search for it. That's quite a bit of sway, I'd think. > AMP doesn't enforce a uniform interface. Its restrictions are primarily technical; not stylistic. Most AMP pages look very similar to me. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does suggest that there might be some so…
Fair point. They're planning to fix this with the upcoming Web Package Standard though, so it won't be an issue for much longer.
> and how it's ranked when users search for it
That's just as true for non-AMP content.
> Most AMP pages look very similar to me.
AMP provides a bunch of prebuilt components developers can use to construct their pages, so I suspect what you're noticing here is developers just taking the path of least resistance. (Kinda like how sites built with Bootstrap tend to look similar.) With a little effort, AMP pages _can_ differentiate themselves. For example, these are all AMP pages: