4 ms·

> I love these stories of engineering and science from the trenches. I wish there was a website collecting all these stories and articles. They could also ask

> I love these stories of engineering and science from the trenches. I wish there was a website collecting all these stories and articles. They could also ask the authors for permission and offer epub/pdf downloads of these stories. That would be a nice read while traveling

theoh 8y ago
"all these stories and articles"? There are millions of people working in software, the number of interesting war stories just within computer science is (conservatively) in the thousands. A distributed system of blogs is the only efficient way to publish that breadth of material, bearing in mind that each reader's interests are different, you can't curate a feed to suit everyone. With all due respect, one convenient website aggregating all that material is not a practical idea. It's like asking for one huge magazine to exist which contains everything worth reading about a huge field like CS. Edit: I mean, it would be convenient, but there's no royal road to finding stuff that's worth reading. https://queue.acm.org https://queue.acm.org is pretty good, for example
- whatshisface 8y ago
  It sounds like you're arguing that Netflix is not only impossible, but that it would be more impossible if it served text.
  - lmm 8y ago
    Netflix for text would be impossible. Netflix for movies is only possible because the overwhelming majority of decent movies are produced with the involvement of a relatively small number of production companies, and that in turn is the case because making a good movie is a much bigger exercise than making a good piece of text. It's highly unusual for one person to make a high-quality movie on their own and publish it directly on the internet, whereas this is entirely normal and common for text.
    - cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
      Your public library and services like Overdrive are "NetFlix for text". NetFlix for text != zero curation, NetFlix curates their selection.
      - lmm 8y ago
        > Your public library and services like Overdrive are "NetFlix for text". They're NetFlix for books and formal periodical publications, both of which are more movie-like: there are a relatively small number of publishers and publishing a full-length book is a substantial, multi-person project, as is publishing a magazine or newspaper. There's a huge wealth of text out there that has no chance of ever hitting any library or central seller/distributor of etexts.
      - thaumasiotes 8y ago
        > NetFlix curates their selection Judging by the stuff that comes up when you browse categories, or when NetFlix wants to suggest something to you, the only "curation" involved is whether they were able to get rights to display the content. There's no quality standard, and there's no logical standard (like "if we offer the second film in this series, maybe we should offer the first one too") either.
        cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
        You've clearly never been to my local public library - this is often how things are there - second and fourth book in a four book series there, first and third nowhere to be found.
        thaumasiotes 8y ago
        In the case of a library, I would tend to suspect one of these scenarios: - The first and third book are currently checked out. - The library acquired all four books, but the first and third have been destroyed / lost / stolen by customers. - The library didn't acquire any of the books, but the second and fourth were donated and the library chose to absorb them rather than selling or destroying them. None of those are even conceptually applicable to NetFlix. I definitely would not expect - The library has a limited budget, and considered that it would be better spent buying the second book than the first book. Note that NetFlix's inventory of physical discs doesn't suffer from the same problems that its streaming inventory does. That is (most likely) because it's trivial to obtain the legal right to distribute the physical discs -- you just buy them on the open market, the same way a library does with its books. NetFlix's streaming inventory isn't "curated", it's not under NetFlix's control at all.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Maybe it's time someone brought back the concept of WebRings[1]. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
  - Ibethewalrus 8y ago
    There is a company, forgot the name, but I’ve seen the owner chime here on HN.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Yes, it's hard. And hard things shouldn't be done, or even tried.
anderspitman 8y ago
Not the same thing, but your comment made me think of AOSA [0] [0] http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html

theoh 8y ago

"all these stories and articles"? There are millions of people working in software, the number of interesting war stories just within computer science is (conservatively) in the thousands. A distributed system of blogs is the only efficient way to publish that breadth of material, bearing in mind that each reader's interests are different, you can't curate a feed to suit everyone. With all due respect, one convenient website aggregating all that material is not a practical idea. It's like asking for one huge magazine to exist which contains everything worth reading about a huge field like CS. Edit: I mean, it would be convenient, but there's no royal road to finding stuff that's worth reading. https://queue.acm.org https://queue.acm.org is pretty good, for example

whatshisface 8y ago
It sounds like you're arguing that Netflix is not only impossible, but that it would be more impossible if it served text.
- lmm 8y ago
  Netflix for text would be impossible. Netflix for movies is only possible because the overwhelming majority of decent movies are produced with the involvement of a relatively small number of production companies, and that in turn is the case because making a good movie is a much bigger exercise than making a good piece of text. It's highly unusual for one person to make a high-quality movie on their own and publish it directly on the internet, whereas this is entirely normal and common for text.
  - cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
    Your public library and services like Overdrive are "NetFlix for text". NetFlix for text != zero curation, NetFlix curates their selection.
    - lmm 8y ago
      > Your public library and services like Overdrive are "NetFlix for text". They're NetFlix for books and formal periodical publications, both of which are more movie-like: there are a relatively small number of publishers and publishing a full-length book is a substantial, multi-person project, as is publishing a magazine or newspaper. There's a huge wealth of text out there that has no chance of ever hitting any library or central seller/distributor of etexts.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > NetFlix curates their selection Judging by the stuff that comes up when you browse categories, or when NetFlix wants to suggest something to you, the only "curation" involved is whether they were able to get rights to display the content. There's no quality standard, and there's no logical standard (like "if we offer the second film in this series, maybe we should offer the first one too") either.
      - cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
        You've clearly never been to my local public library - this is often how things are there - second and fourth book in a four book series there, first and third nowhere to be found.
        thaumasiotes 8y ago
        In the case of a library, I would tend to suspect one of these scenarios: - The first and third book are currently checked out. - The library acquired all four books, but the first and third have been destroyed / lost / stolen by customers. - The library didn't acquire any of the books, but the second and fourth were donated and the library chose to absorb them rather than selling or destroying them. None of those are even conceptually applicable to NetFlix. I definitely would not expect - The library has a limited budget, and considered that it would be better spent buying the second book than the first book. Note that NetFlix's inventory of physical discs doesn't suffer from the same problems that its streaming inventory does. That is (most likely) because it's trivial to obtain the legal right to distribute the physical discs -- you just buy them on the open market, the same way a library does with its books. NetFlix's streaming inventory isn't "curated", it's not under NetFlix's control at all.
Jaruzel 8y ago
Maybe it's time someone brought back the concept of WebRings[1]. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
- Ibethewalrus 8y ago
  There is a company, forgot the name, but I’ve seen the owner chime here on HN.
reaperducer 8y ago
Yes, it's hard. And hard things shouldn't be done, or even tried.

anderspitman 8y ago

Not the same thing, but your comment made me think of AOSA [0] [0] http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html