karlb

I migrated to Reader from Instapaper, which was crashing all the time, so I had little to lose. Before that, my company used Diigo, which felt clunky and unloved. Reader is incredibly polished. I absolutely love it, and I’m delighted when they add new features. I’ve been on the beta for 11 months, and am genuinely excited to read the updates. They launched YouTube support a few days ago, and already it’s great (on desktop). I also love being able to add tweet threads (effectively turning them into articles I can highlight). Reader has a feature that automatically subscribes to RSS feeds you like (based on your reading and highlighting history) and, for me, it was at least as surprisingly effective as the recommendation engines in Spotify and Amazon.

Even though I imagine it’s hard to create software like this, I don’t believe it’s beyond one company to make a do-everything app. Already, it’s do-enough-for-my-needs, and their velocity is impressive. (I want them to add podcasts next, with highlightable transcripts. That sounds easy to me, but every podcast-workflow app I’ve tried has been buggy/crashy/awful.)

And Hemi, not Hemmi.

At the very least, I wish HIBP could distinguish between whether the data contains an email-plus-password or the email address only.

Does this apply to Macs?

I know that many Mac users don't use anti-virus. Are they right not to?

What are the best things you've read about personal identity?

So am I right in understanding that… (i) When my new MacBook Pro arrives, I need to learn which is the Thunderbolt port. (ii) I can simplify matters by always buying the top-spec leads. If so, how do I know which to buy?

Many musicians much better than me are surprised at how I can play a song just by hearing it on the radio. My breakthrough came from understanding music was realizing that the real “meaning” of a note lies in its position relative to the tonic note (e,g, I-II-II, etc, also written do-re-mi). Suddenly, almost all of the clutter was removed, and the problem became manageable.

Let's consider the three-note tune “do, re, mi”. If that tune were played in the key of C, it would become C-D-E. If it were played in G, it would become G-A-B. But in either case, it's the same tune but with each frequency increased by the same percentage.

Trying to understand music by understanding the letters is like trying to read in a world where every article has been enciphered into a different “key”: e.g., the word "cab" in “the key of A” (the alphabet we normally use) would be written as "dbc" if the article were written in “the key of B”. In the latter case, you could discern meaning only once you realised that the letter “d” represented the third letter of the alphabet. There's nothing meaningful about a “d” but there is something meaningful about a “4th letter of the alphabet”.

Once you start to “decipher” all music into I, II, III, IV, V, etc., the complexity becomes manageable. You can start to learn to recognize the sound of a III note, or of a VI minor chord. After all, there are only eight notes in the major scale.

>always, always, always, split test EVERYTHING

Side projects tend to not have the traffic for this. If in doubt, use a calculator to calculate how long it would take to statistically detect a given uplift.

Instead, user-test everything. User-tests give feedback that's rich, nuanced, instant, qualitative and granular. And each one needn't take more than five minutes.