Explains why Rudderstack changed their license to Elastic a few weeks ago!

The essay makes this central claim but then spends most of the time talking about writing leading to better thinking (which I think is well proven). Does anyone know of research that backs up the main thesis?

"Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write."

For me it was:

* Exhalation by Ted Chiang

* Ride of a lifetime by Bob Iger was a close second

'Exhalation' is a revelation, and reminded me how good fiction could be.

The first story in the collection, 'The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate', instantly rose to the top of my all time favorite short stories.

Yeah that was my favorite as well. And the one about perfect recall memory (remem) was perfect too. He's so good at examining all human implications of a single technological idea. And the prose is quite remarkable for sci-fi.

Concur. That’s the kind of writing that makes me want to sit down and write myself.

Ah thanks for reminding me about the Bob Iger memoir! Caught an interview with him on Bloomberg last night and he was remarkably cool and confident given the current uncertainty about the future of theme parks ;)

The causation does exist but in a different direction (see the GP's post about storks and chimneys).

GP's post was about storks on houses.

This article studies the number of storks in a country overall.

So it's not really related. I'd say total storks in a country and total births in a country are more related to the size of the country.

Thanks, fixed! The content-type header was missing the encoding on the S3 object!

This is my attempt to solve the problem of sites becoming unavailable when they make it to the HN front page. It is also a trial balloon for a new service that I am developing. AMA! :)

If you're mirroring articles on these sites without permission, wouldn't that be a violation of the owners' copyrights?

That's a valid concern. I believe this service is very similar to Google cache and the copying should be permissible under fair use [1]. But IANAL :)

[1] http://fairuse.stanford.edu/case/field-v-google-inc/

edit: we also respect robots.txt!

I looked at the judge's order in that case, which was very interesting. Some of the points he makes in Google's favor are:

- Google respects any "noarchive" tags that are on the page, so the page owner can control whether Google copies each page.

- The site owner can also prevent Google from copying the entire site (or parts of it) via robots.txt.

If I understand the argument correctly, this metadata, as set on the plaintiff's site, gave Google an implied license to use the content, based on widely-understood web conventions.

Also, the order notes that Google places a prominent banner on top of its cached pages stating that they're copies that may not be current. However, your copies seem to be indistinguishable from the original content. If somebody were to send someone else a link to one of your cached articles, it would be difficult to tell that it was a cached copy.

Thanks for the comments. Our crawler does respect the robots.txt standard and the nofollow tag. Seems like noarchive is what google recommends. Will look more into it.

Although we do put a banner on the index page - we don't have them on each page. Thanks for pointing it out - will fix!

Even more important than that for me (possibly for you too) is that you make sure that none of these pages make it into googles index.

The duplication of content (potentially sending the original pages down in search ranks) and the fact that you are polluting the organic search results for the sites you mirror could be a big issue for the owners of the pages.

Good point! There is a robots.txt that prevents the site from getting indexed now: http://hn.getpageback.com/robots.txt

I wrote an app that does something similar but albeit not as pretty :)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsmithy....

Thanks for the feedback! We are split on whether we should exclusive make it a habit-building app. Lots of people use the app just for logging. Goal setting would definitely make it more useful - we have to figure out how to implement it without forcing it on people who don't need it. And yes, the design needs work :)

I made something similar for android for my needs - although it is not as pretty :)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsmithy....

Agreed. You can confidently negotiate if you've got nothing to lose. Another way to achieve this is to have multiple offers. You come out ahead when you have competing offers - get them in a bidding war.

Also you can be a total hard-ass when negotiating with HR - you won't offend your future boss or team in the process. They usually are not involved in the negotiation process.