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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

What, did Medium just copy over Stanford's alumni magazine? Here's the original story.[1]

[1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-bikini-atoll-looks-lik...

You must have missed it. All this is mentioned at the very top of the linked page. The article was published in this Medium and then they moved to stanfordmag.org.

> We’ve moved! Read this article and new stories from STANFORD on Stanfordmag.org.

Medium is a publishing/hosting platform for authors. This Medium account is (or purports to be) the official account of the Stanford alumni magazine.

It appears that it was published on medium and subsequently added to the standfordmag site, hence the 2 links to it they're and the notice that new articles are published there. It probably just remains because they have no control over medium, so they can't turn the page into a permanent redirect, and they don't want to just take it down and break links.

If I may go off-topic, I wonder why the “Standford” spelling is such a common typo? Is there a linguistic reason for it, or is it some sort of infectious meme?

I mean typing it slowly, left ring finger 's', left pointer finger 't', left pinky 'a', right pointer 'n', then because 'f' and 'd' are so close on a qwerty keyboard any sloppiness between the left pointer and middle finger sitting on the 'd', 'f' would mean the d gets hit first as you roll into the 'f', seems pretty easy to make

It's possible it's QWERTY-related as a sibling suggests, but there's also precedent for this specific kind of sound change in many dialects of English: /d/ is a stop consonant, which are commonly inserted in the middle of a nasal (/n/) and fricative (/f/), and in particular /d/ is produced with the tip of the tongue the same way that /n/ is, so it and /t/ (the unvoiced variant) are the most likely stop consonants to be inserted after /n/.

Other examples of this effect:

Samson -> Sampson

prince -> prints

hamster -> hampster

warmth -> warmpth

fence -> fents

Python -> Pythong

I do wonder why people still publish on Medium. There was a time when Medium probably (for no particular reason carried credibility (for no partucularly good reason over a random blog post. But these days the negatives seem like they outweigh any small positives.

It's still the least bad way to just write something and put it on the internet in a way that looks non-awful. For people whose focus is the content, not the, uh, medium, it still makes sense.

I guess I won't really argue. The appearance is good and, if you don't want your own blog (which is still more work to setup than it should be unless you're a web designer or pay someone), I suppose Medium is a reasonable option.

1. This is the official Medium publication for the Stanford Alumni Magazine.

2. The Medium version of this story was published 1 month before the stanfordmag.org version, so this is the "original" story.

Arguably the print edition of Stanford's alumni magazine is the "original" version. The web version of that issue is currently hosted at:

https://stanfordmag.org/issues/december-2017

It makes sense to link to the current web version of the issue rather than the medium.com version.

Right under the title there's a note that says "We've moved! Read this article and new stories from STANFORD on Stanfordmag.org."

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