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No matter where you are on the politics of all this our immigration system is incredibly broken.

There are so many “work arounds” or “hacks”, if you prefer, placed precisely because the system is so badly broken. Whether it’s DACA, or this, or the many other things put in place and intended to help families these are all hacks around a fundamentally broken law system.

No one seems to have the courage to fix it and the politics are now so devisive that the state things are in is incredibly sad and frankly inhuman in many cases.

I believe behind much of this success with Podcasts is that we are actually entering a golden age for Audio content that isn’t music. So I don’t think this is limited to just podcasts but podcasts are riding this wave.

I think the Apple AirPods, gaining extreme popularity and removing so much friction, the home speakers and the incredibly busy lives of people today all make audio easier to consume while doing other things. I think we will see more and more interesting content in this space and it’s not limited to Podcasts or Audio books. I think we may even get to a point where we see audio go viral, which has never happened to my knowledge.

As an example of alternate sources for gaining knowledge on the go, and a little self promotion, I have built an App that uses AI/ML models to read any article to you.

You check it out here at https://articulu.com

Generally I’m incredibly motivated by the non music Audio space and I think there will be even more interesting things coming.

Totally agree with you.

I think the biggest reason this is not universal is because not everybody hates their job or working. I get an incredible amount of Joy doing what I do. So much so that when I get home I have plenty of energy to do a little more on my own personal projects. This is obviously not true every single day but the vast majority of days it is.

That dosent mean I don’t love my wife or my family, quite the contrary I spend as much time as possible with them and love them very much.

But it does mean that I don’t love TV or much of the other bullshit.

This article is a great read, with a different sort of take on life:

https://blog.stephsmith.io/you-dont-need-to-quit-your-job-to...

For sure planning the rewinds by second but even more I’m planning sentence rewinds so one could rewind sentence by sentence and even saving snippets of one or more sentences..

I hadn’t thought about emailing that though, it’s a solid idea thank you.

I think we are definitely already planning the first one.

The second one is super interesting.. I’ll have to think about it a bit but it’s a great idea for sure.

I completely get this.

Between family, my full time job, side projects.. I had no choice but to listen to some of these books as Audio books.. I ended up pretty much listening to 25+ audio books this year.. the only way to make the content stick is to:

1) take a ton of notes

2) do exactly as you say, rewind over and over until you can mark it down.

These are the next few features I want to add to this thing, taking notes and rewinding quickly and bookmarking snippets precisely because of your point that audio requires a little more work to retain. Still worth it though, I would have never been able to read that many books this year given how busy I am.

Ultimately I will concede that it will never beat reading, but when we have no time or are commuting? This, in my opinion, is the next best thing for busy people.

I think distractions are just the beginning of our issues, a much bigger factor on how much I can read is Time.

As we become adults, with responsibilities Time is incredibly hard to find. Big readers tend to be productive people and as such the more active and busy we are the harder it is to sit down and read. This might sound like a straight forward problem but I find myself bookmarking great articles or writing down great books I heard about only to never really find the Time to go back and read them.

As a little shameless self promotion this problem of not having enough time to read led me to build an App that lets me listen to any article from the web. It converts the article to Audio using some amazing open advancements in AI/ML. Now when I’m standing on the train with a coffee in my hand and holding a pole with the other I can get through a ton of this content from the web distraction free.

You can check the app out here: https://articulu.com

These articles on the “coming down turn” are written in such a way that they seem so matter of fact.

The article basically says that they had people study past recessions and therefore the markers are there, but things in the real world don’t work like this at all. They say that the tax cuts extended the bull run for two years but now it’s over, as if they are 100% sure.

Fidelity who, I guess, sponsored the study should follow its own advice that they give their customers “Past performance does not guarantee future results”.

Therefore I just feel these people are shorting the market and trying to move things in their preferred direction.

However, in reality no one knows what will happen next and no Model can tell us. There are so many variables at play right now in our modern economy and saying that there will be a recession in the future is like saying everyone has to die at some point.

As long as your posts are useful and insightful I’m pretty sure it’s allowed.

You can reach me right on the website, I put up contact info and it works.

Edit: excellent post by the way, loved it and shared it with some friends. That word of mouth thing is 100% true.

That’s a great idea, but I’m thinking of giving that away for for free say up to say 1k listens.

We’ll see it’s a ton to build as a side project.

I love the idea of being generous and having that come back to you. This notion not only works with products but it works in every other part of life. You may not believe in Karma but the vast majority of the good will we put out there will eventually come back to us, at least it is this humble engineers opinion.

As a little self promotion, and an example of this idea, I recently built an app that lets people listen to any article, it uses AI to convert the articles to Audio with some amazing sounding open source models. I decided to give folks up to 30 free article conversions per month and only charge after that, if they really love the product. You can try it here https://articulu.com

I may at some point be forced to lower that a bit because it does cost a bunch of money to run TensorFlow in the cloud, but trying my best to keep the karma goin.

Spotify's acquisition spree in this space is not surprising and Gimlet is just the beginning. In case people missed it they also recently announced that they are setting aside another 500 million for this year for more acquisitions.

It is my opinion that Audio is going to be a huge opportunity for lots of Startups, I feel it is underserved. I really do feel that the AirPods have been game changing in making audio consumption far easier. In some ways they are the new iPod for Apple, they cost about the same as the iPod used to and I’m almost certain at some point Apple will add storage to them and we will be able to take them with us without our phone. I believe they are expected to sell 75 million units through this year, those are no small numbers and presents a huge opportunity for audio startups.

The other thing about Audio is that there is so much more potential than just music or podcast. Since Audio is obviously one of those things you can consume on the go, while doing other things, like exercising or commuting and you can consume it for so much more than just entertainment but to stay informed or to learn. In some ways audio is far superior to video in our modern fast paced world.

As a little self promotion, this is exactly why I decided to create an app that uses some open machine learning models to read articles to you, I believe folks on the go will benefit immensely by staying informed and learning new things. You can check it out at https://articulu.com

As someone who has started messing around with different open TensorFlow models and NLP algorithms I believe there’s is a lot of exciting things that AI/ML will unlock, although there is far too much hype right now.

Still despite the hype there are a lot product opportunities and we are only beginning to scratch the surface thanks to these phones getting better and generally large scale compute becoming easier to access. However, I disagree with the author that we can’t go vertical for now and have an app for each little advancement to take advantage of the piece meal innovations in this space. I think that’s exactly what we should be doing ala Shazam, as he mentions. I think product discoverability and growth is a whole other problem and I don’t think one needs a fully integrated magic AI/ML camera on day 1 to make an impact and have a great product, old techniques coupled with some of the newer open source models/papers these big companies are putting out can work wonders.

As a little example of this, and some self promotion, I recently built a cross platform app that uses some AI/ML techniques to read any article to you from the web, forgive me for being a little self promotional but if your interested you can check it out here: https://articulu.com

Audio is getting really hot, I really do feel a lot of folks are missing how important and game changing the AirPods have been. In some ways they are the new iPod for Apple, they cost about the same and I’m almost certain at some point Apple will add storage to them and we will be able to take them with us without our phone. I believe they are expected to sell 75 million units through the year, those are no small numbers and presents a huge opportunity for audio startups.

Audio is one of those things you can consume on the go, while doing other things, like exercising or commuting. In some ways audio is far superior to video in our modern fast paced world.

As a little self promotion, this is exactly why I decided to create an app that uses some open machine learning models to read articles to you, I believe folks on the go will benefit immensely by staying informed and learning new things. You can check it out at https://articulu.com

Although there is a lot of hype around AI/ML, there are a ton of pragmatic things coming out of the research much like this Live Transcription by Google that I think will be incredibly helpful to people around the world.

The thing I am most excited about is that most of this work is being done in the open, in the very least much of this is being open sourced by Google, Facebook, and other giants. For all the heat they have been taking lately I do think they deserve to be applauded for this and Of course this is mostly happening in order to sell us cloud services but it cannot be understated how helpful this will be to many around the world.

Another thing I’m excited about is what I can build with these things, and even more what others will create with these models as building blocks in their applications.

As an example, and complete self promotion here, I was able to use some open source models by Google on TensorFlow to build a cross platform App that can read Articles to you using these neural networks. The amazing thing is I built it mostly on nights and weekends, which shows how easy some of this is to work with now, you can check it out here if you like https://articulu.com

At the expense of losing what little reputation I have on HN I will say this:

As many others on here seem to be correctly saying, i think this article amounts to fear mongering of vendor lock in. The modern public cloud is very different from the Oracle/IBM mainframes of yester-year.

The whole point of the public cloud is to leverage managed services to their fullest extent so you can move incredibly fast. As a startup, you’ll run laps around your competitors doing all of this from scratch simply to preserve their non vendor lock in.

The notion that removing that glue code that glues your code to AWS or Azure managed services amounts to vendor lock in, that is no more true than any other code running on any VM that talks to those same managed services. Except the main difference here is that your not wasting time writing the glue code.

Additionally Azure Functions or AWS Lambda, or even Functions on Kubernetes, which are meant to be the smallest unit of work when used correctly (similar to a MicroService) and should contain only your application logic are “vendor lock-in” is absolutely rediculous to me. If anything when you do decide to move vendors this will be the easiest code in the world to migrate, inputs and outputs.

I will concede that it is hard to see this the way I’m describing if you haven’t actually worked on the modern public cloud and are not actively taking advantage of managed services on there for speed of delivery.

A little self promotion: as an example of what’s actually possible with these Serverless frameworks I recently built a cross platform app, as a side project in just a few months nights and weekends with the entire backend as Serverless Functions, the app can read any article to you, using some open source ML models for text to speech, and can be found https://articulu.com if you want to check it out.

Nice, thanks for contributing it’s the most promising cross platform app development I’ve seen so far.

I think it’s fine for us to disagree on Mobile vs Web. But I think depends on what his goals are, in my opinion these days Desktop isn’t the main use for apps like this. He could always add that kind of support later.

So for something like this I would go Mobile first and I would use this new open source technology from Google called Flutter, you can avoid JavaScript all together and go with Dart, even if you’ve never used it it’s incredily easy to learn. In my opinion is far superior technology to react native. You could get out a cross platform app with some of the basic things you describe in a few weeks.

I would use AWS Lambda or Azure functions for the entire backend for something like this. You could make it incredibly scalable and do it incredibly fast. Both AWS and Azure have great managed Document database you could use to power the features you mentioned. It has never been easier than it is right now to build some incredibly things.

Shameless plug, this is exactly what I did with a recent app I built that can take any article and convert it to Audio. Check it out https://Articulu.com got it out for iOS and Android incredibly fast.

I just meant economics since the article is about the global economy.

I agree there is a large amount of division and political risk in the US.

Edit: but still we are far from the world ending.

Daydreaming about what though?

Look at the US economy it’s the strongest it’s ever been. Maybe that’s not a good indicator for the rest of the world?

Let’s look at some of the poorest countries? Have they improved over the last 20 years or gone south?

I don’t think I’m day dreaming, I’m working hard and building things. I can sit there and speculate or I can worry about impacting things.

It’s funny that all of these academic, government types seem to be signaling the end of the world. This, at least of late, has been reinforcing for me personally much of Nicholas Nassim Taleb has been saying about these guys; that in effect they don’t know shit. That many of these academic types have not actually worked in the real world and instead are directing policy from an ivory tower.

The world is doing better than it ever has, innovation has been steadily picking up, especially in the United States and in China. Just look at the amount of disruption in so many industries e.g. Taxis, Hotels, Office space, on and on. Even if Chinas economy isn’t doing great right now these things move in cycles. Poverty is significantly dropping across the whole globe and ultimately I think the future is much brighter than it is being painted by these pessimistic academic types that have suddenly lost their clout as people start to value real experience more.

I see a lot of comments on here about the efficiency of Lyft/Uber's and lots of comments about their overspending.

The new book by Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling, was an eye-opener for me as to how these companies operate and what seems as incredibly inefficient now will all be but forgotten tomorrow when they have complete monopolies over all transportation... The nature of technology makes it winner take all almost always, it's only a matter of time until they can offer other forms of transportation to people. Perhaps people someday won't even own any cars at all especially if it's cheaper to call an autonomous one from your device whenever you need it.

These are interesting times we are living in and these business models are completely counterintuitive to traditional norms of taking small risks and that much is obvious from seeing the business models of Uber/Lyft, WeWork, Airbnb, etc.

Facts are facts but to me this always seemed like the dumbest idea. I thought it was a dumb idea before the City Bike program was introduced here in NYC then I thought so many people would get hurt with the way Cabbies drive out here.

Fast forward a few years and the program is a huge success here in NYC, there was some accidents but no where near what I thought there would be. People obviously love Biking and I was completely wrong.

What’s even crazier now I think with the technology and access becoming even easier this has the power to completely transform cities. Obviously people love this and politicians that don’t support it will be voted out, it’s looking more and more like there could be entire roads dedicated to bikes and scooters as this becomes more popular.

Mayor Bloomberg wanted to limit the amount of cars in the city and put a toll on any any cars going below 95th street in Manhattan, people rebelled back then but if something like this had been in place the Cabbies and Car owners would be out of luck.

I love the analysis that Ben does on so many pressing tech related issues.

I agree with the majority of what he said but I disagree that it is that clear cut that Apple’s rent seeking isn’t hurting costumers. While I’m no lawyer either, the Supreme Court case that is relevant here was dealing with the state of Illinois as a customer and the mass consumer markets are two different things and I believe the Supreme Court will deal with this in a separate lens.

Could be very well that Apple does win but the fact that a product like Spotify, to name one, is cheaper when bought through the Spotify website and more expensive on the App Store shows clearly that in fact this does harm customers. I think the Supreme Court could rule in a whole other direction on this because of that fact coupled with Apple allowing no other competition on the platform, meaning no way to download a second App Store or even link to purchasing the product on a website especially for digital goods.

I believe we are seeing normal corrections in the housing market which has been overheated due to low interest rates. It is not some big conspiracy by the government and it is not a big collapse as some are making it out to be.

1/8th of a percent on a 30 year mortgage equals 80 dollars more per month on a 500k home, over 30 years, that is 28 grand more you are paying. The mortgage rates went from low 3% to high 5%, now even at 6%, in a matter of a few years. Of course this will cool the market a bit, people can do the math that much more in interest is hundreds of thousands.

This is very different from the 2008 crisis where people that had no business owning homes were defaulting on their loans. This is just supply and demand, standard capitalism. Home prices will come down a bit and they will start selling more homes.

I have had an iPhone since the first one and access to the App Store since they introduced it in the 3G.

I completely agree that prices on Apps have come down but that is just what happens when a new market is created. Supply and demand has to set in. Developers are guessing what people will pay at first and if they find they can sell millions more if they just drop the price to 99c then they might just do that. In my opinion the Apple App Store has had very little to do with those prices coming down.

While I do admit the App Store was incredibly innovative and has ushered in an era of new ways for developers to create/distribute/monetize this stuff it is hard to deny that if there was any competing way to load Apps that the 30% fee Apple collects would stand... not to mention the many practices that developers (and consumers) disagree with that Apple regularly does such banning apps that may compete with their products or somehow upset them.

Edit: I don’t want to come off as overly negative here, I love Apple and their products. I am simply arguing that a little competition here would do consumers good.

Unfortunately for Apple, I do think the App Store being an exclusive and default way to purchase and load apps on iOS is in fact causing prices of Apps, in many cases, to be higher than they should be.

The perfect example of this is the subscription services, right now you can get a cheaper subscription to a service such as Spotify if you buy it off the App Store. That is a prime example of how much the 30% payment to Apple is hurting developers and ultimately consumers... Apple is so upset about this they won’t let developers like Spotify link to buying the subscription on their own website anywhere on the app that is sold through their App Store, if that’s not Monopoly abuse I don’t know what is.

As much as I love Apples products I do feel that they have gotten away with a lot here, especially since there is zero other ways to load apps into iOS devices, in the very least consumers are paying 30% more for apps if there was a competing App Store on iOS that charged less to load apps.

Edit: whether the Supreme Court will see it this way or not is a whole other issue.

I think that hits the nail in the head.

A lot of people are asking why the got rid of the SE model and I think this is exactly why it doesn't actually help with their positioning.

I completely agree with the sentiment.

I see this as a strategy from Apple. Unfortunately for their supplier's Apple's strategy to destroy Android seems to be somewhat counterintuitive, it involves selling fewer iPhones. It involves doubling down on premium and having these older phones last far longer. By definition that will mean a bigger used market which Apple seems to be embracing especially with the recent iOS update to actually, for probably the first time, make older phones faster for a change rather than slow them down. I think they have realized that their eco-system is far more valuable and having android owners switch to older iphones which seem to be holding up almost as well as new android devices not only does not cheapen their brand but brings in droves to the eco-system which is the thing with the real value at the end of the day.

May sound far-fetched but every step they have taken lately points to this strategy, dont be surprised when they post more record profits.

I think people are failing to see that not all apps are huge monolithic applications; for most of those apps Angular works just fine.

In fact we should be striving to get away from all of those monolithic code bases as much as we can. In the cases where we can't get away from that then we should be going with tried and trusted methods of building those apps and probably relying on the server a hell of a lot more for those kinds of really large/enterprise/corporate apps.

Most use cases for angular are to make a web app that pulls and pushes data from some Restful service. Angular lets us take that web app, through cordova/phonegap/etc, and wrap it into a mobile ready application that you can push to an app store.

Whats wrong with that?