News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by okareaman on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:13PM (#27935712)
I really dislike this writing structure of "before I get to the point, let me tell you a story about my life"

Edit: I'm not alone, https://style.mla.org/dont-bury-the-lede/

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by khazhoux on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:29PM (#27936323)
I can understand why the style may seem offputting, but the thing to understand is that it has been traditionally very hard to engage with the public on this topic of robotic advancement. In fact, I know a bit about this myself, having been in the robotics space for over a decade. But my own struggles in the field only reflect a longer trend, which I can even trace back to my grandfather.

Growing up in a strict Lutheran household in the southwest England town of Flenkelshire, Elias Nathaniel "Kazoo" Pendleton III did not immediately stand out among his peers. Born with dull red hair, one leg three inches shorter than the other, and shoulders that somehow resembled cornish hens, young Elias was a frequent target for the town bullies. A child at that time has only three options: fight harder, run faster, or invent some kind of device that would enable him to escape his tormentors. Luckily (by chance or by fate), Flenkelshire was home to a radio-electronics store, Bundleron's Radio and Horseshoe Supplies, which gave young Elias just the right ingredients to hatch his escape plan. And hatch a plan he did, though it would take twenty years for the town to understand exactly what had happened.

The first trap was set in the Fall of 1951. Winston Churchill had returned to power. The Festival of Britain had just wrapped up and lit the imagination of attendees and non-attendees alike. And Elias Nathaniel "Kazoo" Pendleton III, now well-armed with a stock of electronics, metalwork, and several years of intense study, went into action...

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by acevesj on Friday July 23, 2021 @07:18PM (#27936764)
I knew this was going nowhere and still read through it with excitement
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by systemvoltage on Friday July 23, 2021 @07:25PM (#27936821)
Ah, it’s refreshing to see some comedy in this politically enraged atmosphere. Thanks for the laugh on a rather dim Friday for me.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by khazhoux on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:00PM (#27937138)
tips hat
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by breakfastbar on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:44PM (#27936467)
Bravo
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by beardyw on Saturday July 24, 2021 @04:59AM (#27939341)
Thanks so much for this. Sadly Bundleron's are online only now.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by khazhoux on Sunday July 25, 2021 @04:55AM (#27947769)
LOL. Yes, it's just not the same.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by alfiedotwtf on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:40PM (#27937393)
Your comment made a great start to my weekend.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by kwhitefoot on Saturday July 24, 2021 @03:52AM (#27939144)
Is this autobiographical or is the similarity between the nickname Kazoo and your HN username khazhoux entirely coincidental?
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by giovannibonetti on Saturday July 24, 2021 @10:10AM (#27941074)
He's talking about his grandfather, so it is not a surprise he has the same last name
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by polynomial on Saturday July 24, 2021 @04:50AM (#27939321)
maybe they're just really really into kazoos
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by lanewinfield on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:21PM (#27935794)
You will not be a fan of recipe blogs anywhere on the internet.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by mchusma on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:28PM (#27935834)
Recipe for french toast: Step 1: Learn the history of France Step 2: learn the history of toast Step 3: heat bread, eggs, milk in a pan
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by joezydeco on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:31PM (#27935863)
Keep going. The ingredient list is on page 12.

One time I inadvertently hit print on a recipe like this and the print dialog estimated 45 pages.

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by spoonjim on Saturday July 24, 2021 @01:12PM (#27942641)
Few people pay attention to their print stylesheets anymore but some recipe sites do and it’s great.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by timClicks on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:43PM (#27937414)
Ahh the wonders of SEO
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by mcintyre1994 on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:10PM (#27936191)
You forgot the history of the writer’s family and the impact that French toast has had on them for generations.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by christophilus on Friday July 23, 2021 @07:33PM (#27936924)
Blogs in general, I’d say. As for recipe sites: https://based.cooking/

That is where it’s at.

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by doctor_eval on Friday July 23, 2021 @09:36PM (#27937682)
Squeal emoji
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by iratewizard on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:24PM (#27937291)
This is fantastic
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by tomp on Saturday July 24, 2021 @03:18AM (#27939046)
SeriousEats. It’s truly amazing. Most of their recipes are split into two pages, one is just ingredients+steps, and the other is a “story” - but not an irrelevant story of a person, dish, or how it tastes on a warm summer day, but instead it lists different experiments the author tested, results, dispels common myths, …
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by slimsag on Friday July 23, 2021 @11:02PM (#27938069)
Boy oh boy do I have the recipe for you!

http://slimsag.com/best-apache-chef-recipe/1438731.htm

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by dreamcompiler on Saturday July 24, 2021 @10:33AM (#27941262)
This made my day.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by human on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:32PM (#27936345)
That hits so close to home. I’ve given up searching for recipes online because of this. And I’m not even mentionning all the ads you have to scroll through.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by quintin on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:32PM (#27935867)
Most recipe blogposts these days have jump to recipe.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by rognjen on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:45PM (#27937424)
The mitigating factor for recipes is you can just scroll down till you see a table.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by SV_BubbleTime on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:26PM (#27935824)
Those have gotten way worse. It’s an SEO thing right?
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by eps on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:18PM (#27936253)
It's viewed as a DRM measure. Recipes are not copyrightable unless they are attached to a story. It's probably an urban legend, but can't blame poor food bloggers from acting on it.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by compiler-guy on Friday July 23, 2021 @07:19PM (#27936770)
It's not an urban legend in the United States:

====

Based on this reasoning, the United States Copyright Office Compendium, the Office’s manual for examiners, states that a mere listing of ingredients or contents is not copyrightable, as lists are not protected by copyright law (chapter 314.4(F)). The Office has also stated that a “simple set of directions” is uncopyrightable.

In addition, courts have found that recipes are wholly factual and functional, and therefore uncopyrightable. As the Sixth Circuit described in Tomaydo-Tomahdo, LLC v. Vozary, “the list of ingredients is merely a factual statement, and as previously discussed, facts are not copyrightable. Furthermore, a recipe’s instructions, as functional directions, are statutorily excluded from copyright protection.”

https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by AlexCoventry on Friday July 23, 2021 @11:12PM (#27938101)
I would have thought the same reasoning would apply to software. I'm curious about how reasoning differs in that case.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by Octoth0rpe on Friday July 23, 2021 @10:01PM (#27937802)
I have to think part of it is also the pay structure of food bloggers being paid by the word.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by Bjartr on Saturday July 24, 2021 @09:40AM (#27940856)
I'm pretty sure recipes aren't copyrightable, even when they are attached to a story.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by yencabulator on Sunday July 25, 2021 @06:08PM (#27953386)
I'd assume it prevents legally scraping & copying the whole site, at the cost of a silly amount of human labor writing the fluff.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by jbc1 on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:48PM (#27937442)
I just think they're part of the non-fiction fantasy genre of entertainment alongside cooking, travel, and house buying + renovating shows.

They're ostensibly informational, but 99% of people consuming them aren't genuinely looking to cook the thing, travel to the place, or buy and renovate a house.

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by loa_in_ on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:30PM (#27935854)
Clearly an attempt to lure you in when you're hungry and searching for some common queries like history of famous places.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by acdanger on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:33PM (#27935880)
I’ve assumed it was to create a longer page which can hold more ads.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by kortilla on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:46PM (#27935986)
Recipes by themselves aren’t copyrightable. Bullshit stories are.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by mandelbrotwurst on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:55PM (#27936065)
Does copyright for a story containing a recipe protect against use of the recipe outside the context of the story?
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by lbotos on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:32PM (#27936346)
No, but it stops straight scraping, and requires a scraper to do a little bit more work to copy the recipe.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by kwhitefoot on Saturday July 24, 2021 @04:01AM (#27939166)
Not much extra work surely. Most recipes are on sites that use the same template for every recipe so it's pretty easy for a scraper to find the ingredients and method. The structure is usually even labelled with meaningful class names on the elements.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by numpad0 on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:40PM (#27936425)
I think the question is “is it possible to split recipe from BS story programmatically”
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by CrazyStat on Saturday July 24, 2021 @10:11AM (#27941087)
Generally yes. Most recipe blogs use semantic markup so that Google recognizes it as a recipe, which also makes it easy to scrape programmatically.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by CrazyStat on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:20PM (#27936266)
No
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by mappu on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:59PM (#27937500)
Yes - it's not specifically that the recipe sites have changed to do this, but rather, that Google is preferring to show you sites that are doing this.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by dreamcompiler on Saturday July 24, 2021 @10:25AM (#27941181)
I want an AI browser plugin just for recipe sites called GTTP (Get To The Point).

Probably could build it with regex, actually.

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by themolecularman on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:08PM (#27936175)
I dislike this story in journalism and podcasts too. I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts:

> Before Y was murdered, they lived in X. X is a quiet town, the type of place where you don't need to lock your doors. Y has a happy upbringing collecting flowers along the river at...

Like we get it, this is the first half of every 1-hour long true-crime podcast. Also quite often the first half of every long-form article.

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by mkwarman on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:30PM (#27936335)
I don't mind it as much in true crime podcasts when it's done well. Totally agree that the generic "it was a peaceful town where nobody locked their doors blah blah blah" can get old quickly. But hearing about the unique lives of the victims in murder cases can definitely add to the story. And in podcasts more focused on the investigative side (ex. Someone Knows Something) knowing the background info can even be critical to solving the puzzle so to speak.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by gadabout on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:28PM (#27937323)
Agree, also podcasts in that genre are often more about "story telling" (which requires - dun duh dun - backstory), but articles do not.

I do not mind 5 minutes of backstory on a 60 minute podcast. I do mind 2 minutes of backstory on a 5 minute read.

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by Olumde on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:56PM (#27937486)
Oh gosh I hate this about wondery business wars[0]. Very informative but also very annoying when they conjure up complete/narrated conversations between people e.g. a tech CEO and an investor or customer. This happens a LOT in the show.

I'm like, "you weren't there man!!!"

PS: I'm not the only one who thinks wondery shows are "overproduced" https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueCrimePodcasts/comments/byk8ix/d...

[0] https://wondery.com/shows/business-wars/

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by jszymborski on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:16PM (#27935744)
Maybe I'm off base here, as it's no small feat by any means, but it's especially jarring to read when "first-website-building-SaaS" has so little to do with industrial robotics at its surface.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by ManBlanket on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:35PM (#27936378)
I had a similar impression. It was jarring to say the least and made me ask so many questions that had nothing to do with the story. Does this person lead every tech related conversation with, "When I was the CEO of Moonbeans, the world's first SAAS blockchain beanbag chair crowd sourcing platform" just to buy some credibility? Why do they feel the need to tell us that? Do they have inadequacy issues or is it the opposite? I can barely remember what that article was about. Robotics? Oh, right, shame it's an Alphabet subsidiary. It's bound to end up in the Google graveyard when it fails to be one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world. Even if they do great things and make a great product, it's the fate which will inevitably follow most of Alphabet's projects until the SEC breaks them up, this being one of many good reasons.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by SN76477 on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:10PM (#27936195)
"On a cold autumn day in Brooklyn a young child crosses the street with his parents."

How every NPR story about criminal justice starts.

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by ignoramous on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:01PM (#27936114)
Can we blame that on the-most-important-job-of-a-leader-is-to-tell-an-inspiring-story narrative prevalent in the tech world? https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/nh3ubp0nRaw
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by skybrian on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:53PM (#27936045)
I like inverted pyramid style too, but it’s a very brief intro and letting the CEO of a new company introduce themselves doesn’t seem so bad? You could skip the first paragraph.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by okareaman on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:30PM (#27936332)
I often don't know how much to skip. Where is the point? I often give up unless it's something I'm really interested in.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by skybrian on Saturday July 24, 2021 @10:07AM (#27941055)
That's probably for the best. Reading things just because you're there, even though you're not actually curious about them, seems like a bad habit.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by andrew_ on Friday July 23, 2021 @07:42PM (#27937001)
This is really making me rethink my penchant for "the backstory." I'm so guilty of that so so often.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by baxtr on Saturday July 24, 2021 @01:43AM (#27938760)
I hat this too. Especially for newsletters. They tease you with an interesting headline and then let you scan the entire thing to find maybe just a link to the topic teased.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by yunohn on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:59PM (#27936096)
There is literally just one short paragraph of personal intro by the CEO, before getting the “plot”.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by okareaman on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:33PM (#27936350)
I'm not trying to be disagreeable, but...

> Intrinsic is working to unlock the creative and economic potential of industrial robotics

...is under the fold, under two paragraphs and an image

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by yunohn on Saturday July 24, 2021 @02:07AM (#27938856)
The “second” paragraph is one sentence, and announces Instrinsic. Having an image is not something I would consider wrong either.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by mongol on Saturday July 24, 2021 @03:41AM (#27939113)
How is lede pronounced? Like lead?
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by grey_earthling on Saturday July 24, 2021 @08:37AM (#27940381)
When typesetting a printed newspaper, the leading (pronounced like “ledding”) is the space between lines of text, originally physical strips of lead (Pb).

The lede (“leed”) is the most important statement in the story. The word comes from “lead” (also pronounced “leed”), because it's the statement that everything else should follow. It's conventionally spelt differently to avoid confusion with “leading”.

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by _Understated_ on Saturday July 24, 2021 @04:35AM (#27939282)
I believe you say it like "leed"
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by kwhitefoot on Saturday July 24, 2021 @04:02AM (#27939171)
And how is lead pronounced? Like lede?
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by addicted on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:36PM (#27937368)
It’s a blog. Not a journalistic article.

The whole point of a blog is to be a personal log.

Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by bubblethink on Saturday July 24, 2021 @01:10AM (#27938579)
Off-Topic: I would recommend aspiring writers to read, or better still, write, academic papers. Once you get the hang of what makes a good paper, it helps with all forms of non-fiction writing.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by ugh123 on Sunday July 25, 2021 @11:13PM (#27955159)
I agree. First two paragraphs are completely irrelevant and offer no support to the actual topic. Just flexing on career. Kinda sounded like typical LinkedIn content these days
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by m3kw9 on Friday July 23, 2021 @07:32PM (#27936902)
Yes, but I just skip the bs and scrolled to the point.
Re:Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company by rognjen on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:44PM (#27937420)
That's exactly why I'm in the comments looking for a TLDR