I'm Marco Arment: creator of Instapaper, technology writer, and coffee enthusiast.
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Dan Benjamin, my podcast co-host, asked me to record a special episode in John Siracusa’s Hypercritical time slot, since John couldn’t record this week. Those are big shoes to fill, so I said I’d only do it if Merlin joined us.
This is the result.
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MG Siegler:
Why would VEVO pirate content? Because it was easier than getting it legally. This is the actual root cause of piracy online. It’s not shady, masked individuals at swanky events commandeering computers to pirate for the hell of it. It’s VEVO employees. It’s everyone.
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Nate Anderson thoroughly disassembles RIAA CEO Cary Sherman’s New York Times op-ed, a blabbering, rage-filled diversion-fest so badly conceived and written that it makes me question the editorial standards of The New York Times.
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I’ve probably kept up with Dan’s Data for longer than any other website. That AeroPress that everyone discovered last year? I remember reading his review in 2006. That’s nothing — I read his review of the Pine D’music MP3-CD player before buying one in 2000. And if you think I review headphones acceptably, Dan puts me to shame.
His posts were the inspiration for Instapaper’s automatic Wikipedia popovers when you tap a Wikipedia link, since he copiously links to Wikipedia and I just had to know what he was talking about without leaving the page.1
And his new Psycho Science series on the blog is fantastic. This article (remember, this is a link post) got me reading about borosilicate versus tempered glass and inspecting our Pyrex all evening.
If you’re my kind of geek and have been reading on the internet for a long time, you should definitely be reading his site and blog (which aren’t the same, probably for legacy reasons).
Note to Instapaper competitors: Do not start reading Dan’s writing. ↩
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Amazing (previously). This shows two things:
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David Heinemeier Hansson:
The world is full of ideas that can be executed with 10 to 20 hours per week, let alone 40. The number of projects that are truly impossible unless you put in 80 or 120 hours per week are vanishingly small by comparison.
This is of course nothing new. We’ve been playing this bongo drum for years. But every time I see people crumble and quit from the crunch-mode pressure cooker, I think what a shame, it didn’t have to be like that.
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The popular Path app was caught uploading and permanently storing people’s entire address books on Path’s servers. People were upset, but what’s scarier is the bigger issue: apparently, this is a very common practice among popular apps.
It’s easy to set Path on fire for this, but accessing the iOS Address Book is essential to most “Find my friends on this service” features. Indeed, I use the Address Book for a similar feature in Instapaper as well. But there’s a big implementation difference between my method and Path’s.
The two Instapaper features that access the Address Book
Instapaper accesses the Address Book for two features:
SELECT statement on the user database to find any matches. That’s it. The list of email addresses isn’t stored (the query isn’t even logged), and only email addresses are sent, not anybody’s name, phone number, address, or other information.When implementing these features, I felt like iOS had given me far too much access to Address Book without forcing a user prompt. It felt a bit dirty. Even though I was only accessing the data when a customer explicitly asked me to, I wanted to look at only what I needed to and get out of there as quickly as possible. I never even considered storing the data server-side or looking at more than I needed to.
This, apparently, is not a common implementation courtesy.
We can’t prevent services with poor judgment or low ethical standards from doing creepy things with the data once it’s sent to them. We can’t even realistically use App Review to only permit access to the Address Book fields (email, name, phone, etc.) that are justifiable for any given app to access, because there are too many gray areas.
But Apple can, and should, assure users that no app can read their contact data without their knowledge and explicit permission. I don’t know why this hasn’t always been required, but it probably isn’t a good enough reason to justify the erosion of user trust in iOS apps that this could cause.
Apple needs to change the Address Book API to require user permission first, like Core Location and Push Notifications do. I don’t care how many applications break as a result. Not requiring user permission to date should be treated as a security hole and patched promptly.
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Thanks to kooaba for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week:
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On the difficulties of running a booming startup while trying to maintain a family life:
Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.
Whatever startup you’re working on right now probably won’t exist in ten years. Probably not even in five. It’s important to maintain a perspective of what’s really going to matter, long-term, in your life.
Instapaper is one person and no funding. I work completely from home. I don’t even put an unhealthy amount of hours into it, and it’s very low-needs (and therefore, low-stress) to keep the service running. This is a lifestyle that I’m not willing to give up for the promise of taking VC money, hiring a bunch of people, making everything free, and hoping to cash out after a few years of nonstop “crunch mode” by selling it to a big company so they can ruin and “sunset” it a year later.
Most people can always point to a reason why it’s not a convenient time to have children, but my wife and I couldn’t think of a single one. We know that we will never have a better time than right now. So our first child is due in April.
I hope to maintain as healthy of a perspective as Jeff has.
Great work, Jeff, and best wishes.
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Honeywell makes crappy, ugly thermostats. They’re the market leader, but they’ve been sitting on their asses, not doing much. So thermostat innovation and design has been pretty stagnant for years.
Nest’s is by far the most innovative thermostat we’ve seen for a long time, but it looks like they’re going to have a lot of problems with these Honeywell patents, which will probably impair (or, at worst, prevent) them from pushing this stagnant industry forward.
Remind me again how the patent system promotes innovation.
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Stephen Hackett interviewed me for his great Writers I Read series.
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I often accidentally hit the wrong button in the iPhone music-playback control bar, because they’re too close together since the introduction of AirPlay:
When playing music, the behavior of these makes sense (for the most part), since it mimics the behavior of CD players:
When you’re listening to a podcast or audiobook — anything “bookmarkable” that remembers its playback position, rather than starting from the beginning each time it’s played — the behavior of the “Previous Track” button has a significant side effect:
If your finger slightly misses the “Play/Pause” button, probably the most commonly pressed button in this group when listening to podcasts or audiobooks, it is very likely that you’ll hit one of the buttons next to it.
Accidentally hitting the “Next Track” button is a minor annoyance, but its behavior is reasonable.
But the “Previous Track” button loses and resets my playback position, which is extremely frustrating and disruptive to listening. And there’s no “Undo”.
It’s a form of data loss: not in the traditional sense of needing to recreate a document, but because it requires me to take additional time to manually restore the correct state after the disruptive, non-undoable result of a very simple accidental action.
I know this is a tricky design problem, but my proposed solution is simple:1
Stop making the “Previous Track” button behave like it does on CD players, where tapping it first brings you to the beginning of the current track, and tapping it again within a short time goes to the previous track. Even on CD players, that was often annoying.
Instead, make it behave just like the “Next Track” button in reverse: always just seek to the previous track. If the previous track is bookmarkable, resume from its last-played position, and if not, play it from the beginning.
People who actually want to reset the playback position of a bookmarkable file before it’s finished, which is probably a very uncommon action, can simply drag the progress scrubber all the way to the left.
This is admittedly dodging the exacerbating factor that the buttons are too close together. But the position-losing behavior of “Previous Track” even annoys me when I’m using the iPhone remote-clicker or my car’s controls to change tracks. It’s primarily a problem with the universal behavior of “Previous Track”. ↩
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Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic:
So, if tripling the size of the social network to 3,000,000,000 users is not going to be enough to justify its valuation with its current revenue per user, there is only one strategic direction for Facebook to go. It needs to generate more revenue per user. A lot more.
This is one of the problems with being so big that the world’s population is limiting your growth in a market that demands ever-increasing growth.
(Via Jim Ray.)
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In this week’s podcast, Dan and I successfully avoided talking about development.
Instead, we talked about USB outlets and my experiences so far with my Nest thermostats. I haven’t officially reviewed the Nest yet because I wanted to spend more time with it, so consider this my stand-in review for now.
If you want to jump right to the Nest discussion, it starts at 26:40.
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Google dominated search and online ads with a lot of great engineering and hard work, then they leveraged their search dominance and more great work to build a strong presence in webmail, maps, and many smaller categories.
Geeks like us commended them for how well they operated their business, seemingly (mostly) living up to their geeky, feel-good “Don’t be evil” motto1, “winning” by releasing (mostly) quality products that catered to our geeky preferences while gaining huge marketshare.
But social networking never worked well for them. The battles between social giants bought Google some time, but now, Facebook has established themselves into as strong of a position in social networking as Google holds in search and advertising. As Facebook extends its social dominance into more areas that may threaten Google’s profits and relevance, Google knows it has to fight back and is finally making a strong attempt. But, unlike when Microsoft realized it was late to the web over a decade ago, Google’s big attempt to invade social networking with their own Google+ product hasn’t worked.
It’s the first time that Google has largely failed against a threat of this magnitude.
It’s easy not to “be evil” when you’re ahead. But when you’re backed into a corner and your usual strategies aren’t working, it’s easy to get frustrated, scared, and angry, and throw previously held morals and standards out the window.
People with very strong values can maintain their standards and dignity even under immense pressure. But that’s no easy feat. And every time we get a peek into Google’s leadership, from intentional patent infringement and anticompetitive aggression to selling out net neutrality and now tarnishing search relevance, it’s increasingly clear that Google’s upper management is willing to do a lot of “evil”, even by Google’s own previous standards, to get their way when they’re not winning.
In the first version of Bullshit, I had misquoted the “Don’t be evil” motto as “Do no evil”, and a reader complained by email that I was being too strict. The difference between the two is subtle but important.
“Do no evil” is a much stronger statement: don’t do anything “evil”, whatever that means.
“Don’t be evil” allows a lot of wiggle room and equivocation. What does it mean to be evil? Can you still do evil here and there without being evil overall? Doing evil seems more concrete and easily verifiable by others, but being evil sounds like the kind of label you’d be able to escape if you only do evil occasionally, or if you think what you’re doing is justifiable. ↩
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David Smith:
The Japanese government requires that Apple withhold 20% of your profits from App Store sales unless you have filed forms demonstrating that you are a foreign company and taxable there instead. The forms are a bit complex and the process a bit cumbersome, but unless you complete it 20% of whatever you make in Japan is taken and not returned.
If you sell on the App Store, read this.
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J. R. Daniel Kirk:
However, coffee bean weight is determined, to no little extent, by the water naturally present in the bean. When you roast a coffee bean, one effect of the roasting process is that the bean dries out.
The longer you roast the bean, the drier–and therefore lighter!–the bean becomes. …
So here’s the question: should we, in fact, measure coffee by volume rather than weight in order to produce more consistent coffee? Or, alternatively, should we vary the weight of coffee such that fewer grams are in play for darker roasts and more for lighter roasts?
Great question.
Water doesn’t account for much of an unroasted bean’s mass. According to strangers on the internet:
Water accounts for between 8 to 14 percent of the weight of unroasted coffee. … The total loss weight loss for an average roast is approximately 16 percent.
I like to use about 12g of beans in my AeroPress. That would be about 14g of unroasted beans, and honestly, I don’t think I would notice the difference between 12g and 14g most of the time. And that’s the weight difference for the entire roasting process.
But the difference between light and dark roasts is very small relative to the entire roasting process. Most good roasts are likely to fall in the narrow band between 430–460°F.
All of the water, being heated far past its boiling point into steam, probably escapes long before the lightest usable roasting temperature is reached, leaving no meaningful water-weight difference between light and dark roasts.
But let’s assume that there’s a tiny difference. For a 12g serving, a 1% weight difference is about 1 coffee bean. Your kitchen scale probably isn’t precise enough to notice.
So there might be a water-weight difference between lighter and darker roasts, but it’s probably too small to matter when you brew.
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The New York Times reports on Newer Technology’s Power2U outlet with built-in USB ports for charging USB-powered things.
It’s an interesting idea that I’ve been following for a while. But even though I’m renovating my home office right now, I need to buy new outlets for it next week, and I’m a huge geek, I’m still not buying these.
There are some alternatives that avoid some of these downsides. But even if I could get a perfectly executed USB-outlet combo, I don’t think it would solve a problem that I really have.
The biggest problem is most outlets’ location: it’s not very convenient to plug a USB device into an outlet that’s near the floor. Many USB cables, including Apple’s, are barely long enough to reach an outlet from a desk. This would make a lot more sense for outlets at desk or countertop height.
But I’m also just not very bothered by USB power bricks by themselves. You still need to keep the USB cables around, after all, so these USB outlets are only saving you from dealing with half of each device’s charger. How many USB-charging bricks are you really likely to be saved from over the lifetime of these outlets before you get devices that can’t be properly charged by them?
If these still make sense to you, by all means, go for it. But I just don’t see the appeal in practice.
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It was an honor to be interviewed on one of my favorite podcasts, NPR’s Planet Money.
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Thanks to Kooaba Déjà Vu for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week:
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Features:
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