This was always going to happen, Atom was always doomed to fail.
Why was that technology stack used to develop Atom? A browser window to render a text editor?
If Atom wanted to take over the world, it should have chosen a technology stack that made it run AT LEAST as quick as Sublime Text. Instead we got Eclipse. Therefore, it's never going to get traction outside a niche.
LESSON LEARNED: Choose a technology stack that benefits the end user, not one that suits the developer of the software.
That can't be correct, I get lots of traffic from China, and use Cloudflare. Unfortunately, the traffic is often SQL injection type garbage, so I'm going to be upgrading to Cloudflare Pro as it seems they block such traffic.
What is the cost to produce a page like this? Must be high, versus the cost of a normal article with inline images. I cannot imagine that the ROI is worth it. Therefore I think that this article format will disappear for economic reasons.
It had over 3.5 Million page views the first week. Estimates are that it took about three man-months to write and design the long article. But that was two years ago, and without any of the tools and experience they have now.
That's expensive, but napkin-calculations can be done:
Average yearly at NY Times according to Google is: $98 167
That means about $33 000 plus some taxes and costs for three monte, say, $50 000 then.
Can you sell one ad space in such an article at $50 000 / 3 500 000 = $14.29 per 1k impression?
NY Times sells ads at $6.29 for 1k impression on their sports pages. On the Snow Fall article three such ads would be enough to cover the estimated costs.
As a comparative note: A full page print ad costs $10 per estimated reader, it is possible that this Norway article is also published in the regular print, and will therefore recuperate some costs there as well.
I don't think so. If you look at theatre for comparison (which is also an act of storytelling), most plays are simple amateur pieces, that anybody with some skills and knowledge can put together. However there are also very expensive professional theaters that that sometimes tell the same stories as the amateurs for many thousands times the cost of the amateur pies. Yet expensive theatre is found in every major city.
To keep the analogy, NY-times is doing web-page stories Broadway-style. Perhaps they found an unexplored marked, perhaps it is too soon. But sooner or later, the art-form of story telling on the web is going to be taken to the next level done by professionals for a lot more money than any amateurs telling the same story.
You forget that sometimes we go to events and places not because of the places or events themselves, but for their image or the people we expect will also attend. The same doesn't work for the web.
I wondered about that too, but after hearing a talk by one of the lead tech dudes involved with The Guardian and the like, and after seeing some of the 'frameworks' that are popping up specifically for this purpose (Ractive.js comes to mind), I think that even after an initial 'slump', we'll start seeing more and more of this kind of stuff.
In fact, I'm betting on it by trying to find a market for being the creator of things like this. I haven't gotten started yet, but it's at the top of my 'business opportunities' list. I think I mostly just need to find someone who is good at visualizing data, or dive into that myself.
I can see Mike Bostock among the creators - D3 creator can definitely accomlish a great feat in short time! His data visualisation/storytelling skills are just amazing!
The technology is not nearly ready. Not in a city. It's like flying drone delivery. Easy to demonstrate in a single controlled setting, but nearly impossible to actually implement in the real world.
Actually landing UAVs is far harder than automatically parking a car.
The driving vs flying after take off is what is easier. Landing and take off.. nope.
Note that drone could mean a car in this case. UAV being an unmanned aerial vehicule.
With a modest infrastructure of marked landing pads on roofs, I think UAV landings are easier than automated car parking. If you're expecting delivery UAVs to fly under the tree line along sidewalks and yards to land directly on a residential porch, then yes, that's extremely difficult. But I highly doubt that this is a remotely feasible plan within a decade or so.
It's hard for me to even imagine how a self-driving car could manage somewhere like large swaths of Manhattan where a certain amount of, umm, aggression is needed to make any forward progress. Though it will likely happen some day (probably multiple decades from now).
As it is, I'd even settle for voice control on my phone that could reliably understand me.
> a certain amount of, umm, aggression is needed to make any forward progress
They added a slight "aggression" back in 2011, if other cars aren't letting it out it starts pushing forwards a bit:
> Sometimes, however, the car has to be more "aggressive." When going through a four-way intersection, for example, it yields to other vehicles based on road rules; but if other cars don't reciprocate, it advances a bit to show to the other drivers its intention. Without programming that kind of behavior, Urmson said, it would be impossible for the robot car to drive in the real world.
I really don't understand why people think small behavioural differences like that require decades of work. Things that humans find difficult and stressful are likely to be the things that are significantly easier when you have a reaction time measured in milliseconds and full 360 degree vision.
I hope you're right but the very uneven progress of AI generally--especially when it involves real world interfaces--makes me skeptical. As I wrote elsewhere, even voice recognition is very much still a mixed bag.
But voice recognition is something we take many years to learn, even when are brains are highly plastic. I find it hard to understand people when they speak often. We disambiguate heavily based on context and expectation, very complex issues.
Oh, I fully agree. The fact that it's been the subject of so much research and remains only very incompletely solved demonstrates just how difficult a problem it is. I'm just saying that navigating a potentially dangerous machine through a physical world populated with erratic human beings is also very complex and difficult--albeit probably far less so in some contexts (limited access highways in good weather) than others (Manhattan, Boston).
Google is closing in on over a million miles with no accidents, and have decided to focus on refining their intelligence for city driving. 6 years tops.
This trend is terrible, not only those webpages are hard to read, but they're also hogging CPU. I had to close a tab with it, because it reduced my remaining time on battery from 50mins to 20 mins...
Same, though I think perhaps the ideal solution is somewhere in the middle. If built with it in mind, the page should gracefully degrade to something more basic, where the videos are all optional. I can see how this would put strain on mobile devices(as another comment responding to the parent pointed out)
I see your point.
But I love that it's one feature at a time, rather than being placed between two columns of links to other stories, other photos, automatically-playing videos, and ads.
I would rather see the text broken up more with images and pullquotes rather than less. I find a story like this presented as a bland slab of text so mundane unless I have the time to really sit down and read it, which is never.
That's an extraordinary claim - I presume you have extraordinary evidence? I mean... this is Hacker News, not a conspiracy website.