It feels like HN still upholds the early promise of the internet (along with Wikipedia and very small number of other websites). But what will the next 15 year bring about?
Greed killed the golden goose and this article points this out in a simple and convincing way.
> The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge
This doesn't immediately provide a solution because knowledge sharing does need infrastructure (which needs to be developed and maintained etc.) But as the (relatively) tiny budgets of organizations like wikimedia indicate, if you have the right incentives less might be more.
There is room for money to made in the digital economy, lots of it actually, but it will require us to pull the plug on adtech and all the ways it has degenerated. In broad brush we need to cleanly bifurcate into 1) trully free commons and 2) pay-to-play services that respect and are accountable to the client/user
I think the article makes a very important point about under-resourced developer teams but misses an opportunity to point out that most other teams within organizations and businesses face similar constraints.
I think this favors stacks and frameworks where the business logic of a domain is already reflected, at least partially.
This might explain why some open source frameworks persist and thrive even while their "tech" is deemed obsolete / deficient...
Something that people with casual exposure to musical notation probably don't know is that before the standard 5-staff notation became ubiquitus there were quite a few alternatives, maybe the most interesting from a mathematical perspective being the Byzantine notation
Broadly speaking, while the modern system focuses on pitch values and an elaborate (modulated) map from frequency space to physical space (paper), older systems used in the Byzantium used "deltas" or the first differences of pitch values.
So you start with a base note (lets say C) and then you go +1, +1, -2 to indicate pitch changes (in semitones). This is quite well adapted to monophonic chant. This notation was never developed to cope with the complexity of modern music but its not immediately obvious that it can't be done
"Google's results are clearly getting worse". Can somebody quantify this in some objective way?
As in: I have this concrete metric (that anybody can inspect / replicate) and I saw it declining from 201X to 2022 etc.
I don't dispute that it is a true fact. The comments reveal both ways that this manifests, inventive workarounds and possible causes. But without having read through the 765 comments(!) (at time of posting) I don't see something that can be quoted as a measured reality.
NB: It would be really useful to have such an independent quality index, also for future reference when invariably somebody provides a "better" search engine.
I get a sense that the julia community is more anxious about adoption than, e.g. python or R communities. Its probably natural given it is a relative newcomer in the broader "data science" / "scientific computing" thing and in the past years there was an explosion of interest / hype around some of its subsets (in particular anything that can be labelled machine learning or AI)
But participating in that "hype" is not necessarily what will entrench julia for the long term. Turning its unique characteristics (unique versus these other two open source contestants, not across the entire programming language landscape) into unmissable developer / user experiences seems to me a safer route. E.g what makes R impossible to ignore is the richness of its statistical toolkit. What makes python impossible to ignore is the productivity boost for typical tasks etc.
Ideally you'd want some distilled and organized subset of "good" (informative) discussions, comments etc to persisted as a separate hierarchy that is subject focused and not timeline oriented. A subjective wikipedia of sorts (less encyclopedic, less moderated) that is composed on the fly.
For a long time advertising was the art of creating "wants". For a century it worked "like a charm". We are now living in a world that (at least in so called developed world) is overconsuming by a very large factor.
The proliferation of the incredibly regressive practice of building and selling behavioral profiles of unsuspecting "consumers" may in part be due to the cannibalistic arms race of an exhausted economic paradigm.
Somehow we need to find sane digital ways to connect people who have to say, sell, announce something with people who want to hear, buy, be informed about something.
It doesn't sound that complicated if we lose our unsustainable ways of thinking and acting
it sooths my soul that next to the cryptobros and data oligarchs there is a small community that chips away at making the world a better place - one command line tool at a time
if the hardware landscape settles for a while (in terms of the capabilities of devices and networks - which is not a crazy precondition given Moore's law has run its course) then it may be that these server/client pendulum oscillations get damped around an "optimum" of sorts.
An optimum defined both in terms of what it enables users to do with software but also how easy it is for developers to deliver it. Since simple is better than complex it feels that any architecture that does not require two distinct ecosystems might have an advantage (all else being equal).
If it was just a "scam" it would be easier to resolve this. Alas it is a complex and evolving mix of all sorts of factors:
* new software architectures based on cryptography and additional communication patterns (aka consensus) which may or may not have long term utility, but are "real"
* a loose "anti-systemic" ideology that is in part deserved but also part half-baked / / misinformed / delusional. In any case it creates lots of talking points in societies that are mismanaged and "angry"
* buy-in and (partial) legitimization from frustrated parties (eg NGO's) that want to "solve the world's problems" and think blockchain might be the tool to fix humanity's faults
* defensive engagement by systemic parties (the same people that have brought society to its knees) that want to embrace and extinguish (just in case it might actually work)
* opportunistic engagement by intermediaries that could not care less what "asset" they make a market in, provided they get a cut
* opportunistic engagement by marketeers that could not care less what channel they use, provided it generates some exposure for their clients (NFT)
* greedy techies that feel left out from the tech oligopolies and found an alternative exploitative path to riches (print your own money)
* a younger generation that is 1) flush with cash, 2) has never had experienced fleecing by smooth operators so has no behavioral immunity 3) thinks this is all very "tech-savvy" and modern and thus kosher
Both BeeWare and Kivy are great projects adressing a space that could surely produce some very interesting applications. Offering seamless integration of the versatile python stack on mobile devices would be a game changer as far as I am concerned, turning the mobile more into a computing device as opposed to merely facilitating the fastest click to the cloud.
They seem under-resourced, though, especially BeeWare. Targeting platforms that do not support python natively feels like a task that would challenge even much larger teams
R is frequently compared with python and julia which are general purpose programming languages but it is not really a proper comparison. Once you approach R as a domain specific language / system then its various quirks and pecularities are more palatable and explainable: they are in a sense the price to pay for tapping a large domain of statistical analysis expertise that is not available elsewhere.
In a strange way the adoption of JS SPA's has made the "thinking-not-required" backend frameworks like Rails and Django less "opinionated" and thus requiring more thinking.
I don't know about the Ruby/Rails ecosystem but in Django there are now quite a few different ways to deliver the "same" user functionality depending on how much one splits the load between front / backend, whether and how much it is structured around DRF etc.
this seems to be the main new data point that is now evident for all to see
I mean it is sort of obvious to anybody not captured and with basic morals but such is the allure of greed that for ages people were cynically and hypocritically pretending otherwise
It may really be time to re-examine the text-only proposition (gemini style). There is this fear of missing out on visual content but I suspect this too could be handled.
As people commented already, meta / facebook will be a enormous cash cow for quite some time. This raises the interesting question of whether it could actually reinvent itself in some way.
Having an almost 100% concentration on a business model that is (thankfully) increasingly seen as a socially detrimental aberration, it means that they would need to diversify into more conventional tech business models the way, e.g., Alphabet/Google is trying to do [0]
The problem is, of-course, that honest tech business models are a well occupied ecological niche and in the absence of some regulatory/political granted monopoly the competition tends to turn lethal.
They could launch a cloud business for example, with the unique selling point: we know best how to collect and monetize your data, so we know best how to protect it :-).
[0] I am dismissing the "metaverse" thingy as some sort of smoke and mirrors that seems to be necessary to provide cover for precisely the kind of news now being discussed
Imagine this dismall planet dotted with decrepit nuclear plants, even as the societies that are supposed to keep them safe collapse either of their own accord, or due to interminable warfare.
When deciding on the wisdom of adopting a technology that will shape our fate for the next century you don't condition on the best (or even expected) scenario, you condition on the worst plausible scenario.
For a long as we haven't solved our obvious and serious socio-economic pathologies it is actually safer to keep burning carbon. At least that damage is in-principle reversible.