I used Zotero quite a bit in the past, the thing that ultimately drove me away is that when synchronizing you couldn't easily access the PDFs just via the filesystem. I use a nextcloud and also wanted to access PDFs from devices without Zotero installed and this turned out to be a pain at the time. Is this possible with more recent Zotero versions? Is the sync still cumbersome with a zotero account + self-hosted webdav?
Readit NewsTheCabin commented on Zotero 6 zotero.org/blog/zotero-6/... · Posted by u/Schiphol
TheCabin commented on Moving to London for a Tech Job relocate.me/blog/expat-st... · Posted by u/andrewstetsenko
It's astounding that people smart enough to land a job that pays enough to push them into the higher rate band of income tax are so often confused about how their taxes are actually calculated!
Sadly many countries have 0 education on this topic and it might not be straightforward to get hold on good information about the subject.
TheCabin commented on Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year? · Posted by u/break_the_bank
Buying a pen plotter last summer was one of the best decision for a while. As I start my journey into programming with generative art, using macromedia director and processing, I always wanted to be able to create my on physical prints.
So for the last months I got back to have fun writing code in my spare time. Some examples:
https://twitter.com/eskimobloood/status/1366300689652187140https://twitter.com/eskimobloood/status/1285159611599933441https://twitter.com/eskimobloood/status/1373317198119370753
Just logged in to say that this work is amazing and that I really like your style :)
I also keep coming back to generative art and think about getting a pen plotter for years already. Now I am getting one!
TheCabin commented on 3500 packages uploaded to PyPI, pointing to a malicious URL twitter.com/DataNerdery/s... · Posted by u/DyslexicAtheist
One of the things that the recent Python cryptography debate has highlighted to me is how much we depend on this distribution of libraries like this. In that case, it's normal to just automatically get updates from a product and then one day, a whole bunch of software projects suddenly notice and, luckily, break (lucky, as opposed to being compromised). In this case, it's normal to just type a project name in install software, with very little vetting done by many people. I want to work on someone's web app, npm suddenly downloads the world. Who's actually audited all that? I know I haven't.
Not sure how we could fix it without slowing way down and doing a lot more work.
Many people here say that slowing down is a must -- and I agree it's probably the best solution -- but surely there are more approaches we could think of:
* Not allowing packages with similar names to popular ones
* Not allowing packages creation to be anonymous (in the extreme case you would require to validate your passport or similar)
* Automatic detection of malicious code
* Central auditing organization ...
This is just on top of my head, there must be many more ideas.
Maybe this provides an interesting point of comparison between two different eras of web development. Zoomquilt 1 [1] was created 16 years ago, in 2004. I sometimes see people bemoan modern development as being inefficient, and in this this case it really seems to be true. When I view Zoomquilt 1, the framerate is steady and CPU usage low. When I view Zoomquilt 2, Firefox spins up to 100% CPU use, the fans start going, and the framerate is somewhat choppy.
And as far as I see, the functionality of both is the same. Sure version 2 may have higher resolution images and some hue transformations, but surely 16 years of hardware improvements can handle that without consuming a whole core.
Morning moan over. Also, this is first and foremost a piece of art, and this comment shouldn't take away from that. I just think this is an interesting comparison that is relevant on HN.
The website says "ZOOMQUILT 2 An infinitely zooming painting
created in 2007" (Version 1 is from 2004) and on both pages it says "A project by Nikolaus Baumgarten".
So it doesn't seem to be the case that we compare two eras of web-dev here.
If you don't mind pulling a bunch of cinnamon dependencies along with it, you can use nemo (the cinnamon file manager) as a nautilus replacement in gnome. The search behavior you mentioned in particular is very annoying with nautilus.
Thanks for the tip. I'll probably give this a shot.
Very interesting article, thanks for sharing the information.
FWIW, I used to be very happy with the Gnome environment but 2 recent (nautilus related) changes frustrate me incredibly:
* Copy / paste file paths from nautilus to terminal is broken. (You get this extra meta information in the path starting with `x-special/nautilus-clipboard`)
* Type ahead is gone. Previously you could type the first letters of a file / folder and select it this way. Now typing automatically triggers a search (equivalent to ctrl+f), which is much slower.
These might be minor things but I hit them so often that I was driven away from Gnome.
TheCabin commented on The death of corporate research labs blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the... · Posted by u/fanf2
It's not being too large that forced a split up but their anti-competitive practices and positions. The regional bells still were big enough to run their own research labs.
Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube.
The problem I think is how easy it is for large companies to acquire smaller companies. It's how they expand or enter a market, they refuse to be bothered to bootstrap a new org-unit. They just devour smaller, innovative and creative companies. Look at Google, they couldn't be creative and patient enough to compete with youtube so they gulp up youtube. It's the bigcorp M.O.
So why bother with R&D when you can just buy a smaller company that does R&D, tests the market and builds a brand for you? My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead. You become a cemerery of dreams and ideas. You become an IBM,HP,Xerox and AT&T. Once the damage is done it becomes nearl impossible to recover from. I like IBM as the best example, they are doing superb amounta of innovation even today but look at all their initiatives lack any traction or competitive edge. They have a ton of smart people working on brand new areas of tech like quantum computing,but their reputation and overall culture has not been great. They've been declining consistently. Look at yahoo, yahoo!! They had legitimate means to compete with google toe-to-toe,they relied too much on aquisitions as did Verizon that recently aquired them for a meager $4B.
In the end I blame all this on how publicly traded companies prioritize quarterly profits as opposed to multi-year growth. Acquiring bumps up the stock value for a while, spending billions starting from scratch competing or developing a new concept is risky so stocks go down.
> My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead.
Not so sure about that. Maybe if you read HN a lot, but I think most users won't even notice.
TheCabin commented on Second-Guessing the Modern Web macwright.org/2020/05/10/... · Posted by u/erict15
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."