Readit NewsThis absolutely rocks: like an open and usable version of the once beloved and now deprecated Echo Nest Audio Analysis api [0]. There used to be a tool to use this data to manage your own (Spotify-only) music library and while it wasn’t magic, it sure felt like it.
Super excited to try AudioMuse
[0]: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
Wow, this deserves more attention. It's hilarious at times and would be perfect as fiction but overall leaves me with a sad and worried feeling when I realize it's fact. I really shudder to think what kind of world we're heading toward.
11 years ago, NY Magazine published my favorite startup zeitgeist article of the Uber-For-X era: “Let’s, like, demolish Laundry”. This feels like a perfect revisit of that for our darker and more cynical era.
riordan commented on A skyscraper that could have toppled over in the wind (1995) newyorker.com/magazine/19... · Posted by u/georgecmu
What a great story: remarkable how the New Yorker of 1995 has the same efficient but easy-going clarity as 2025.
Seriously - I find myself coming back to read this once every few years because of how riveting the piece is (oh no -just realized the pun)
Also I’ve heard wonderful things about The Great Miscalculation[0], a recently released book about the Citicorp Tower incident
There have been several projects over the past few years to make text embeddings visually explorable (notably Nomic.ai's Nomic Atlas). However, Apple's just released a tool that makes this kind of analysis super accessible and insanely interactive.
Under the hood it's powered by Mosaic[0], a dataviz library built on top of DuckDB that's designed to handle coordinated interactive plots over huge datasets, the kind of thing where you interact with one plot and the rest all respond, which requires going back to the database to recalculate all the aggregations.
I've been fanboying Mosaic for the past year but finally have this to point to as an illustration of what's possible with it.
riordan commented on H3: For indexing geographies into a hexagonal grid, by Uber h3geo.org/... · Posted by u/wiradikusuma
Yes, but it's important to note that it's quite a specialized index.
- It's an index that doesn't depend on the data, unlike traditional r-tree indices. This means non-uniform data won't be queried as efficiently as with rtree, but it may be faster to build.
- This data independence property is VERY important for distributed or streaming queries. For example, if you want to join datasets using Spark or other big data tools, each team can add a column for h3 cells independently and join somewhat efficiently. For large volumes of data, constructing the rtree is just not feasible, or more precisely, very disconnected from the rest of the "data ecosystem".
- It doesn't work with any coordinate reference system other than EPSG 4326 (which you may want if you only work on specific geographies to get more precision in your floats)
- It's clearly built with points in mind. Polygons, curves, or lines are an afterthought. For example, the polygonToCells function returns a set of cells that are entirely within the polygon. If you want to join, you'd need to also have the set of all cells that entirely contain the polygon. I've never found a reliable way to get that.
That being said, it's not bad at all, but if you don't have so much data that you can't compute rtree indices, just stick with PostGIS.
> Polygons, curves, or lines are an afterthought. For example, the polygonToCells function returns a set of cells that are entirely within the polygon. If you want to join, you'd need to also have the set of all cells that entirely contain the polygon. I've never found a reliable way to get that.
With v4 of h3 they (finally) have a clean syntax for this with polygonToCellsExperimental[0].
Now there’s options for
- Cell center is contained in the shape (default) - Cell is fully contained in the shape - Overlapping (covering): Cell overlaps the shape at any point - BBOX: Cell bounding box overlaps shape
Makes life a fair bit easier if you’ve gotta deal with H3 polys. And if you’re working locally, DuckDB Spatial’s r-tree indexing[1] can make for a nice stand-in for PostGIS as a quick point-in-polygon solution without the need to spin up a service.
[0]: https://h3geo.org/docs/api/regions/#polygontocellsexperiment... [1]: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/extensions/spatial/r-tree_ind...
Interesting that the newest available is from 1963.
Chronicling America is great, but as you’ve noticed it’s limited to issues that are in the public domain. It’s not just LC, the National Digital Newspaper Program[1] has been funding hundreds of libraries across all 50 USA states to make it possible since the mid-00s.
Australia’s national library offers Trove[2], which has a huge collection of Australian public domain newspapers.
Most of their repository is likely funded by your tax dollars and is there for the public to use.
[1]: https://www.neh.gov/divisions/preservation/national-digital-... [2]:https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/
Also, Firefox on Android still supports PWAs, it was only removed on the desktop.
It’s good to hear that PWAs are still on Firefox Android, even though they’re out of Desktop.
From my [fairly-out-of-the-loop-for-the-past-few-years] vantage point, Mozilla’s been a lot less invested in the PWA ecosystem since they abandoned their Firefox Phone / Boot2Gecko initiative, which was intended to create a middle tier between the expensive smartphones of the early 2010’s and ubiquitous and cheap feature phones (flip phones, classic Nokia candy bars), and expand access to the web across the world with it.
All the apps were PWAs, which made it simple to build out. Eventually Mozilla stopped the project, but KaiOS became a commercial implementation and it still runs on a fair number of feature phones to this day.
But without that pressure for PWA support in Firefox as a critical mobile feature, it was largely serving as an expensive bookmark launcher in the Firefox code base so that folks could alt-tab to the small number of sites that supported it on their desktops. Not a noble end for Mozilla’s support for what should have been / could have been an incredible leverage point for the web ecosystem and open development.
Even with those two options, you can't just write some code in a page and execute it without some sort of itermediate code.
Thats why php became so popular, perl coders could pick it up in a day ($ and all) and all you have to do is write .php files to a server - with the bonus that you have a rudimentary templating system built-in to php.
There really isn't much more to it than that.