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?
Readit Newsstreamofdigits commented on Happy 15th birthday Hacker News news.ycombinator.com/fron... · Posted by u/andrelaszlo
streamofdigits commented on Reddit can't build a better search engine ruky.me/2022/02/17/reddit... · Posted by u/rukshn
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
streamofdigits commented on Building for the 99% Developers future.a16z.com/software-... · Posted by u/bdburns
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...
streamofdigits commented on Music theory for nerds (2016) eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/mu... · Posted by u/marianoguerra
> That problem is that sheet music is terrible.
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
There is no easily accessible exposition of this musical notatin style, this cheatsheet gives a flavor http://www.byzantinechant.org/notation/Table%20of%20Byzantin...
streamofdigits commented on Google Search Is Dying dkb.io/post/google-search... · Posted by u/dbrereton
"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.
streamofdigits commented on Why We Use Julia, 10 Years Later julialang.org/blog/2022/0... · Posted by u/KenoFischer
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.
The dawn of "digitally augmented relationship management"?
- Dave, I noticed you haven't spoken to X in a while. Do you want me to sent them a short generic message to keep the relationship warm?
- Aaw, thanks HAL. I love how you are taking good care of me.
On the other hand, we have finite and overburdened memories. Surely there is a way to get them triggered that doesn't feel mechanical and "fake".
streamofdigits commented on Don't contribute anything relevant in web forums (2020) karl-voit.at/2020/10/23/a... · Posted by u/signa11
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.
streamofdigits commented on What have we got to lose? (1998) douglasadams.com/dna/9807... · Posted by u/colinprince
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