Isofarro

The idea that you have to read everything is a reader UI design flaw. By presenting feeds as an inbox, it gives the impression of RSS feeds being email. And that's not right, it can be, but it doesn't have to be.

The TikTok model is about scrolling, skipping, being selective.

RSS readers should be treated the same way. "River of news" is an RSS thing. You dive in when stuff interests you, and you let what doesn't interest you flow by.

Twitter is basically an RSS-like reader with 120 character limits on posts. You subscribe to interesting people, and their little posts drop on your homepage in reverse chronological order. There's no inbox or unread items. You just scroll past to the next item that interests you.

Yeah, turning off unread-items counters, definitely. The value of RSS is in what you chose to read. It's not an anti-library. And if something is really great, a good subscription list means someone you're reading will likely mention it and link to it.

And a lot of these people do employ a lot of people so they just start companies elsewhere.

Great, do that! Go start companies in other countries, and trickle down their wealth to employees in the form of wages and salaries.

If only they thought of doing that in the UK! Instead of the rich buying up properties turning them into buy-to-lets, both pricing out working people of their first home, and then taking their income as rent.

They already "open companies elsewhere". From the article, the non-dom status is a tax-exemption on a non-dom for profits and revenues from businesses outside the UK.

If these non-dom billionaires leave, and they aren't currently paying tax, will we even notice?

The housing market noticed; again from the article, the value of properties valued above £10m dropped by 37%. So these "just leavers" aren't just leaving, they are taking a near 40% hit on selling up.

Non domiciled are roughly 0.11% of UK residents and pay about 1.24% of UK taxes

It's curious that the percentages used to defend not taxing the rich (whether they are UK citizens, or operating as "non-doms") tend to be what percentage of the tax burden they pay. But it's never what percentage of their income and capital gains they pay as tax.

I think the latter is a fairer representation, considering we have a progressive taxation system. Someone who is earning over £125k a year should be paying close to 45% of their income and capital gains.

The question is: are they? If not, why not?

Dominic Cummings is the Chief-of-staff of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He managed the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, the primary campaign during the UK referendum on European Union membership (campaigning successfully to leave the EU).

His success in Vote Leave is down to a targeted digital campaign on Facebook using the services of Cambridge Analytica / AggregateIQ. These are the root actions that sparked Facebooks turmoil around election advertisements that may again affect the 2020 US Presidential campaign.

Cummings is an anarchist and has said he wants to tear down the UK Civil Service, getting rid of mandarins and long-term civil servants, and replace it with something else. This blog post is part of that change.

It's government by data science, perhaps technocratic. With a governing majority of 80 seats, by December 2019 election, he thinks he -- the government -- has space to do controversial or unpopular things, and tearing down the civil service is something he believes is necessary.

The first no-castling match has already taken place earlier this month as part of the London Chess Classic

https://www.londonchessclassic.com/press/lcc19_pr5.htm

The current castling rule was an innovation of the Italians when the game was brought in from India. It, along with pawns moving two squares on their first move, ushered in the Italian School of Chess, known for its slashing attacks, sparkling sacrifices and all out aggression.

However, the Indian form of the game did have something like castling, the king could move from its start square to g2, where a fianchetto'ed bishop would normally sit.

Step one of fixing bad laws, or abused loopholes in existing laws is demonstrating the extent to which it's being abused. That way we can equate the lost tax revenue into something more identifiable. Stories like this give us the evidence we need that something in our tax laws isn't working.

These figures published are part of the public record of the company.

That is untrue. When IE6 first arrived it was on par with Mac IE 5.2 in terms of web standards support. It was a great browser for its time.

The problem with IE6 is Microsoft declaring victory in the Browser war with Netscape, and IE6 development stopped. For years until Firefox and Chrome threatened Microsoft's browser dominance.

The Web, the iPlayer app.

Bobby Fischer played a lot of Blitz, notably:

* 1958 trip to Moscow chess club he took on all comers, including Petrosian in blitz: https://nezhmet.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/the-fabulous-50s-fi...

* 1962 Stockholm, Geller pulls a trick on Fischer suggesting he play his "unknown" compatriot when Fischer challenged him to blitz. The unknown was Leonid Stein, a legendary blitz player, but largely unknown outside of the USSR: http://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2012/03/16/bobbys-blitz-che...

* 1970 Herceg Novi Blitz tournament, held very soon after The World vs USSR match. Winner was a certain Bobby Fischer: https://www.365chess.com/tournaments/Herceg_Novi_blitz_1970

It's currently +3-18=14. That's 3 wins for Caruana's position, 18 wins for Carlsen's, and 14 draws. That's about as decisive a position as you can get in high-level chess.

Except that +3 would mean three chess engines, supposedly stronger than Carlsen, have managed to lose Carlsen's position. That's eye-opening, and perhaps justifies Carlsen offering a draw than risking being in that +3 column.

Caruana was supposedly without counter-play. +3 is far too high a score to support that claim.

If US corporations hike their prices up to cover the tax, that would increase the competitiveness of local companies who have already been paying their fair share of tax. Perhaps that's the encouragement governments need to stimulate the local economy further.

Atomic CSS was used on Yahoo sites, since the Marissa Meyer level. Apparently on a few of their properties. Hard to assess whether it was a failure or not. Considering their websites were a negative asset, I doubt the use of Atomic CSS was a major component of that, there were definitely bigger problems.

Ah, I see your issue: you do know you can have whitespace inside attributes? You don't have to clump all the class names on one line. Scanning vertically is quicker than through the horizontal line-noise of both your examples.

    <img class="
        block
        height-16
        small:height-24
        rounded-full
        margin-horizontal-auto
        margin-bottom-4
        small:margin-bottom-0
        small:margin-right-4
        small:margin-left-0
    ">

On the other hand if you regularly need that many classes to style an element, perhaps it's a good place to refactor commonly occurring class names into a set, and label that set with a meaningful identifier.

As for mathematical notation, it's about as understandable to me as my understanding of Hanzi.

In what context is this "an awful amount of characters" an issue? GZip compression is fairly standard these days, and languages based on plain english (or similar languages) has a better level of compression than random text because of repetitive nature of sequences of characters.

I can't believe that mnemonic based languages are easier and more readable than something closer to a natural language. And with the assumption that code is written for humans first, computers second, what is the point of inventing a language that's less readable than the one it's trying to replace? CSS compresses particularly well, as every Atomic CSS based framework tends to point out on it's landing page!

It puzzles me why these Atomic CSS based systems use various mnemonic systems instead of plain English which is much more understandable. I'm not a fan of human-powered text compression.

The Web has been collecting dates from users in forms long before date-pickers existed.

The US did initially include the European Union in this trade war, but when the EU threatened to respond with a import levies that affected Harley Davidson motorbikes manufactured in a Republican-voting state, the US backed down [1].

Chinese media (and social media particularly) does regularly cover stories about Chinese people outside of China involved in situations such as these, whether it's a high-profile business figure [2], or ordinary Chinese people involved in non-ordinary conflicts. Including the narrative that Chinese people don't get justice or support from local police when they are victims to criminal activity, that's regularly reported in Chinese media.

UK media does the same thing, any disaster always has a mention of how many British citizens are involved, sometimes who they are. And a regular diet of outrage of British tourists coming face-to-face with the legal consequences of their behaviour across the world.

Brexit revelations shows me that China trades using WTO rules with Europe. There does seem to be movement on that front too. [3], [4]

Though, with trade arrangement with WTO rule, it's worth asking why US aren't resolving their dispute within the WTO. We shouldn't glorify bullies, even if they are bullying other bullies.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43926092 [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hna-chairman/chinas-hna-c... [3] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-china-eu/eu-pushes-china-o... [4] https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-china-eu-trade-...

Google are now making new standards which don't conform to the agreed standard, which restrict how you can build your site. If you don't do it, they'll destroy your traffic.

If this "your traffic" is traffic from Google to your website, it isn't "your" traffic, it's Google's. If that traffic from Google is important to you, then it's in your best interests to work with Google's requirements.

If the metrics Google collect indicate that visitors prefer quickly loading pages, that should be factored into the decision as what external resources to link out to.

The evidence that visitors find bloated pages an issue is slowly growing, from Amazon quantising the financial loss of slower loading pages [1], to more recently, Life Hacks taking advantage of GDPR-triggered quicker-loading less-bloated European-versions of news sites [2].

I guess the question worth asking is if a non-AMP page is objectively more-performant than an AMP version, does Google prefer the publisher to keep the slower AMP version?

In a sense AMP is user-focused, validating Jakob Nielsen's prediction of the end of Web Design, because "people spend more time on other sites" [3].

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cos... [2] https://lifehacker.com/to-make-websites-load-faster-browse-t... [3] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/end-of-web-design/

Don't learn a new language for the sake of learning a new language. Learn it because it solves a particular problem better than your existing skill set.

For example Node.js is good for tiny Web Services/API endpoints using an event-based model. Elixir for writing highly concurrent systems.

Sure, both of these can be done with Java -- since it's a general purpose language, but the result with more focused languages is a more succinct solution.

Not strongest opening, but because it's an asymmetric opening system, which introduces imbalance into the position, thus it tends to have less drawish tendencies than a symmetric opening system.

This creates the psychological effect of slightly turning the knob of "Black is playing for equality", to "Black is playing for counter-play".

I find it helps starting with the most egregious issue/concern first. Otherwise your argument is merely an appeal to self-declared authority.

Replace "Yahoo" with "Microsoft", and "Facebook" with "Yahoo", and you have basically the same justification given to me as a Yahoo employee to patent my (company internal) hack-day ideas.

The engineering manager responsible said Yahoo would only use patents as a defensive measure, to defend themselves against patent threats from other companies. Same promises, same logic. Two years later Yahoo launched their software patent action against Facebook.

Software patents can only be used offensively. Because their defensive capability is limited to the threat of using them offensively. If there is no substance to the threat they are useless. So the value of software patents rests solely on their offensive capability.

You are comparing your first time trying to digest rapid speech, compared to someone who has done it for years. Yes, it's typical.

A new screen-reader user would start such an endeavour at normal speed, then gradually increase the speed. It's not much more different to people listening to podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5x speed. The robotic voice is more of a help than a hinderance because of it's consistency.

Oh hello, it's by Damien Katz. Who did CouchDb, and yonks ago worked on the storage engine underneath Lotus Notes.

Thinking of it as an app install feels like an anti-pattern. Like when you turn on the Xbox for a quick five minute play, and have to sit through a 15 minute update before you can even do anything. It's a bad user experience.

This approach was a commercial failure on the native platform level (those Office-like app suites with network install of components each time you needed them). It was also a commercial failure on the "build my desktop from scratch when I boot up" environments.

It yet another tick in the "does not belong in a browser" list.

Perhaps Single Page Applications need to run inside a window where there's no browser navigation bar, no url bar. Stripped down so far it's not actually a functioning browser. That feels very much like a native GUI library at that point. Except for that ludicrous notion of the app needing to be installed each time the chrome/window is launched.

I can't see how "install the app each time you land on this website" is competitive against native's "install this app once, and run many times" approach.

I'm not convinced that introducing the limitations of native apps to a non-native platform is a benefit, or a feature that makes the non-native platform more competitive.

Out of the browser navigation facilities, the back button is the best understood feature. Users know how to use it, and what it should do.

Perhaps, where this goes is that Single Page Apps and web browsers aren't a good fit together?

Yoiks. 12 seconds until the first piece of content is displayed (compared to Wikipedia's 0.6s). That there (TTFC - Time to first content) is the perennial problem of client-side apps, the inability to get the first piece of content immediately to the user.

Since you say it's all JSON APIs, it should be trivial to build something on the server to server-render the initial page with content and serve that up while the rest of the application tries to download itself into the browser.