marcjuul

While that's an interesting thought experiment and there are definitely good reasons to make it more difficult to sit on an unused patent, it's already difficult enough for lone inventors and small organizations to get and keep a patent. This would require everyone to either have a lot of money up front to pay the maintenance tax or keep the license fees low thus ensuring that they will never have a lot of money.

Yeah this seems to be a fairly important missing piece. Is there some special boot mode with a ROM-hosted unmodifiable adb?

Why do you think this is the case across all of Europe? You can definitely buy SIM cards in vending machines in Denmark still.

The author seems to be making an assumption that the average person cares as little about preventing centralization of power and having any semblance of online privacy as they do about the speed of their dishwasher and that the projects that focus on improving these things fail to gain a large user base because users don't care.

That's simply not the case. Talk to most people and they'd prefer that their entire digital lives weren't dominated by a few megacorps with access to all your private data. It's true that a lot of people have no idea how to begin achieving that, but that's not the same as not caring.

The problem is that when you develop a new system, privacy and decentralization generally aren't things that can be easily added in as later optimizations. If you care about those things then you need to build them into the design from day one, and they are hard problems to solve. Something as simply as resetting a forgotten password can turn into quite the challenge when there is no centralized authority. Getting to the point where your basic decentralized and secure platform works well enough that you can build stable, user friendly apps with all the expected niceties takes a lot of time and thinking by highly skilled developers and many projects never fully get there. This doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to attempt to develop such technologies.

There is also a weird fallacy going on here around building stuff based on a shallow perception of what consumers* supposedly care about. Looking at the current social media landscape and thinking "this exists because it's what people really want" betrays a particularly narrow way of thinking about the economics and power dynamics of the modern internet. This type of willfully naive thought process would have us optimize toward a highly profitable software skinnner box. The wetware equivalent would be to suggest that we design the most profitable and addictive drugs. After all, consumers are consuming them so that must be what they want, right? Why are you building something that isn't optimizing for maximum consumption? You must be blinded by your own weird ideology or blinded by interesting but irrelevant technical challenges.

Then there's the weird comment about exciting technical challenges not necessarily all being businesses. The author seems to have an underlying assumption that if it's not a viable business then it shouldn't be worked on.

*Thinking about participants in a two-way global communication system as simply "consumers" seems in-line with the rest of the author's thought processes

Is is, in fact, neither silly nor off-topic to discuss the politics, economics or ethics of the product being advertised. The fact that this makes you uncomfortable or annoyed is disturbing. As you well know there are plenty of different business models available that do not keep code secret and proprietary but even if it was a criticism of "business models in general" it still would be neither silly nor off-topic to discuss this in the comments. This reads like an attempt to silence discussion of perceived problems with our society and how they relate to innovation and software development in the context of your product and makes both you and your company look bad.

Nice feature but what is the use case for saving to PDF? If you want to save a web page for later offline reading then epub would be both much easier to implement and more useful given that it retains ability to reflow to fit different screen sizes. Are there good reasons to prefer a non-reflowable format?

Absolutely not an expert here and would love to be corrected but my poorly informed personal impression is that the whole idea of a sustainable amount of fishing and whether all species even have a number that is safe to harvest (especially given that no species exists in isolation), let alone what that number is, is on fairly shaky grounds scientifically. Meaning that a lot of this is guesswork based on too little information and "doing something is better than doing nothing" compromises with the fishing industry. If a species population has appeared to be stable for x number of years with y amount of fishing, does that mean that it's sustainable? Indefinitely? Given other changes in ecosystem and environment?

It's actually simpler than a table of voltages. It's a series of trinary values that indicate whether to use positive, negative or zero voltage. The actual voltage used is static (even the specialized EPDC PMIC (which _is_ a separate chip) doesn't allow changing it on the devices I've seen). The waveform (as they call the lookup table) is sometimes actually stored on a separate flash chip soldered on to the display's built-in cable. Years ago I wrote a tool to decode and convert the proprietary formats used by the E Ink corporation for these: https://github.com/fread-ink/inkwave

zxing does not have a usable datamatrix decoder last I checked. it's there but it's no good.

It's not great but libdtmx is the best open source datamatrix decoding as far as I know.

Does anyone happen to know where in the Chromium code base the implementation is hiding?

The android version seems to use a library that's part of Google Play Services:

  /**
   * Implementation of mojo BarcodeDetection, using Google Play Services vision package.
   */

  // The vision library will be downloaded the first time the API is used
  // on the device; this happens "fast", but it might have not completed,
  // bail in this case. Also, the API was disabled between and v.9.0 and
  // v.9.2, see https://developers.google.com/android/guides/releases.

The desktop version references a third party library called "barhopper" here:

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/e1e495b29e1178a451...

and barhopper seems to come from a non-public Google repo:

    'src/third_party/barhopper': {
      'url': 'https://chrome-internal.googlesource.com/chrome/deps/barhopper.git' + '@' + 'ad3c4382875afdd0340f1549f8b9c93cbbc16e37',
      'condition': 'checkout_src_internal and checkout_chromeos',
  },

I didn't realize that Chromium had missing APIs compared to Chrome but maybe that's always been the case? This appears not to be a W3C standard:

https://wicg.github.io/shape-detection-api/

I was interested in this because there are no really good open source DataMatrix decoders (to my knowledge) with the one in ZXing being basically unusable (last I checked) and libdtmx being ok but not comparable to commercial offerings.

You know what would replace the web app if it was replaced today?

Some corporate locked down solution subtly or unsubtly controlled by a single conglomerate or interest group.

Recently certain corporations have been whispering about replacing the web standards with something "better". At the same time as they have been pushing free our-platform-only "internet connectivity" in developing countries. I don't want to name names since multiple corporations are implicated but for the sake of simplicity let's call the imaginary placeholder company "Facebook".

At the same time we literally JUST had a major split in the fabric of the internet with the EFF leaving W3C over DRM and now this is the top-rated comment on Y-combinator?

Venting frustrations is one thing, but anyone seriously advocating for replacing the web standards at this moment in time is either ignorant, ethically bankrupt or a corporate shill. Yes I know: Your mental internet filter has been finely tuned through years of weathering forum flamewars to stop reading any thread after encountering the word "shill" but please let me explain.

This is the first time in the history of the world that humanity has achieved a single standardized application platform supported by all major devices! If that wasn't enough we now have amazing code collaboration tools like git(hub/lab/etc) and `npm publish`, to the point where the hardest part of writing a new web app often comes down to finding the right libraries and sticking them together. This is fucking amazing!

Today's web is a land of unicorns and rainbows compared to what any sufficiently pessimistic human being would have predicted when the internet began. The technology used by the world for most of its communications is largely based on globally accepted standards and open source software!(!!).

Keep in mind that this is despite a global economy that has been trending toward increased corporate control by a decreasing shortlist of major players. In short: Despite the fact that the rest of the world currently appears to be mostly made of burning garbage, web developers should be dancing in the fucking streets!

If there are problems with the web then please remember: It's still the early days of the web and we've only recently begun writing very complex applications for this platform. We'll keep improving what we have and every year things will be better, but it is also always going to be the case that humans will push technology as far as it will go, so if you feel like web technology always sucks then that just means that you're always working at the very edge of what's possible with the state of the art. Changing platforms won't change this fact and the bleeding edge will always be... bloody.

If anyone thinks that throwing away the world's only common application platform because "development is hard" is a good idea then maybe they should try writing a UI-heavy app supporting Android, iOS, .NET and *nix with one-click install and high security, without using any web technologies, and then come back and tell me that this is a better way.

Now let me predict the future:

What's going to happen is that Facebook will come out with some new app framework based on React (or React Native) which will compile to current web standards but also to the new "Facebook browser" (they won't brand it as a browser but rather as a new part of the internet that has been missing until now). They will get more and more people developing for this framework since it makes development less painful (at least for the younger web developers who are fresh out of their corporate sponsored bootcamp and have only ever tried this one framework) and when they get enough developer market share they will start adding more and more "facebook-only" features which will enrich the experience for people using their "browser". Keep in mind that I am still talking about a metaphorical Facebook. Maybe it will be a Facebook/Adobe/Amazon/RIAA/MPAA conglomerate "standards" initiative or some such multibeast.

Anyway: Because "Facebook" is actively developing this framework in-house at the moment they've been pushing public opinion against current web technologies in preparation for launch (honestly given who they are and their available resources they would be incompetent if they weren't).

They were planning to launch this cross-industry collaboration and framework after the W3C DRM incorporation failed to pass, using the fires of industry indignation to bootstrap a corporate replacement for web standards, but now that they actually succeeded in undermining the W3C once, they will simple continue undermining web standards via the W3C while the FCC and the rest of the world is left to attempt to start a new standards organization out of the ashes, and let's face it: The web standards were created when few people cared about web standards and the feat would be very hard to re-create without heavy industry support now that there are so many powerful stakeholders.

I know this post will most likely be buried but at least I'll get the bitter satisfaction of linking to it and saying "I told you so". Or maybe I'll learn not to be so fucking pessimistic. Either way it's a win.

Completely agree that Kobos are better than Kindles for hacking purposes. Generally not as easy to find cheap used though.

Cool! I did not know this existed!

If you just want to modify the existing OS and write apps for it the look at the kindle hacking community on the mobileread forums. The best devices are probably up to and including 5th generation kindles since I believe they are the latest to still have working soft-jailbreaks (but that could have changed since last I checked). I believe all kindle models are trivially rootable if you are willing to buy a 1.8v usb to serial adapter, open the kindle up and solder on three wires. If you want a 100% FOSS distro on your device and you're not afraid of soldering, cross-compiling and super-pre-alpha code then read on.

I've been working on a linux distro for i.MX based e-paper readers (kindle, kobo, etc.) for a while and just had two other hackers join me on the project. Currently we are furthest along with the Kindle 4th generation non-touch with a slightly modified super minimal Debian booting and basic graphics support (Xorg works but no window manager and no screen auto-update yet. e-ink is weird). I believe we've managed to strip out all binary blobs so it's really all open source now. This system is still using an ancient kernel (a slight variation on the one used by the stock OS). We just got the latest stable kernel booting a few days ago but only barely (not even mmc support yet). There's just three of us for now, and we hang out in #fread.ink on freenode and our code is up on https://github.com/fread-ink

You should look at the repo https://github.com/fread-ink/fread-vagrant to get started.

We're engineering yeast to produce a vegan source of cheese protein and in the long run make Real Vegan Cheese: https://realvegancheese.org

We're now hosting Bay Area Applied Mycology (formerly Bay Area Radical Mycology) and they have been using the lab for both genetic identification and microscopy identification of mushroom species.

We also have lots of events coming up such as Introduction to protein crystallography and Introduction to Synthetic Biology: http://www.meetup.com/Counter-Culture-Labs/#upcoming

I'm part of the team so ask away! We're working towards having a larger BSL-1 (bio-safety level) lab for work with safe and well-known organisms and a smaller BSL-2 lab for stuff like growing certain environmental isolates and even some types of human disease work.

We're also working on software to increase the transparency of our research, such as this tool to instantly share hand written and recorded voice lab notes using open standards: https://github.com/CounterCultureLabs/dumpscribe

We all moved in together. Hackers, anarchists, social justice, mad scientists, poets, dancers, documentary film-makers, etc. in one big space in Oakland!