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n0nick

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Infinite Ulysses 11 years ago

Woah. When I last (tried to) start reading Ulysees, almost a year ago, I thought about this: An online "book club", allowing users to join in reading classics and participate in discussions on top of the text. That would have certainly helped me continue reading the book. Eventually I put the book back on the shelf, and wrote down the idea in my ~/ideas.md.

Your 'read' page [1] is exactly as I pictured it. Looks like an interesting, important effort. Kudos!

[1] http://www.infiniteulysses.com/ulysses/3

The one unconventional suggestion is the idea of a correspondence between the characters of the source text and the HTML text.

Did you get a chance to check out fellow HN homepage link Paperman [1][2]? It offers exactly what you propose: Double-clicking on the results frame highlights the relevant line in the source, and vice versa. This could easily be adapted to match your suggestion.

[1] http://paperman.patricklorio.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507310

This seems to correlate to a Hebrew expression "buying a cat in a sack", meaning taking something without confirming its quality. Indeed, same legend is presented as the source for this expression as well.

You read code when you're programming. The only difference is the mix of characters you'll see near each other. General readability matters -- when is it OK for a regular font to be unclear about which character (a zero or 'O') you're looking at?

The difference in mix of characters reflects on the design decisions made for the font type. Target use is important. Some types are great for titles, some for text bodies, some for logos. It makes sense to me that code is another category.

Yes, readability is important, but it's not binary. The level and aspects of readability required for a novel body are not the same as for an article title.

Differentiating between zero 0 and uppercase O is critical for code (and work terminals, and perhaps data tables), but IMHO isn't interesting when designing for text bodies. Same goes for 'rn' and other issues that have ever annoyed only programmers.

Immutable URLs 13 years ago

I really like your idea, but what about content being changed/updated, instead of deleted?

For some use cases it would make sense to show the cache (when the original quote is no longer there), while for other it'd make sense to forward (some style update, or an important addition).

How do you think can such service handle this?

Off the top of my head, this move also means that most, or at least some, of the Opera developers who worked on its rendering engines, will now be contributing to WebKit and V8.

This might mean even faster development cycles for WebKit, the integration of new features that were not on top of Google's and Apple's lists, and some new complications introduced to the inner politics of the WebKit and V8 projects.

GitLab 4.0 Released 14 years ago

The thing is, I actually did install most of the software you mentioned, and most of them just ask you for some credentials and run the db initialisation and population themselves. WordPress goes so far as to do that via a post-upload web interface, which is a superb UX IMHO, and something I remember writing into my own open-source PHP projects 10 years ago [1].

I really don't mean to disrespect but I think in the age of Rails and ORMs, these sort of tasks can be implemented even easier for the user and cleaner for the integrating apps.

That being said, I realise that GitLab relies heavily on some system-heavy dependencies (cough gitolite), and whoever wrote the installation guide is probably a system guy that didn't want to hide any of the details behind some automatic script. I just suggest that this should be the "Installation for Advanced Users" doc that's the alternative to some automated process.

[1] figuring this out made me feel very old.

GitLab 4.0 Released 14 years ago

I haven't tried running it on my development machine; last time I tried installing it, it was on the server we use at work to host our git repositories.

Since it was already a dedicated server machine (which we even use sometimes to host some small web apps), I thought I had my work cut out for me.

It was the amount of system work required (sudo-ing, chmod-ing, installing mysql because we only used postgres before, creating users) that made me give up eventually.

I want to give GitLab another try, so I'll see into using Vagrant for that. But I still believe some install scripts would be very much appreciated and help the project gain popularity.

Btw, re Python - I still see the paragraph "Make sure you have the right version of Python installed" on: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/4-0-stable/doc/ins...

GitLab 4.0 Released 14 years ago

First of all, thanks a lot for the quick response.

Let me apologise in advance for complaining on an open-source project instead of trying to contribute.

Anyway, my personal feelings were that some of the dependencies could have been avoided (or perhaps set to some default value), at least for the community edition that I'm supposed to get up and running on an existing server machine.

Some examples: * Requiring Python (for a Rails project!), * Asking me to create special system users for the processes, * Setting paths, keys and chmods manually (and not in some install.sh process), * Configuring a database and access to it (this could easily use a default setting that pro users could edit manually).

From the comments around here, I realize that maybe I looked at the project in the wrong way and it should be installed either as a standalone service or as a virtual machine. If that's the case, I think a short Readme or Install doc explaining that would be very helpful for most users.

GitLab 4.0 Released 14 years ago

GitLab looks awesome, both features and design wise, but the installation process is so tedious and complicated that I quit in the middle of it more than once: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/4-0-stable/doc/ins...

This is feedback I heard from fellow developers as well.

I'm curious as to whether the maintainers are planning to simplify the list of dependencies and installation steps in the upcoming versions.

Looks very cute, and might be useful (not having to leave the terminal is always good), but I think I speak for many others saying that I don't want to start a new address book from scratch, let alone one that won't sync into my other devices.

So my suggestion for the killer feature here is an ability to sync with some major service provider such as iCloud or Google (preferably both / some standard protocol?). I'd love to help the development of such a feature.