HN user

rwl

600 karma

https://recursewithless.net

Posts49
Comments212
View on HN
lasindias.net 1mo ago

How to Build a Phyle

rwl
3pts0
bzg.fr 3mo ago

The Issues with Issue Trackers

rwl
2pts0
recursewithless.net 8mo ago

Improving Emacs' iCalendar Support

rwl
29pts0
going-medieval.com 9mo ago

AI and the Golem

rwl
3pts0
www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de 2y ago

Symbolics

rwl
2pts0
www.gnu.org 4y ago

GNU 8sync

rwl
12pts0
eniacprogrammers.org 7y ago

Eniac Programmers Project

rwl
2pts0
blog.archive.org 7y ago

Helping us judge a book by its cover: software help request

rwl
2pts0
www.npr.org 8y ago

Why a French Attorney Is on a Digital Privacy Crusade [audio]

rwl
2pts0
www.nytimes.com 8y ago

Big profits drove a stock boom. Did the economy pay a price?

rwl
3pts0
aeon.co 8y ago

Dark Leviathan: what the Silk Road shows us about libertarianism and the state

rwl
6pts0
krebsonsecurity.com 10y ago

American Dental Association Mails Malware to Members

rwl
2pts0
onedscorecard.datadrivendetroit.org 12y ago

Data on quality of life in U.S. cities

rwl
1pts0
www.servalproject.org 12y ago

Serval: mesh networking for Android

rwl
4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Ask HN: how do you manage encrypted email?

rwl
8pts11
phdmovie.com 13y ago

Piled Higher and Deeper, the movie [video]

rwl
4pts0
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com 13y ago

Land of Plenty (of Government)

rwl
2pts0
dp.la 13y ago

Digital Public Library of America

rwl
2pts0
pypi.python.org 13y ago

Show HN: My weekend project - schoolutils

rwl
1pts0
lisperati.com 14y ago

How to tell stuff to a computer

rwl
5pts0
pwmt.org 14y ago

Programs with movie titles (Vim-like browser, PDF reader, and other apps)

rwl
1pts0
wwws.whitehouse.gov 14y ago

Reinstate the tax exempt status of Graduate Student Stipends (Petition)

rwl
3pts1
blogs.law.harvard.edu 14y ago

Enough with browsers. We need cars now.

rwl
1pts0
whereofwecannotspeak.wordpress.com 15y ago

24 Hours with Android: Thoughts from a Debian User

rwl
1pts0
freedomboxfoundation.org 15y ago

FreedomBox

rwl
7pts0
www.softwarefreedom.org 15y ago

Why Political Liberty Depends on Software Freedom More than Ever

rwl
6pts1
catb.org 15y ago

MFTL: My favorite toy language

rwl
2pts0
www.structuredprocrastination.com 15y ago

Structured Procrastination

rwl
3pts2
www.salon.com 15y ago

Fixing Anonymity on the Internet

rwl
1pts0
home.btconnect.com 15y ago

Wendell Berry: Why I am Not going to buy a computer

rwl
9pts11

Yes, I'm aware. The problem with anchors is that the author has to take care to make them both unique and human-readable across the whole document. The problem with URL text fragments is that they generally become too long to be a citation. Both need quality-of-life improvements in the tooling before academics will consider using them.

For example, it's pretty easy to use CSS counters to create as many automatically incrementing counters as you need. Page number, section number, theorem number, etc. But (a) you can't do this in raw HTML, which means you can't rely on this working in any user agent that has poor support for CSS; and (b) you can't refer to the values of those counters outside of CSS. Thus, there's no way for you, as an author, to write the write the equivalent of LaTeX's "See Theorem~\ref{thm:foo}" in HTML and rely on having it auto-numbered and rendered correctly wherever your readers are. So the number has to already be there as text in the HTML, and you need a separate, document-unique id attribute coordinated with the number to use for linking. This means you need a separate compilation step to produce the HTML, so you've lost pretty much the only advantage that HTML had over LaTeX.

But fundamentally, the problem is that citation practices assume that the reading format is controlled by the author/publisher, so that all readers are looking at a common view of the document, whereas the Web assumes that the reading format is controlled by the user agent, and user agents vary widely. Thus, on the Web, you need formatting-independent citation practices, which have not yet evolved, or at least not become widely used, because it's too hard compared to page-based media, which have been working for centuries.

Citations. Until we can cite specific passages in HTML as quickly, easily and readably as we can cite pages in paged media, HTML will remain a second class citizen for serious scholarship.

Dumbphone 2 2 months ago

I don’t need it with me all the time; I‘d prefer to just log in to a website on a real computer! But you can’t do this in the EU in practice without a banking app on a phone, or some other piece of hardware that you have to pay extra for and is certainly not more convenient.

Dumbphone 2 2 months ago

Right, I suppose this is theoretically possible here too (I'm in Austria), though I haven't looked into it that carefully, because all the options here seem to cost more than my current bank account and as far as I can tell still require a smartphone.

I wouldn't necessarily mind a dedicated piece of hardware, but if it's dedicated hardware, I feel like the bank ought to provide it, not make me pay for it. And I'd much rather it be a generic piece of hardware that can also be used as a second authentication factor for other things, like a Yubikey. I've looked around but have not found any banks that offer this. The only one I had heard of no longer offers it.

Sure, the world is a better place with fewer serfs in it, but what exactly is of "higher value" than being a research mathematician? It's already a profession that consists essentially of exercising our highest and most distinctly human capacities: creativity, abstract reasoning, and passing the results of those on through a distinctive language and culture. I don't think the comparison with serfs is useful.

I'm sure most research mathematicians would like more freedom from some of the drudgery of their work (grading, admin, etc.), just like the rest of us. But we should be aiming for a world that allows more people to become mathematicians, not fewer.

Dumbphone 2 2 months ago

I love the idea and wish I could get something like this in Europe. The main reason I "need" a smartphone over here is that EU banking regulations make it nearly impossible to do online banking without one. Anyone know of similar projects over here that would satisfy that need?

Presumably the 40mb of data is not from Wikipedia, but the Javascript tracking code bundle needed to turn it into a doomscrollable social media feed. ;) By those standards, I think it’s pretty lightweight! For comparison, the Instagram iOS app is 468.9mb, more than ten times the size…

I have been working on implementing iCalendar/RFC5545 in Emacs Lisp. I recently submitted a large patch and hope it will be merged in the next couple of months:

https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2025-11/msg0...

This will add an iCalendar library to GNU Emacs, allowing packages in core and third-party packages to work with the format. More on the decisions I made and what I learned here:

https://recursewithless.net/emacs/index.html

Kagi News 10 months ago

Indeed! A once per day human-curated news aggregation feed used to be called a "newspaper". You can still get them in some places, I believe.

Yes, that's what's going on: job titles are typically gendered in German, which leads to job ads being written in an awkward way to express gender neutrality. For example, "engineer" has both a masculine form "Ingenieur" and a feminine form "Ingenieurin", so a job ad might say something like "Ingenieur*in (m/w/d)" to mean "an engineer of any gender".

The distinction between "first order" and "second order" is in the first instance a distinction at the level of formal languages. A second order language has more complicated syntax and semantics: it allows variables in predicate position, which (in the standard semantics) take values from the entire powerset of the underlying domain.

This makes second order languages, including the language of arithmetic, much more expressive: they can distinguish models that first order languages can't. Those infinitely many non-isomorphic models of arithmetic expressed in a first order language can be distinguished, and excluded, as models of arithmetic expressed in a second order language. That's why second order arithmetic is categorical: all of its models are isomorphic.

Yes, a model of second order arithmetic contains a model of first order arithmetic, but within the second order language, you can say "which model it is" (up to isomorphism). It's only if you restrict yourself to a first order language that you can no longer say anything which will be true in that model, but false in any non-isomorphic one.

Usability issues of dispersed content include:... Increased cognitive load Difficulty building a conceptual model for the page

This completely agrees with my own experience. But if these things are true when viewing a "dispersed content" site on a desktop browser, shouldn't they be just as true on mobile? It seems to me that this is a big problem with mobile-first design in general: it's just not the right format for actually conveying conceptual information to users.

I've had tinnitus for about two years. Like you, I just kind of noticed it upon waking up one day. I don't know what caused it but it seems to be related to stress, posture, and sleep position. I'm still figuring it out, but it doesn't bother me that much, so I've been kind of slow with it.

Earlier this year I came across this study with very promising results:

Sirh, Soo Ji, So Woon Sirh, Hah Yong Mun, and Heon Man Sirh. 2022. “Integrative Treatment for Tinnitus Combining Repeated Facial and Auriculotemporal Nerve Blocks With Stimulation of Auditory and Non-Auditory Nerves.” Frontiers in Neuroscience 16. https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2022.75857....

They found an acupuncture-based treatment which eliminates or significantly reduces tinnitus in more than 87% of cases (n=55). I'm hoping to be able to get this at some point. The study is out of South Korea though; it might be a while before the technique is available in the west.

I also read the Dawn of Everything and wanted to recommend it here. The first chapter drew me in immediately: reading the native American critiques of the culture of European settlers was eye-opening. By the end of the book I felt they had beat their message to death a little bit, but the message was a very interesting one.

There was also a cost in human life.

I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wound. The photos are amazing and beautiful, but they show how dangerous the working conditions were.

When someone fell off and died, the workers would take the rest of the day off, but be back on the job the next day.

We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs. But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing, and I bet that if you went and talked to the "builders" today, they'd prefer those costs to the ones we paid in the 1930s.

[1] https://museumca.org/exhibit/peter-stackpole-bridging-bay

But my whole point was that they wouldn't be hosting content. The users would be hosting it themselves, on their local computers, serving it via their browser. Mozilla would just have to provide a way to give users a stable base URL (linked maybe to Firefox accounts) that they could give to other people.

Totally! Unfortunately, last I heard, Beaker was dead:

https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/discussions/1944

https://atek.cloud/blog/hello-world

This is a great idea, but the big problem with Beaker is the network effects: only Beaker users can see other Beaker users' sites. To be successful, I think the idea needs to run over regular HTTP(S) so that other browsers can still access these personal sites. This means, at least at the beginning, that someone needs to run the infrastructure that maps stable URLs to a P2P connection to individual browsers. Mozilla is in a good position to do that.

I agree with most of this vision, think these values are important, and would love to see Mozilla realize them.

Given the values outlined here, I was sad to see that Mozilla doesn't seem to be looking much beyond the centralized platforms of today's commercial web. They see the "minimal barriers to entry for both users and publishers" as one of the key properties that makes the web such an important communication medium, and "Site-Building Ergonomics" is a top-level area where they see possibilities for improvement. Despite this, I don't see any recognition that it's still too difficult for ordinary users to publish their own information, which is why we have big commercial platforms where people do this, funded by ads, with all the problems that come along with that.

I think the most revolutionary thing Mozilla (and other browser makers) could do to realize this vision would be to turn their browser into a publishing platform. Browsers already have excellent tools for editing HTML, CSS, and JS built in, and they already speak the relevant protocols. Why not give every user a base URL for their personal site, and serve pages under it directly from the browser running on their computer? That would really lower the barrier to entry for users to become publishers and help realize the values of Openness and Agency.

Of course, such sites wouldn't be available 100% of the time, but they would probably be available enough to cover most of things people use the big platforms for: sharing text, photos and videos with their family and Internet friends. They would not need to be ad-supported and wouldn't raise the associated privacy issues. There are other problems to solve, but Mozilla is uniquely qualified to solve them.

The very first web browser had this feature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#Features And it seems the perfect way to realize much of this vision. Why not bring it back?

Public transportation does enable drinking. That is one reason why young people move to, and like to live in, cities with public transportation.

But there are still huge, important differences between public transport and "ride sharing". Public transportation almost never takes you point to point. You are expected to navigate public transportation on your own, including getting in and out at the right stops. Public transportation usually has sharply reduced service several hours before bars close. You also need a ticket, which often means you must be sober enough to work a machine that only takes cash.

If public transport is your ride home, you need to be a lot more sober than the people the author is writing about.

There are important differences compared to taxis, too. To take a taxi, you must (often) be prepared to pay in cash. You must have enough verbal control to give your address.

It is not implausible that ride sharing apps enable a kind of binge drinking that is qualitatively different from the kind people do when they have to take another way home.

Thus what matters is a publication's impact factor, its reputation, and whether they are already in the acceptable list or not.

This makes me wonder if there's room for a kind of legal hack that could carry these things over to a new journal. A journal's reputation is essentially tied to its name; and the name is what goes on people's CVs and on the lists of approved journals and so on. It seems like the name is really the only asset of a journal that could not very quickly be duplicated elsewhere if the editorial board decides to move together.

I assume these names are protected by trademark law and that the publishers will fight to the death to protect them. But in the scenario where the editorial board jumps ship, is there some kind of legal argument they could use to either (a) effectively steal the name from the publisher or (b) piggyback on the name and reputation of the old journal, for example by naming the new journal "The Journal Formerly Known As X", so that it's clear to everyone that this is the journal X in all but name, and thus should be treated like X for the purpose of performance reviews etc.? Anyone know how far an editorial board could go in this direction, if they made up their minds to do so?

My point is not that this is impossible; it's that separating the tasks of building a list of query results and then executing an operation on those results requires some kind of convention about how to refer to those results across the two phases. Developing such a convention is a harder problem than it looks like.

The example I was responding to was from the (Unix) shell, which as far as I am aware does not offer any such convention other than filenames. Real programming languages of course offer more options, but even there the problem is not solved: as you say, you must then build the system which understands how to take the results of the query and execute something on them. That means designing such a convention inside your program. The article is about using a type system to help you do that cleanly.

This is a good point, but notice that what makes the segregation easy in your example is that the query and the command have a shared way to refer to what the command will operate on: the filename.

Consider a conceptually very similar case: instead of finding and deleting files in a filesystem, think about finding and deleting lines matching a pattern within a file. Then the query is something like grep...but what do you put for the command on the other side of the pipe?

Of course, you can tell grep to output line numbers and use a command that operates on line numbers, or similar. The point is, in order to achieve this kind of segregation, you need some common way of naming operands on both sides of the divide. And naming things is hard, so segregating things this way is hard, and thus there's a lot of tools with mixed query/command responsibilities.

Sure, you're probably rich enough that you can afford a crazy amount to subscribe to every possible website. But the majority of the world cannot - and that's why ads are not just an unnecessary distraction but instead a necessary way to life on the Internet.

You seem to be assuming that "life on the Internet" requires these services, and requires them to bring in the insane revenues that they bring in through targeted advertising. It doesn't. The Internet and the Web had thriving communities before any of them existed, and there are meaningful alternatives to everything you mentioned that don't surveil their users. The only thing that makes any of these services feel required is network effects and the attendant monopoly power. People use them instead of the alternatives because they're "free", and that's where their friends are and where the content is. They actively enforce this power, by buying competitors, investing in slicker UIs, preventing other services from providing a different interface to the same data, and not providing any meaningful way for users to export their data and delete it from the company's servers. Wanting an alternative to this situation needn't be an expression of privilege.

I just don’t see tracking online activity as more harmful than the benefit that people get from the service. (Not so much US users, but the benefits to people in very poor countries are very real, and wouldn’t exist if the service didn’t monetize so well)

Can't you elaborate on this? What's the difference between people in the US and poor countries? Why does tracking help the latter group?

assuming student size held constant

It did not: https://pages.github.berkeley.edu/OPA/our-berkeley/enroll-hi... During this period, the undergraduate student population grew about 20%.

I was at Berkeley during most of this period. The undergraduate population swelled at the same time that the university was dealing with difficult budget cuts. The growth was significant enough that many students had, and still have, difficulty signing up for the courses they needed.

(I believe the cuts and the student population increase were related: admitting more students, especially out of state students, brought in more revenue. But there could have been other factors, like more students wanting a college degree after the financial crisis.)

In this context, it seems worth mentioning Woolfiller, a product I love because I always wear out the elbows in my wool sweaters and it lets me mend them: https://www.woolfiller.com/ It's a great example of a company trying to reverse this trend.

I recently ordered a new kit from them, and learned that they are working on a new project to produce a more mendable fabric: https://madetomend.com/ I can't wait until I can buy a jacket from them and try it out.

Yes, narrowing lanes will increase drivers' stress (whether by a significant amount, I don't know). But it will also decrease the stress of cyclists, pedestrians, and other people using the same roads. So this is not a straightforward consideration against narrowing lanes, or any other measure that will increase safety but increase drivers' stress as a side effect. To me, it sounds like a good trade: when the stress of driving goes up and the stress of cycling or walking goes down, more people will switch away from driving, and there are many reasons why that would be a good thing.