Cyberdog

Oh, it was 0% valid, and anyone who knows anything about how typewriters work (which you would think Rather, as someone styling himself as an old-school journalist, would know) could tell you in an instant. A partisan viewpoint is exactly the problem here - if you hated Dubya enough, as Rather and the others at CBS apparently did, you were able to punt logic to the curb and believe the story they wanted to believe.

But even if you were ideologically opposed to Bush, this should have been interesting to you too as an example of something not to do. Why not report on the stuff that actually happened and was backed by evidence that wasn't easily-debunkable? Plenty of not-so-flattering things happened during the Bush Jr administration… starting with an unwinnable war in which military contractors made out like bandits.

But I think the yet-still-ongoing three-ring media circus around the Trump administration proved the press learned nothing from this. Oh well. So long as the people instead learn that the press is just as ideologically-driven as anyone - more so, even.

That would have been before my time. The first big instance that I can remember is the Killian Memos controversy during the Dubya administration, where Dan Rather wanted us to believe a document written in a proportional serif font with ligatures and superscripts which happened to match up to Microsoft Word's default typeface at the time was in fact typed on a typewriter in the early '70s.

Interesting username you have there.

I don't see why you don't accept "it's Rails." There are other issues as sibling comments have pointed out, but by starting with an ecosystem known to have performance limitations, this sort of outcome is inevitable, is it not? I'm sure the Mastodon team were never expecting the degree of usage which has been thrust upon its larger instances, but now that it has happened and the limitations have become apparent, I'd encourage people who are interested in setting up fediverse/"Mastodon network" instances to consider the alternatives to Mastodon, however paltry they currently are.

I know that the Pleroma front end and its forks are written in something called Elixir, which I have no idea about but I can't imagine it could be much worse than Ruby. What I'd really like to see is something written in a language known to be actually fast, though - PHP or Lua.

So then why is it called "Djot" instead of "Jot?"

> Interesting. I suspect something like this will always be subjective, but I find the opposite to be true. bold and _italics_ make the most sense to me and is always what I wished Markdown did.

Yeah… After posting that message, I remembered that _foo_ in Markdown also results in <em>foo</em> - so the underscores are backwards-compatible. But I've just always used asterisks so I completely forgot about it. So I guess they were bound to make some people upset no matter which one they made <em> and which one they made <strong>, and I'm on the losing side. :P

Whatever. If this ends up taking over the world as Markdown did (and I hope it does), I'll just get used to it, I suppose.

Incidentally, how did you "deactivate" HN's parsing of the asterisks in your reply?

Aside from the sibling answers, Markdown, though originally intended solely for HTML output, is useful for writing other types of documents; I've written an e-book which was eventually destined for PDF format as a series of Markdown files. I could have used HTML instead, but aside from being more difficult to write, Markdown's document orientation solves some problems with that (should the HTML-to-PDF translator handle CSS and evaluate JavaScript? How does it deal with <audio> or <video> tags?) by not making them a possibility in the first place.

Similarly, for things like comments on message boards or blogs, a user can just dump a bunch of text into the text box without knowing the first thing about Markdown and expect it to look more or less like how it was entered, with paragraph breaks and such. If you force these people to use HTML instead, you're forcing them to at least learn and use <p></p> - which is probably simple for those of us reading HN, but I don't consider it a reasonable request for the normies on Reddit.

So, sure, HTML is quite good at what it was invented for, but not everything that involves text input on the internet or elsewhere should be HTML.

As someone who's been using Markdown since before it was cool, I love it! I think writing the implementation in Lua is an interesting take since Lua out-of-the-box does not support standard regular expressions; it instead has its own pattern-matching thing which is a bit more limited. But it looks like they've embraced that limitation to force themselves to write something that doesn't need a full regex library to be sanely parsed.

My biggest complaint is that asterisks map to <strong> and underscores map to <em> (in HTML terms). This is not backwards-compatible with Markdown where (asterisk)foo(asterisk) gets you <em>foo</em>, and it feels objectively backwards, if that makes sense. I wonder if there's any chance they could reverse that.

Will anyone at MS learn a lesson from this and stop taking their OS development in directions the user doesn't want it to go? Or is that just crazy talk?

Love it. Does anyone know of any active artists who do a similar style of art?

That’s the way I see it. Give the people the means and expectation to protect themselves in a dangerous situation and the rest of the problem solves itself.

Sorry to be the guy, but "Game Boy" is two separate words and always has been.

So if you have one of those ridiculous ultrawide monitors, the text is very large, or if you have a vertically-mounted monitor, are using a smartphone held vertically, or just prefer to make your browser windows narrow, the text becomes very small?

That sure is an interesting trick, all right.

And unsurprisingly the downloadable version uses Electron.

Here’s my app’s logo: https://github.com/GarrettAlbright/wptrans/blob/master/Icon%...

Note that it does not use the same colors as the Wikipedia logo or the same puzzle piece/globe iconography. It uses a serifed “W” as well as characters from other writing systems, with a brown and yellow color scheme - alluding to Wikipedia as well as the app’s purpose, but intentionally avoiding copying to a degree that would cause confusion. If, after considering this, you still believe I was intentionally inviting confusion between my app and an official Wikipedia product even before all of the documentation stating that is not the case, I believe that you are either operating on very bad faith, or are one of Wikipedia’s lawyers trying to justify your invoice. “Our firm removed 20 violating apps from the App Store this month!”

What does the Twitter purchase or Musk’s opinions on the war in Ukraine have to do with Space-X’s capabilities to successfully put satellites into orbit?

The fake ad is a brilliant idea; it encourages readers to look at the legitimate ones, just in case.

Could you elaborate for those of us who don’t typically follow space news? Has Space-X had some trouble recently?

No, but the broader idea of sensationalist journalism wouldn't have been a foreign concept.

At any rate, there is a process for amending the Constitution, so if you want the First Amendment to change such that the federal government has a clear mandate to do this sort of thing, feel free to campaign for that. But just repeated violation by the state is not that process.

I don’t like the idea that the First (or any other) Amendment should be violated because there is already so much precedent for it.

By that logic, if someone uses a phone book to harass you via telephone, the phone company is liable.

Or, for a more up-to-date example, if someone uses a DNS provider to find a server's IP address and do a DDOS attack against it (as is constantly happening to KF), the DNS provider would be liable.

> There's always politics, admin only channels, and people contacting each other outside the main system.

Okay, so KF is responsible for conversations that happen outside of KF now? What should KF's admins do about that?

> Sure, and if you know the right people on the right Discord, then you can avoid all that and discuss all the plans and share all the juicy news away from prying eyes.

Take that up with Discord, then.

Oh, God, I'm being dragged into this debate again.

> There's no such thing as "just words on the internet". Words express beliefs and intent. I take them seriously.

Intent? Find me a post on KF stating intent to harm someone in real life which wasn't either downvoted or promptly deleted. Go ahead.

> Of course. The sort of people that compile elaborate profiles on people including personal information are some sort of enlightened beings that despite obsessively tracking down and compiling every embarrassing or weird thing about another person would never actually use that information for anything at all.

Create an alt account on KF and post in a lolcow's thread saying that you want to harm that person in real life. You'll be downvoted into oblivion, probably banned, possibly doxed if you used the same username as you use elsewhere, and possibly reported to law enforcement.

You can believe what you're told by people with motivation to lie, or you can discover the truth. Up to you.

> How about this: try posting an URL for kiwifarms or stormfront or whatever right here, in this thread. See if it stays up. See who's willing to tolerate it.

Man, I almost did. But people just get so irrationally angry about words on the internet nowadays that I decided against tempting fate. I don't need people trying to destroy my career because I don't irrationally hate the right people right now.

Yes, Kiwi Farms exists and has information and opinions you might not like. It certainly has ones that I don't like. But at the end of the day, it's just words on the internet; the stuff about "organized harassment campaigns" and all that is a media lie. I really wish people would just visit the place and realize that it's just a bunch of shitposters with a clear "look, laugh, but don't touch" mentality and not the demonic bogeyman the press has made it out be. But I realize that irrational hatred is faster and easier, so…

Once upon a time I built an iOS language translation/dictionary app which used Wikipedia as a back end. Basically, if you entered a word in language X and the Wikipedia version for language X had an entry, it could find the translation for that word in language Y by looking at the "this article in other languages" information in the source for that page. It was useful for finding translations or transliterations of terms that wouldn't commonly appear in standard dictionaries, like neologisms, brand names, or even just really obscure topics. Unfortunately it eventually got taken down from the App Store because Wikipedia's asshole lawyers didn't like that I used a serifed W in the logo even though I made it clear it wasn't an official Wikipedia product everywhere and I didn't have the motivation to "correct" my audacious use of an upper-case W which Wikipedia now apparently holds the copyrights to.

I still use this technique "manually" for finding translations when dictionaries, though. Wikipedia has a lot of information which isn't in a typical API-friendly format, but with a bit of regex there's some interesting possibilities.

If this sounds interesting, the Objective-C source is still available here: https://github.com/garrettalbright/wptrans You might also be able to find clones of it in the App Store since I know people were taking my source and republishing it back in the day, some even for a profit (mine was always free).

This is kind of my take on it. As gross as I find pipe-to-shell installers to be instinctually, I can't really think of any objections I have about them which don't apply to just grabbing a package from MacPorts, save for one: MacPorts gives me a unified interface for listing and uninstalling that software after it's installed that I don't get from ad hoc installers. But in terms of the common complaints like security, it's pretty much the same - it's not like I'm auditing the source or patches of all the software I'm installing via MacPorts either.

I would argue that shipping bad software is worse than shipping no software at all, yes. And it's impossible not to create bad software when you start with "it runs in a web browser, but it's not a web page." I say this as a web developer with over fifteen years of professional experience.

Worst of all is the shamelessness, though. Don't Electron developers feel ashamed when they ship their products? Or have their brains been so muddled by this "JavaScript everywhere" mentality that they don't realize it's bad? Will future generations even know what a native application is anymore?

This program suggests quitting other applications while it runs. Maybe that wouldn't be so necessary if it wasn't using a framework which needs like 2GB of memory before it can draw a window.

I note that my OP hasn't been downvoted into oblivion as most of my critical HN posts are. I think there's at least a significant silent minority who agree with me on this one.

I’m still stubbornly using MacPorts. If it ain’t broke…

But given that the entire world of technical documentation assumes all technically-inclined people using Macs are using Homebrew, I’ll probably have to give up and switch over at some point. But not yet.

On the one hand, I appreciate the attempt to bring this stuff into the realm of "double click to run" boneheads like me, but on the other hand, I really despise Electron apps when they're multi-platform, where such use is somewhat understandable if still despicable. For a Mac-only app to use Electron… Why do they hate us so?

Where did you get those instructions from? Is creating a virtual environment necessary if I'm fine with it running on my real system?

I assume the environment part is what the "conda" commands on the GitHub repo readme are doing, but finding "conda" to install seems to be its own process. It's not on MacPorts, pip seems to only install a Python package instead of an executable, and getting a package from some other site feels sketchy.

What is it with ML and Python, anyway? Why is this amazing new technology being shrouded in an ecosystem and language which… well, I guess if I can't say anything nice…

I had no idea who this person was so I searched her name. Apparently she grew up in Massachusetts, went to elite private schools, and became a Hollywood actress and writer. Somehow I have a hard time believing she had to pirate Photoshop just to barely scrape by at any point in her life.