Rumperuu

Abstract:

A proposal for building an index of the Web that separates the infrastructure part of the search engine - the index - from the services part that will form the basis for myriad search engines and other services utilizing Web data on top of a public infrastructure open to everyone.

Recorded on the 20th anniversary of WIRED's publication of the 1995 piece “The Curse of Xanadu”[0] (and adding onto his previous rebuttals in the same[1] and online[2]), Ted Nelson announces his creation of a feature-length rebuttal video to be released upon his death.

[0] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

[1] https://www.wired.com/1995/09/rants-raves-123/

[2] http://www.xanadu.com.au/ararat

Brian Will of “Object-Oriented Programming is Bad”[0] fame presents ‘a positive case for an alternative’, or a ‘prescription for how code should be written, rather than how it shouldn't.’

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM

Sounds like TrackMeNot[0], which constantly searches for random things on various search engines, or AdNauseum[1], which clicks every ad it sees.

[0] https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

[1] https://adnauseam.io/

Add the following to your bookmarks and click it when you come across a paywall:

  javascript:window.location=%22https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

Surely each executed prisoner could be expected to provide multiple organs, the transplantation of each being recorded as a separate operation?

Although obviously that's a pedantic quibble rather than a defence of the practice, as even a highly reduced number of such executions remains appalling.

>I spent a while following blogs of the IT / radio support guys who were working down South

Any that you particularly recommend? Or have all the ones you followed then now all finished up and gone home?

I thought this was one of the most interesting of Swartz's writings collected in the book The Boy Who Could Change the World, particularly now that Congress, um, isn't.

More information about the seminar at https://ethics.harvard.edu/aaron-swartz-%C2%A0%E2%80%94%C2%A...

Consider this story about a man stabbed on the NYC subway and the police who locked themselves in the train cabin whilst a bystander provided first aid [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAfUI_hETy0

For a different perspective, in the UK the approach taken to policing is (in theory) governed by the Peelian Principles [0]. None of the principles explictly mention protection of the public, but 5/9 of them do refer to the police force's relation to the rest of the population.

Principle 7 - ‘Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.’

[0] http://www.lacp.org/2009-Articles-Main/062609-Peels9Principa...

What happens if you decline the millimetre scanner in a UK airport?

Gov't guidance states that ‘...the individual must either be screened by an alternative method which includes at least an enhanced hand search in private...’ [0]. Is that just a standard pat-down, or is it more ‘eeny meeny miney mo, I wonder where my glove will go?’

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

I'm a latecomer to HN and I remember wondering at first how such a 'basic' site could possibly be so popular. After a while, it was clear that something was really very right about the design of the thing, but I hadn't ever bothered to put into words just what that was. Now I don't have to.

Ignoring whatever views you may have about him and those he associates with, at the end of one of Carl Benjamin/Sargon of Akkad's recent videos on his Patreon removal [0] he starts talking about 'alt-tech' (Gab, Voat, whatever this alt-Patreon ends up being) and tells his viewers to join with him 'to essentially build a new Internet that _they_ can't attack'.

This has me wondering about the long-feared Balkanisation of the Internet. It's always been assumed that nation state conflicts would bring this about [1,2], but this incident has me wondering if we might not see it come about based on ideology instead.

With all the fuss made about how people on social platforms live in filter bubbles, at least those bubbles coexisted on the same platforms and there might be at least some chance of piercing them. What's going to happen if we create two (or more) entirely separate service ecosystems for people to sort themselves into on political bases?

On the flipside, maybe this is a _feature_ of the market rather than a bug and everything'll work out fine [3]? It might even lead to a drive to develop resilient, distributed services that don't run the risk of a single provider being strongarmed or being able to revoke service on ideological grounds that everyone can benefit from.

I'll be interested to see how this all develops.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXRx98gpuRY

[1] http://newdigitalage.com/

[2] https://www.rt.com/russia/446502-russia-legislators-internet...

[3] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...

Not _quite_, although it's a fairly pedantic technical distinction.

As I understand it, an organism that reproduces sexually (rather than asexually) has a sex dependent on the gamete it produces. There _might_ be some insects with more than two sexes[1], but generally a dioecious (two-sexed) species will be anisogamous, meaning one sex is responsible for bringing a load of smaller, simpler gametes (sperm, pollen) to the party whilst the other brings a single, larger one (egg, ova). Put them together and babies happen.

The mechanism that determines the organism's sex varies by species. Homo sapiens are a species that have an XY sex-differentiation system. As a sexually dimorhic species (our two sexes look different), one's chromosomes also cause one to express distinct secondary sexual characteristics (e.g., male facial hair, female breasts). Man boobs and bearded women exist, however, so these characteristics are not a 100% accurate indication of one's sex.

Also, as another reply stated, the meaning of ‘gender’ may or may not == that of ‘sex’.

Gender referred only to a linguistic concept or was a synonym for sex until the '60s-'70s, when radical feminists and sexologists like John Money[2] proposed that gender be used to refer to the expectations, roles and responsibilities that a culture assigns based on sex (i.e., women should raise kids, men are more aggressive). Personally, I feel a term like ‘tertiary’ or ‘socio-sexual characteristics’ would have been a better, less confusing choice, but unfortunately I wasn't around in the '60s to tell them.

Outside of social sciences, the words generally remain synonymous. Within social sciences the '60s-'70s-era distinction is retained and gender is studied almost exclusively (as you might expect of a sociological concept rather than a biological one).

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953470...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money

>I wasn't as ambitious. I was less social. In other words, it made me feel fine just hanging out in my apartment doing nothing.

Incidentally, this echoes my experience with romantic relationships. Have you considered that you may have started dating the pot and not noticed?

It looks like that can only be triggered if the user interacts with the extension in some way. Presumably, then, it won't work if there's a script that should run on each page load.

EDIT: I had a look at the manifest.json[1], and it turns out that's the only permission I've requested. Not sure why Firefox says I'm asking for everything and the kitchen sink.

[1] https://github.com/Rumperuu/Pinpointer/blob/master/manifest....

This is really interesting, I'm not sure how I didn't find it before. What I'd like to know is whatever happened to the CSS-selectors-as-fragment-identifiers movement and why it didn't take off. The proposal that inspired that extension[1] was written by Simon St.Laurent and Eric Mayer, so it's not like it was a fringe thing, and they co-chaired a W3C Working Group on the topic[2], but it apparently never published any reports and the last recorded activity was in Jan 2013. Anyone know what happened?

[1] http://simonstl.com/articles/cssFragID.html

[2] https://www.w3.org/community/cssselfrags/

If you mean what I think you mean, you can already send a link that specifies a valid element ID on the page to anybody and have their browser focus on it — that's what fragment identifiers are for. However, if the page designer has neglected to provide a unique ID for each page element (and they probably have), you're out of luck. Ideally, you'd be able to specify any valid CSS selector that only selects one element as a fragment identifier, but that's not the case (and is basically what this extension makes possible).

As yoklov said, I had to have a small script[1] run a quick check on every page you visit to check if the URL is a Pinpointer URL. As far as I can tell there's no way around this (and I'd say breaking backwards compatibility with HTTP is a bit drastic for a little browser extension like this).

[1] https://github.com/Rumperuu/Pinpointer/blob/master/content_s...

As far as I can tell the Mozilla addons page doesn't like addons running on it. I'll add a more explanatory error message though. I hadn't thought to test it on HN, so that's intriguing. I'll look into it, but I'd presume it's due to some sort of quirky DOM structure.

Good point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela#aHRtbCA%2BIGJvZ...

(I wasn't kidding about needing to shorten those links.)

I wanted to try making a browser extension and it seemed weird to me that there didn't seem to exist any means of linking to specific elements on a web page if they hadn't been given IDs to make a fragment identifier out of, so I made this.

You select a page element and generate a link, which you can then share. For someone without the extension, the link will work as normal and just take them to the page, but someone with the extension will have the selected element focused on and highlighted for them.

There's also a repo on GitHub (for now)[1] and I wrote about how I made it[2]. My next priorities are to make it not look like ass and to shorten the links somehow. Let me know what you think.

[1] https://github.com/Rumperuu/Pinpointer

[2] https://bengoldsworthy.net/2018/04/developing-pinpointer/

>It is not illegal...to threaten the president

That may not be entirely true [1], although the same video makes the point that US courts have apparently ruled you _can_ incite another to harm them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5bEwcJ8eCI

They blog (intermittently) at Sapiens Anonym.[1] They went dark for a bit due to what I gather were various medical, educational and relationship issues, but things have been picking up again lately.[2]

[1]https://sapiensanonym.blogspot.co.uk/

[2]https://sapiensanonym.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/upcoming.html

Prof. Harold Thrimbleby, “Designing IT to Make Healthcare Safer” (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I

It might not sound like much from the title, but it's really worth a watch. Thrimbleby talks about UX (captivatingly, even though I'm not usually particularly interested in it) and the many, many bad examples within healthcare tech that leads, directly, to people dying—such as his mother. He also has some really interesting points about tires at one point. I'm not sure if I'm selling it.

These two are also really good: Steve Rambam, “You've Lost Privacy, Now They're Taking Anonymity” (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNZrq2iK87k Lepht Anonym, “Cybernetics for the Masses” (2010): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APOAmxFEMkQ

And this one always makes me chuckle: Bryan Lunduke, “Linux is Freaking Weird” (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPbAXKMCDkY