njrc9

I wonder if you might find the book “Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case” by Tongdong Bai to be interesting. It delves into exactly these issues: how to ensure that long-term interests, or the interests of future generations, are also taken into account, and not just the interests of the current electorate.

Many people who were in positions to know the real conditions and prospects opposed the use of nuclear bombs on strategic and ethical grounds: https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2021/06/05/who-opposed-nuking-j...

Agree. "Fact-checking" can never be more than assertions of a particular bias. I am surprised that this project has received so few critical comments along these lines here.

The idea that "specificity," such as what scientific research aims for, can be better evaluated for truthfulness or approach what "truly matters," as this project purports, is dubious. E.g., why would a notion that is more limited in scope matter more than something more vast (to use the word that it cites as an example)? In addition to its dystopian idea of a "source of truth," it completely dismisses "vague" language in the name of "science" or "factuality," which is utterly the opposite of science, which I thought was to understand ourselves and nature with as few presuppositions as possible.

How is information qualified as evidence (e.g., the “Evidence Crawler” functionality)?

The best case scenario would seem to be that results are derived from certain biases built into the model, unless it weighs “factuality” by the number of occurrences of certain statements on the internet which is as far from a qualification for truthfulness as the biased model.

Happy user of Soupault here. What you described here:

> Markdown processors behavior differences can bite you and there's no way out.

is under appreciated. The lack of “surprises” in Soupault is very appreciated.

It was a little difficult to wrap my head around at first, but for me its main benefit is this:

In many static site generators, if there is a page in a collection of pages (say, a product page) that you want to add a custom layout to (but without affecting other pages in that collection), you often need to create a separate template, or modify the default template to allow for this exception. With Soupault, page content is typically written in HTML and giving a specific page a custom layout is as simple as including an <html> element in that page’s content file and it will be treated as a completely standalone page. In other words, a content file is not as different from a template as in typical static site generators.

This flexibility and HTML-first approach cuts down on complex or sprawling templates introduced to deal with many exceptions. And as a result, someone only needs to know HTML to make most edits to a website. Of course, you can make certain patterns more efficient with “widgets” (basically snippets to insert content dynamically) defined in the main configuration file, but it is not requisite.

At the end of the day, the website is mostly just HTML with a simple project directory structure, which makes it understandable to a wider audience, which is important to me since I want the website to be easily understandable for future maintainers of it.

Edit: Another benefit is that Soupault is a single statically-linked executable with no dependencies, and therefore can be downloaded via a simple link. This also extends the longevity of websites built with it (i.e. it is easy to get the development environment setup).

I have been very satisfied using https://m-docs.org/ It has pre-built components and a bunch of utility classes that allow basic custom styling in the manner of Tailwind so that I rarely write any css myself. It's also framework agnostic and as simple as just including a <link> and <script>.

The author of this framework is also doing very interesting work on building Haskell server pages [1], taking inspiration from redbean's Lua server pages[2].

[1] https://monadic.systems/post7 [2] https://redbean.dev/#lua

Thank you very much! I just finished watching the video and am now reading more on QuickCheck. This approach makes a lot of sense.

Thanks for the feedback. I am definitely a beginner in Haskell, which would explain why I came to this conclusion. Could you recommend some good sources on testing in Haskell?

One of the nice features of IHP is that, thanks to Haskell’s strict type checking, it does not just eliminate bugs, it also speeds up development. E.g. if you want to change or build a new feature, you don’t need to write tests for it since the compiler basically does that for you. Since you don’t need to write tests, your work is perhaps half of what it would be normally – and neither do you have to know how to write good tests, which is an entire skill in itself.

Thank you very much! I will check out their website.

Thank you very much for the suggested readings. Recommendations like yours are very appreciated since I find it difficult to find such content via the usual means of discovery on the internet. I read through the first article. That and similar critical writings certainly make one doubt much of what one has learned and hears...

Thank you for linking the article. I had never heard of the US Agency for Global Media before. I have not read that much about it yet but it sounds in line with some of the criticisms Chomsky levels at U.S. propaganda. I would be very interested in any other sources of information you might recommend on this topic or hearing more of your own thoughts (my email is in my profile).

Your comment reminds me of Machiavelli’s work “Discourses on Livy” in which he writes, among other things, that discord (between the nobility and the common people) produced the liberty enjoyed by the Roman Republic. Machiavelli’s views on republicanism are very insightful, in my opinion, and offer an understanding of democratic government that may be more prospective of being actualized than what appears to be proposed in much of today’s discourse on democracy.

By the way, I came across one of your HN comments in the past (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127353) and immediately was impressed by your thinking. Ever since, I look forward to seeing your comments on HN. If you are interested, I would be greatly interested in hearing more of your thoughts expressed in the aforementioned comment of yours. My email is njrc900[at]gmail[dot]com

Thanks for taking a look at it –

Regarding resources for absolute beginners, I haven’t read it myself, but this book [1] takes a similar approach to my site, but since it has full English translations of the text it seems like it could be useful to beginners (however, it looks like you still need to understand basic grammar and vocabulary).

As to pricing, the comma is in the American sense. So that would make it about $10/month.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-into-Japanese-Literature-Cla...

Thank you for the feedback. I’ve deliberately not attempted to teach grammar or pronunciation with it since I’m aiming for people who already understand those things (i.e. intermediate learners) but who need help to go from intermediate to advanced Japanese (mostly a matter of building vocabulary) and for which there do not seem to be many educational resources. So right now my foremost goal is to get more books published to broaden the vocabulary presented in the books. Hope that explains its approach!

nv-vn, as fuzzythinker pointed out, an “Easy” marked book has been added to those you can read for free. Hope that helps!

Sorry for the late reply, but thanks very much for the feedback! Yes, doing the same for other languages is something I’ve thought of too. If I knew German, for example, that’d be great fun (thinking of using works by Goethe and Nietzsche). For now, this is a one-man show so I’ll have to keep my focus on just Japanese.

> How do you envisage the fluency colour coding being used?

The color-coding is just to visualize your progress if you are recording how well you know words. Red indicates words you don’t know or haven’t recorded anything for. Each time you click “Got It” for a word, the color will be updated to a new color: red -> brown -> yellow -> light green -> green (green indicates you know it completely; clicking “Know It” will make it green immediately).

Thank you very much for the input!

> Seems to me if you're reading short stories, you probably shouldn't be translating words to English.

Definitely, Japanese that is as nuanced as in these stories does not translate very well. To try to overcome that, the definitions are always shown right in the context of the text and each definition includes all alternative meanings of that word so that puns and nuances are preserved as much as possible. This seems, for the moment, the best compromise between accessibility to English speakers and honoring the Japanese text. However, if you have any better ideas of how to approach this I'd be grateful for your input!

> However, I must ask, is there an option to display the definitions in simple Japanese/use the app entirely in Japanese?

Right now there is no option to use the app entirely in Japanese or to display definitions in Japanese. That is something I had not thought of, so thanks for the suggestion! To begin with, I’m going to work on refining it as it is in English since I figured that what keeps people from breaking into Japanese literature is largely the intimidation of a page of completely Japanese text (e.g. navigating Aozora Bunko for the first time).

> Also, do you explain the nuances of the kanji themselves? There is a lot of connotation(?) not provided by the definition.

Right now there is no explanation of nuances of the kanji themselves (only the words). That is another idea I had not thought much of! Thanks. I’m hoping to get more feedback from users and to find out how they use it and what they might find lacking. This could be one of those lacking features.

Thank you so much for the feedback everyone! I posted this yesterday evening (in Japan) and so catching up now the next day.

kevining: That is a very good point about having free access to a book of each difficulty level. You are absolutely right, since with only an intermediate level book available for free, subscribing is a gamble as to whether there are books suitable for you (definitely don’t want to put people in that position).

I’ve updated the site now so that you can access 3 books (1 of each level) for free.

> 2 - If time permits, consider having a button which can display a translation of the entire sentence. Satori reader has something similar and it's very useful when there's unknown grammar

This is definitely something I’m thinking about. I toyed with the idea of translating each page myself and making that available at the bottom of each page. But scrolling to the bottom of the page is a hassle so I’d want to figure out something more integrated.

I also wasn’t sure how useful whole-sentence translations would be since I figured people using this would probably already have a good understanding of grammar. But perhaps these books are advanced enough to warrant whole-sentence translations regardless? Thoughts?

I made an HTML5 template for programmers that you could adapt into Wordpress, Jekyll, and the like: http://stephenbenedict.com/programmatic-style/