Historiopode

I wonder if there's a way to preserve their cloud.typography service through this. The article states that ownership of the fonts was transferred, but I imagine most designers would disdain the very idea of subscribing if the allegations turned out to be true.

Service aside, how is the company supposed to survive this? Even if Frere-Jones wins the trial and full damages are awarded, surely he'll want to leave the company. I can't fathom how you could keep collaborating with a partner who tried to scam you out of a life's work. That'd leave H&FJ with much weaker creative direction and a tarnished reputation.

On technical counts, I agree. The scenario of a poorly implemented filter reminds me of "porn before the Internet": young people learning the basic tricks to gain access to forbidden material and then spreading them within their groups. Even with physical pornography, doing this was neither complex nor particularly time-consuming.

However, I maintain that there's reason for concern when a government elects to make sexuality a matter of policy. Steering public opinion in a certain direction (making the filter opt-out sounds more like a "you shouldn't be doing it, perv" rather than a "it's entirely up to you, my well-adjusted friend!") and exerting control over exposure at the infrastructure level might not be censorship proper, but I wouldn't consider it harmless from a cultural perspective. Generally, I'm indeed bothered when my government wields morality to crusade against something of dubious consequence.

Granted, this comes from someone who considers the most common stances on pornography and sexual education largely detrimental.

I think that is rather straightforward: http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2013/05/02/elixir-on-xen/

Most of the work really is on the Erlang side of things.

Something along this idea[1], but properly drawn by a designer in more than three minutes?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/DR2w9Jl.png

What brought you to develop this library rather than relying on Incanter/Colt? The scope of HipHip seems different, of course, but there is enough of an overlap to warrant the question.

Wonderful, thanks for the continuous updates. I hope you will keep gaining momentum around this initiative; having a solid community-supported set of benchmarks which routinely improves would be a true asset.

By the way, I would like to offer a UX suggestion: it would be nice if you could select one or more frameworks and have them highlighted in the result listings, so as to be able to notice their relative position at a glance.

A warning: this traditional, over-the-top gesturing is particularly common in certain cities and segments of population. (The kind of colourful things that short tourism&culture articles like to talk about.) Elsewhere? Not so much. If you were so careless as to extend this stereotype to —say— the modern urban youth or the well-educated expat, you would likely be mocked as a clueless American tourist, and asked about how many guns you keep at home. :)

For perspective: I was born in northern Italy. Very few people within my social circles ever used any of the traditional gestures; when they did, they deliberately exaggerated the movements for comical effect, or put on a southern accent. Indeed, I have only recently discovered that gesturing is considered to be such a prominent, common feature of Italian culture... by reading English articles about it.

It seems to me that downloading a subset of a typeface from a webpage would be less practical than downloading an entire collection from a torrent.

Concerning the service itself: according to their product page, H&FJ requires you to include a remote stylesheet rather than javascript. I would say this is the "minimum viable evil" if you are striving to centralize distribution of your webfonts; while annoying, there are some advantages for the user (in this case, free Akamai).

Edit: I just checked a couple of torrent search engines and, apparently, there are not many up-to-date torrents for H&FJ typefaces. In hindsight, I suppose that the population of individuals who are likely to share files illegally and that of professional/dedicated designers have very little overlap.

Ironically enough, the lead actor (Ulrich Mühe[1]) had really been under Stasi surveillance; a surveillance to which his then wife allegedly collaborated.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_M%C3%BChe

Does it offer PGP integration?

Well-designed email clients with proper privacy seem to be very hard to come by, and new players in that niche would be welcome. Particularly in the current climate, I would argue.

While I lack the skill set to fully appreciate the paper, I must say that it is very refreshing to see innovative proposals on this kind of all-important foundational elements.

These are the kind of submissions that make HN worth visiting, for all its problems. ;)

I am fairly sure that Light Table is a node-webkit[1] app, so your assumption should be correct.

[1]https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

Many would argue[1] that “responsibility” is an entirely perfunctory concept when you admit that society should judge and control you based on the actual consequences of your actions (and expectations of similar future behaviour).

[1]One of the many is HN-aligned Sam Harris: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/life-without-free-will

I must say that I am very glad to read this, since I am also looking forward to deploy RethinkDB alongside Clojure (or Erlang, but I fear that will have to wait for quite a while).

Nonetheless, I must agree that focusing on the DB itself is for the best. Keep up the excellent work.

The new UI is quite nice, although its striking similarity to Sonora's design leaves me with quite a bitter aftertaste. Unfortunately there seem to be no substantial improvements over metadata and format handling; it looks like I will keep missing foobar2k for a long time still.

I would argue that your hopes would be better served by Unity Engine[1] and Mono[2] than by Steam. While high-budget releases have almost completely ignored the Mac and Linux platforms despite Valve's effort, the popularity of those tools has brought a very large number of mid-tier and indipendent developers to publish on them. While they are not as popular, they still help to make them look a little bit less like a desolated wasteland of work and productivity. :)

Let's also not forget that those same high-budget productions rely heavily on the current set of graphics (and audio) drivers, and there is hardly any effort to bring the Mac and linux up to par on that front.

[1]http://unity3d.com/

[2]http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

Yes, they will need to be updated, for the most part. I am fairly sure that Sublime Text 2 was Retina-ready after a couple of days from Apple's announcement, though.

I assume it is not relevant, indeed: I was merely asking for comments over an unrelated point that was made in the essay, which is that there are no working Lamarckian mechanisms in biology.

I certainly agree over your second point, which I had considered myself, but that did not seem to be particularly relevant to my doubt.

(My interest in evolutionary biology is quite lax, so bear with me if I say something particularly wrong.)

I was under the impression that, in recent years, there had been a small but significant surge of interest in the possibility of epigenetic inheritance, evidence for which had been found in a few studies on chickens, rats and plants. This article seems to explicitly states that no such thing is currently recognized.

Have I been deviated by fringe neo-Lamarckist press releases, are they simply too recent and in need of consolidation, or did Pinker avoid mentioning them for the sake of clarity and fidelity to the most safe, "gcd" theory?

I think that this comment bears a certain indulgent mixture of patriotism and naïvety. Dismissing Iran as an "evil theocracy" and a "a totalitarian terrorist state" is not entirely without grounds, but I would invite commenters to tone down their statements if geopolitics is not among their interests.

A very interesting feature of the Ivy Bridge architecture is a new digital random number generator code-named Bull Mountain, which uses teetering as an integral part of its workings. [1]

While consumer-oriented reviews rightfully ignore such things, I reckon that the HN crowd would be pleased to know more about such a nifty hardware solution.

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-ne...

I would be curious about the details of such "unpacking". The apparent volume ratio of the born insect over its egg's is quite stunning.

I personally find The Necks very good for almost any kind of work. They produce minimal jazz, which I prefer to more distracting music — even if I might listen to it otherwise, such as electronic.

While their tracks are not available for free, you can find samples here:

http://www.longarms.net/cdcatalog/detail.php?ID=1809

http://www.myspace.com/thenecks

I agree on the quality of the description, but only to a certain point. I think that neglecting to state that their actions are largely retaliatory could have been used to not-too-subtly tinge them as "pranksters" rather than "activists".

As far as I know most of them could well be within the former cateogory, but their most visible attacks were not enacted "just for the lulz"; rather, they were guerrilla tactics employed in response to perceived threats to their Internet homeland, as stated in above comments.

Allow me to interject for a due correction: the inuit "having x>>1 words for snow" is a widespread misconception; Eskimo-Aleut languages feature compounding (as German does), thus allowing an arbitrarily high number of variations of the "snow" lexeme, which can be misunderstood by very uninformed and very monolinguistic individuals (such as lousy journalists writing fillers) as being different words.

This is not surprising, since ACTA is still months away from being effective and news concerning its dangers and shortcomings are only now starting to be visible.

However, there is also another, perhaps major, issue: the tech sector is just not as large or impactful as in the US (or, at least, this is the public perception): no community hub such as Silicon Valley, very few dominant businesses, very few startups and VCs capable of flexing their muscles.

I fear that if we are unable to get major US companies to protest ACTA, such legislation might simply slide past unseen by most.

Out of curiosity, has there been any exchange (either formal or informal) of ideas and/or data with other organizations which suffer from the same issue?

Quora, which spoke very openly about the problem of mantaining a high standard of quality in spite of growth, is a prime example since the structured Q&A format makes inadequacies even more evident; as of today, it seems hard not to think that their efforts could simply fail. (If you are interested in this specific case, take a look at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_can_quora_balance_q... or, for a longer read, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_quora/all/1)

Given this answer (and the amount of downvoting on my previous statement), I think that I might have been ambiguous and left too much space for misunderstandings.

What I am challenging is not the overall value of the initiative (through market effects such as competition), but its technological side: given our parent post's first paragraph, what is Apple's contribution to the current e-textbook toolset? Digital textbooks offer much potential for improving certain kinds of cognitive tasks in both sciences and humanities — the former being exemplified by gfodor. However, from this standpoint, I do not see a significant step forward; rather, I see the promulgation of what are mostly "vanity" features that offer limited additional value for study and learning over traditional tools, and which are often styled with a certain kind of eyecandy that I personally find distracting and detrimental in productive contexts.

This is the reason to be interested in such matters, but I fail to see much of interest in this initiative from the strict perspective of textbook quality. (I will admit, however, that I am alien to the current e-textbook market and technologies.)

While fancy galleries, embedded videos and the such are quite nice, I would dare to suppose that they are not exactly novelties in the ebook field. I might be austere, but Apple-style animations seem toyish, distracting and out-of-place. "Dynamically updated data" seems to be only pushable to Dashcode HTML widgets, which might be lacking in flexibility (but I might be wrong). There does not seem to be a framework for mathematical interactions that could aid comprehension, for example, nor one for on-the-fly manipulation of text structure that allows the student to fold blocks/etc., e.g. to focus on a particular paragraph/conceptual element.

Briefly stated: is Apple's "reinvention" merely reduced to a basic authoring tool and a branded store, which can tangentially (but importantly) channel external efforts in the sector?

Europe is the same, indeed. I wish general and regional distribution issues received more attention when discussing piracy, the latter point standing despite (this) web being US-centric. Publishers deliberately introduce artificious policies, while outdated and unsynchronized legislations contribute to hinder positive efforts. The eventual result for the end-user who is not living the God-Blessed American Way is an imperscrutable buffer of tedious, incoherent obstacles – all of which are easily overcame with piracy, which plainly offers a better experience. This is particularly true for the movie and TV industry, while music and software seem to be gradually improving. This particular issue, however, stems from deeper localist inadequacies that, I suspect, might start to influence things more significant than our entertainment, such as upcoming payment services (e.g. Stripe, which is currently locked-in the US); they are already proving troublesome for financial and fiscal activities. Briefly said: while the Internet is a naturally global technology, middle-men are mostly attempting to costrain it to fit their previous business models. This is, I reckon, both terrible for service quality – and, more theatrically, a wasted chance for progressing part of our cultures past petty nationalisms.