kevinios

> Network effects are hard to topple but if anyone can do it, Microsoft can.

Just a suggestion, and I suspect I might have overlooked some drawbacks: what about hosting it on SEVERAL of those websites/platforms/services/communication systems (probably with a version "number" or a last updated date), and inside the book, provide several backup links, in case the first one was dead by the time they visited it?

Basically spreading the risk to maybe 10 platforms instead of 1, hoping that at least 1 always survives.

One issue would be that if you lose the login access to one of those platforms, their content might be deprecated on that page, and more recent content would be displayed on others. But that might be a small enough problem to ignore it. You could also encourage readers to visit 2-3 of the links, instead of 1, to increase the chances they read the one with the most recently updated content.

And/or maybe each of those pages could embed a system that "fetches" the status of the other 9 pages, and display the version number of the content of each of them, so that the reader can navigate to other pages if they see that another one has more recently updated content.

And/or you (the author) could manually have to go on the 10 pages every month/year and "confirm" that the content is still up-to-date. Each page would display: "the author has last confirmed the validity of this page on date X". This stops working after you pass away, though, but since all pages would show the same last confirmed date, that might be ok. You could also add a warning on those platforms: "If you see that I haven't confirmed the validity of the content in more than X months, I have either lost access to this page or passed away. Please check some of the other links from the book to see if their "last confirmed by author date" is the same, and if so, please try and check online whether I have passed away".

In any case, a fun problem to think about, thank you!

Congrats! Little suggestion if I may, don't use the location of the user to set the default language of the website. Everything on my computer is in English, but your website defaulted to Spanish, as I'm currently in Spain.

Am no expert, but a short article I just found on the topic: https://dev.to/bitdweller/stop-setting-the-language-of-your-...

Unrelated (sorry), but here’s what I see when I open that Medium link in Safari. It’s quite a challenge to find the article between the pop-ups. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/XbYLs5c.png

But they haven’t improved that in years, so I suspect it must actually be working for them and convert well!

Indeed, and I suppose spelling bees makes sense for any language that is not written exactly as it is pronounced, French being one of them. From what I've read so far, Esperanto only has a single way to write every sound it uses, so it would be much less challenging.

Interesting!

Let me know what you think, but I suspect spelling is not exactly the issue, but rather the fact that there is not a single way to write each sound. There are several sounds possible for each spelling ("ough").

If there were a single way to write each sound, then the spelling in itself wouldn't really matter, as we would only learn the spelling of each sound once and be done with it; we'd always recognize it.

Makes sense. Although if the idea is to choose one language because it has been created with the purpose of being as simple as possible, it might be normal that we want this to be as optimized as possible. If I already know that I'm gonna have to install a fourth keyboard on my smartphone and switch to it every time I write in Esperanto so that accents are easier to type, that might an unnecessary barrier we could get rid of.

Basically, this was invented decades ago by a few people. It's 2018, I wonder what language would be produced if several thousands people collaborated online to simplify it to a maximum, while retaining its capacity to express any idea.

Guilty! Felt like it was the perfect audience to ask for a question that I could not ask people around me :-) On HN, there is usually always at least one domain expert on any given topic, so it's a pleasure to know that someone will probably have an answer for you.

Completely agree with you that sx doesn't look good at all! My suggestion was not to replace with something that looks worst, but ideally that looks cleaner (didn't actually even know of the sx form before I read all the great comments, I do not know Esperanto)

True, but I suspect they are sufficiently rare not to constitute an argument for a beginner not to learn English (also, correct me if I'm wrong but most of those words have accents because they come from other languages)

Exactly! And I see that typewriters were invented in 1878, so the difficulty to type Esperanto with typewriters was most probably not taken into account when it was invented.

Ok I see. By "Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal.", I had understood that you could actually just use the normal letter and it would still be understood.

Interesting! I see that this refactor was made in 1907.

This makes me wonder... in an age where we have tools to open-source and crowdsource software programming, would it be possible to crowd-source the creation of a new language? It could then be refactored regularly (with new major versions published every X years), the source of truth would be the main branch of the repo, and the role that an Academy usually assumes (approving changes to a language) would be given to contributors.

I suspect that a language created by a common effort from a thousand brains would be simpler and more optimized than one invented by a single person in the late 19th century, no matter how hard that person worked on it.

Very interesting. I should spend a few minutes reading about it, but: does that mean that accents do not actually have a utility in Esperanto, and that using ĝ or g in the same word does not create two different meanings? Is it just for pronunciation purposes?

Edit: The forum link that kissickas's posted answers my question :-) Thanks

I would love that, but there is one potential issue: English is really hard to pronounce well, and therefore it takes years to understand it well. There are many ways to pronounce the same combination of letters, depending which word they are part of (like "ough", etc.). Words have emphasis that also make them more difficult to pronounce.

Many non-native English speaker I know (myself included) still have a hard time understanding some English words after 15-20 years or more of English as a second language and having lived in English-speaking countries for years. A native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a dictionary.

On the contrary, after a few minutes/hours of learning Spanish pronunciation, one is usually able to write words that they hear pronounced slowly, since they are written as they are pronounced and there is only "one" way to pronounce them. Same for Esperanto I believe, or language like Korean (although it's a different alphabet so it takes more time for anyone used to the latin alphabet, but it is still phonetic).

Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)

I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:

- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).

- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).

I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.

I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.

1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?

2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum/wiki maybe?)

Thanks!

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Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto (this version has been created by Zamenhof himself and removing the accents is part of the proposal.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_language

Would love to see a new crowdsourced and open-source reform on Github, in 2019!

Great job! Thank you.

Quick suggestion: could you show the summaries directly on your first page, without the user needing to clicks links? (Otherwise, we are back to part of the original problem: need to open many tabs to read each story's summary, or do a lot of back and forth between front-page and post's summary).

In case there would be too much text when doing this, another way to solve this would be to unroll the summary dynamically when user clicks "summary" (instead of opening a new page). Hope this is useful!

Google Cloud regroups G Suite and Google Cloud Platform products.

Edit: As well as Google Maps API, Chrome & Android devices.

To clarify, I do not need more storage, I already have what I need with Dropbox + Drive (that I already pay for). But I need more storage on Dropbox, because that's my preferred way of handling Cloud storage (having the files on my computer at all times) and I love that Dropbox has been pioneering the field with a great product.

I want to support them, but not at 5x the price of competitors.

I recently sent an email to Dropbox support, asking/begging them to let me pay for their service. But at a normal price for a lambda user.

Dropbox is the only cloud service that I absolutely love since it was released, the only one I really want to support... and the only one I am not paying for. I pay for iCloud and for Google Drive, 2-3$/month each.

As a normal user, I do NOT need 1 To of storage for 10$ a month. I need a few hundreds Go, and am happy to pay 2-3$ a month for those.

I understand there are reasons to focus on "Entreprises", but still... My money is just waiting to be taken and has been for years. This year, I gave up on waiting for them and started paying for Google Drive, and unloaded some old files from Dropbox to Drive.

I would just like the exact same features I've been using since years, but with a few more Go of space available. That's all I am asking for. And that's 25$ a year I would be willing to give Dropbox, instead of me being a free-rider since years.

(...) we need to separate the usefulness of the underlying technology called “blockchain” from the mania of people turning bitcoin into a big dumb lottery. Blockchain is simply a nifty software invention (which is open-source and free for anyone to use), whereas bitcoin is just one well-known way to use it. (...)

Will just comment on this sentence: careful here, blockchain is just one of the technologies that Bitcoin uses. But there are other important elements to Bitcoin, such as the concept of decentralization. A company or a bank can use blockchain in a centralized manner. This video by Andreas Antonopoulos (bitcoin advocate) helps make the distinction: Bitcoin vs. blockchain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHbtp7pOftU).

From the video description: "Blockchains are only one of the foundational technologies. In an attempt to co-opt the interest around Bitcoin, companies and governments are trying to circle the square by creating centralised and permissioned versions while entirely missing the point: decentralization."

PS: That being said, Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency using blockchain and decentralization.