linguaz

Wondering if something like this could be implemented on tangled with public-inbox:

https://public-inbox.org/README.html

> public-inbox implements the sharing of an email inbox via git to complement or replace traditional mailing lists. Readers may read via NNTP, IMAP, POP3, Atom feeds or HTML archives.

> public-inbox stores mail in git repositories as documented in https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox-v2-format.txt and https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox-v1-format.txt

> By storing (and optionally) exposing an inbox via git, it is fast and efficient to host and mirror public-inboxes.

Interesting post about Picat:

Planner programming blows my mind

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/picat/

> Picat is a research language intended to combine logic programming, imperative programming, and constraint solving. I originally learned it to help with vacation scheduling but soon discovered its planner module, which is one of the most fascinating programming models I’ve ever seen. ...

> ... the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on.

Don't know how useful these are, but here are some links pages on a couple of websites I put together a while ago:

https://b79.net/fields/about

https://earthdirections.org/links/

Just personal non-commercial handcrafted sites. One day I'd like to figure out some tooling to manage / prune / update links, etc.

> I was just reading a book that touched on Ancient Rome. The author tried to convey the significance of the Council of Nicaea by comparing it to the furor over Global Warming.

Could you please share the title of this book?

Thanks for the pointer to Chaitin, his writing seems approachable:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4471-0307-3_...

https://inference-review.com/article/doing-mathematics-diffe...

> he builds a LISP with it

cool, just found these:

The Limits of Mathematics---Tutorial Version : https://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9509010

An implementation of his Lisp, written to explore the above Tutorial : https://github.com/poppingtonic/chaitin-ait

> I imagine falsification of results in math is extremely difficult or just impossible.

Another quote I like from this piece: “No one can be a charlatan mathematician for long”.

If only that were true in certain other domains.

Such a wonderful piece. I'd not heard of Julia Robinson or Yuri Matiyasevich...what a touching story of two people forming a friendship across time, place and culture.

> Julia thought of mathematicians “as forming a nation of our own without distinctions of geographical origins, race, creed, sex, age, or even time (the mathematicians of the past and you of the future are our colleagues too) — all dedicated to the most beautiful of the arts and sciences.”

The mathematics is way over my head, but I find this inspiring & would love to see how we might discover/co-create realms beyond such distinctions in other endeavors.

Wow, this is really cool! If I played a reed instrument I'd be tempted to pick one up...

https://glissonic.com/

"The main novelty is that it uses a longitudinal slot on the instrument’s tube instead of tone holes. The two sides of the slot are covered with a magnetic foil that attracts a magnetized ribbon on top. The ribbon is fixed on the upper end, stretched and lifted up from the lower end as a string on a violin. You can push down the ribbon anywhere, and it will seal up perfectly above it, so you can produce any note in the pitch continuum, resulting in a microtonal wind instrument. It can be played with eight fingers of the two hands or by sliding one finger up and down. The glissonic system can be used on various wind instruments: flute, recorder, clarinet, saxophone, tarogato, oboe, etc., or even the cornett."

It's available under the CC BY 4.0 license, you can find the source here:

https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book

There are instructions in the README to build epub, html and other formats (including a giant manpage).

I use ELinks, and with the following in my ~/.elinks/hooks.pl (& ELinks compiled with perl support), HN comment tree indentation looks fine:

  sub pre_format_html_hook {
    my ($url, $html) = (shift, shift);

    if ($url =~ m|news.ycombinator.com/item\?id=|) {
      $html =~ s|<img src="s.gif" height="1" width="([0-9]{1,3})">|'&nbsp;'x($1/10)|eg;
    }

    return $html;
  }

Wow, pretty cool. Seems it could be a great way for kids to get to & from school, all pedaling together. Longing for this sort of transportation option here in the Bay Area...

Apparently this is the manufacturer: https://www.metaalspecials.nl/

Thanks -- looks like a really useful document. Is there some way to download / save it locally? I'm not seeing a menu within the Google doc, so all I can try is the browser function (Firefox on Linux "Save Page As... Web Page complete"), but that doesn't really do it. Maybe the author did a "Disable options to download, print, and copy for commenters and viewers" [1]?

[1] Limit how your files are shared https://support.google.com/docs/answer/2494893

What I'd find to be interesting & useful is:

Every URL I visit is automatically recorded along with the time & date visited, title and other metadata.

If the URL is visited via a link off another webpage, have that relationship recorded. Provide some sort of navigable tree / searchable database. Should be able to easily scale to tens / hundreds of millions of URLs across decades.

If the URL is visited by manually inputting that URL, provide option to type into a field something like "heard this on the radio in a show about xyz..." or "so-and-so told me about this on 2-28-2020 at lunch".

Provide option (when viewing page or drilling into history tree) to:

- paste in a paragraph or two of text from the page to associate for context

- save the entire page in WARC or similar

- rate / star / tag that page

Provide option to delete pages from history -- either entirely, or "scratched out" (maybe with a comment) so one can remember which branches of the tree are not worth following again.

Provide Fuzzy matching as-you-type search across selectable metadata fields

Search all content with regex.

This would likely involve a browser plugin I guess, but it'd be nice to have a browser-independent way of doing this to facilitate multiple browsers on multiple machines. Also, would be good to avoid "extensions no longer supported after browser update" situations.

In the time it took me to get around to typing this up I see there are a lot of other interesting suggestions here...will have to sit down & read through them (and the Linkalot docs) more closely when I've some free time.

This looks like really interesting & useful. Couple questions:

What copyright is assigned to the posts from contributors? Creative Commons?

Could there be a way to allow users to accumulate a local copy of the discussion threads? This is something I appreciate about mailing lists and Usenet -- being widely distributed & redundant minimizes the chance of important content getting lost to the sands of time. Also allows for reading offline in situations where internet access might not always be available.

I see there are RSS feeds for individual discussions, but on a quick look through a few of those it wasn't clear to me how well this would capture threaded conversations, if it would require continually adding additional feeds for newly spawning discussions, etc. Maybe db dumps could be utilized similar to how Kiwix creates an offline Wikipedia?

Anyhow, great idea, I hope to be able to contribute.

> I am trying to port Rosetta to FreeCAD ... so it is all free.

This sounds really interesting. I've been wanting to work with Rosetta but with a backend other than AutoCAD, hopefully something that could run in Debian. I'd be interested to follow any progress you make on this front if there's a code repo / link you could point to, or maybe message me (contact info is in my profile).

In the article the authors mention conducting a study:

We have come to this conclusion based on an exhaustive, web-based study of everything that the 100 wealthiest US billionaires have said or done, over a 10-year period, concerning several major issues of public policy. For each billionaire we used several dozen carefully selected keywords to find all publicly available information about their specific talk or actions related to any aspect of social security, any type of taxation, or anything related to abortion, same-sex marriage, or immigration policy.

the authors of the article have written a book, coming out soon:

Benjamin I Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J Lacombe are (respectively) Fulcher professor of decision making, professor of political science, and PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University. They are co-authors of Billionaires and Stealth Politics, forthcoming in 2018 with the University of Chicago Press.

Perhaps references & the like will be found there. Looks like the book won't be shipping till early December, but you can peruse the table of contents here:

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo29...

Take a look here:

https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical

"This historical collection of Usenet spans more than 30 years and was given to us by a generous donor"

This group for example, from that collection:

    https://archive.org/download/usenet-comp/comp.emacs.mbox.zip
    [69.8M]

includes posts spanning from December 1988 to June 2013.

For some reason the mbox files have an odd format, with From lines that look like:

     From -8118066241627336028

I wrote some scripts to fix that so I could open the mbox files in Mutt.

BTW, found the above links on this page:

http://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2015/02/23/early_usenet_history_...

which has more info & links about historical usenet archives.

If the psb format can be converted to ppm format (via ImageMagick?), and image size is the issue, maybe NASA's BigView could be an option:

BigView allows for interactive panning and zooming of images of arbitrary size on desktop PCs running linux. Additionally, it can work in a multi-screen environment where multiple PCs cooperate to view a single large image. Using this software, one can explore -- on relatively modest machines -- images such as the Mars Orbiter Camera mosaic [92160x33280 pixels].

http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/projects/bigview/

Not sure if this helps, but there's the Kiwix offline Wikipedia reader and its associated Zim files:

http://www.kiwix.org/

http://download.kiwix.org/zim/0.9/

http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Tools/en#Generating_ZIM_Files_From...

http://www.openzim.org/

On my Debian Sid ThinkPad I've been primarily using the framebuffer console for years now. Setting up custom colors and fonts makes a big difference. Ctheme [1] is handy for making up color themes and changing them on the fly, but this [2] approach makes the colors more persistent. For fonts, I tweaked the SGI Screen fonts to my liking [3]. For viewing PDF files I found fbpdf [4] to be vastly superior to fbgs. The author of fbpdf also created fbpad [5], an alternative to fbterm. I've not tried yet fbpad yet, but the last time I gave fbterm a try I found it sort of took over every VT or something like that...hoping fbpad improves on that. Haven't heard of Terminology, will have to give that a try too. I'd be curious to see comparisons around scrolling speed and power consumption for the fbcon terminal, fbterm, fbpad, Terminology, and an XTerm/UXTerm running in X11.

In addition to tmux, Vim, Mutt and zsh, two other must-haves for me in this sort of environment are ncmpcpp [6] for music and Vifm [7] for file browsing. Note that vifm is quite actively developed (I believe there'll be a new version out in the next month or so), and the older version in the Debian repositories is much less feature-rich.

When I need something more I'll switch over to i3 running in X, but depending on the needs at hand, I've found it's possible to do quite a bit without turning on X11.

Something I've been wondering about...would it be possible to run an fbcon environment like this alongside Mozilla's B2G? I'm thinking of small, inexpensive, low-powered ARM devices where you could toggle between a full-featured modern graphical web-browser and a fast, powerful text-mode development environment.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/ctheme/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4413794

The colors I use:

echo 0,152,96,144,72,128,88,168,48,192,112,184,96,192,120,160 > /sys/module/vt/parameters/default_red echo 0,32,112,104,92,104,104,160,48,96,164,144,128,96,164,180 > /sys/module/vt/parameters/default_grn echo 0,32,48,80,144,176,104,144,48,96,96,80,192,176,144,176 > /sys/module/vt/parameters/default_blu

[3] http://b79.net/fields/comp#mono-bitmap

[4] http://repo.or.cz/w/fbpdf.git

[5] http://repo.or.cz/w/fbpad.git

[6] http://ncmpcpp.rybczak.net/

[7] http://vifm.sourceforge.net/

So many dupes of this... for a counterpoint see [1]:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/oct/20/dirtbo...

Watch enough of the video to see the mention of the photos of the "abandoned" high-school ... as the camera pans over to the brand-new high-school next-door. And stuff like that.

[1] Found via: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059208

Dramatic imagery, but check out this for a counterpoint [1]:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/oct/20/dirtbo...

Watch enough of the video to see the mention of the photos of the "abandoned" high-school ... as the camera pans over towards the brand-new high-school next-door.

[1] Found via: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059208