I used to think people were "odd" for saying that a particular font was hard to read, or that there were significant differences in the typeface used, but this is nearly impossible for me to read. I copied the text out into an editor and read it there.
It's a great read, and there were quite a few snippets I didn't know - for example, I didn't know that it was Arthur Lewbel who tried to juggle upside down.
The newest Firefox version has a fantastic "Reader View"[1] that strips and normalizes the formatting for easy reading, with larger text and a relatively narrow column.
In addition to refusing to collect more data than it needs, this is a good reason to switch away from Chrome/Safari/whatever.
I can imagine Google not being very motivated to add a button that removes cruft, including (google) ads.
I'd say they did provide a solution in the form of AMP, which of course is much better for them because at the very least they get to suck in more data (and still display ads!).
Of course it's also entirely possible that the Chrome team just hasn't prioritized this feature.
"... strips and normalizes the formatting for easy reading..."
While I applaud your comment, I think there is more to consider. Initially the text has no formatting. Someone had to insert the markup. And why did they add the markup? Why not just give us the text and let us add our own, if we want it?
If we have a program, e.g. a custom text-filter, that can strip html tags and other markup (formatting) from original text (content), then why do we need a browser?
As a matter of practice, I use a text-only browser in VGA textmode. All text looks the same, same VGA font, and the look of every website is much more consistent than with a graphical browser, not to mention other benefits such as text being larger, no bright white page backgrounds, less eyestrain, complete absence of web ads, no auto-loading of tracking elements, etc.
With a text-only browser and without javascript many website design choices become irrelevant. All websites more or less look the same. This makes reading much easier and faster. It allows me to focus on the content, i.e., the data, instead of potentially being distracted by web design i.e. the presentation of data.
Needless to say it would be easy to write html "targeting" a text-only browser. It is very forgiving and "normalizes" variation that might otherwise be a problem.
(Do not misinterpret this comment: I have great respect for talented web designers but there are sometimes situations where design can get in the way of consuming data, as in the case of the OP.)
"Reader View" appears to be solving a problem that graphical browsers themselves created. These browsers make web design relevant and thereby enable not only spectacular, creative web design, but also difficulties in reading for some users, among other problems.
Not knocking use of "Reader View" - it is very useful - but just providing a different perspective on why markup is being used to begin with and other ways to achieve easier reading with larger text (and easily adjustable column width).
If we have a program, e.g. a custom text-filter, that can strip html tags and other markup (formatting) from original text (content), then why do we need a browser?
The very early ideology of HTML was to describe structure and content fairly minimally so that browsers could display it in whatever manner was right for the user.
But it turned out that content producers had more influence with browser makers than did content users (who after all don't pay anyone but the ISP). And they want to have control over the user's screen, speaker and (ultimately) brain. Hence pixel-perfect formatting, advanced CSS and of course JavaScript.
But that has sort-of changed for Mozilla. Their competitors have all the close relationships with content producers, so they are trying to become friends with users again. And thus their incentives have shifted to trying to recover the original virtues of the web out of the current set of technologies.
Well, I guess you can still say they are "odd" because this particular example is less about the font chosen and more about the whitespace between the rows.
I use emacs-w3m from within a terminal for most of my web browsing. Its main flaw (or advantage) is that it can't handle javascript. Despite that, I'd say 90% of the websites I visit work just fine without JS.
For what I'm interested in (which is mainly just information minus all the cutsey Web 2.0 design nonsense), the emacs-w3m browsing experience is fantastic. It's 100% readable plain text, displayed consistently just the way the rest of my terminal text is displayed. It integrates 100% in to my editor, allowing me to use it to its full potential.
emacs-w3m is way more powerful and customizable than other text-mode browsers like lynx, elinks, or standalone w3m itself. Also, the kind of emacs/vim integration that Firefox extensions like It's All Text offers also pales in comparison to what emacs-w3m offers, as there is no context switching with emacs-w3m -- you're always in your editor. Firefox extensions like Pentadactyl and Vimperator are good but, again, they're limited compared to emacs-w3m and its tight integration with emacs, they're not written in elisp, and so the impedance mismatch between the browser, editor, and extension is greater.
I don't know if any of this matters to you, but if it does, you should give emacs-w3m a spin.
Is a Claude Shanon biopic or theme park in work? There has been a flood of articles about him in the last few weeks. This reminds me of the time a few years back when general public discovered Nikola Tesla.
There is actually: filmmaker Mark Levinson is at work on a biopic about Claude Shannon, due out next year! He did an award-winning documentary a few years back called "Particle Fever," which was about CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. High hopes for his upcoming one on Shannon!
A book about Shannon's life and his contributions to modern interconnected society came out not too long ago, "A Mind at Play". Seems lots of journalist read it and rehashed into their opinion/bio pieces.
This article as well as all of the others I have seen on the front page are written by the two authors of a recent biography of Shannon. Smart marketing...
Yep, pretty intense gerilla marketing on HN. Worked on me though... After the first article I thought "I want to read that at some point." After the second one, I added it to my wishlist. After they got Vincent Cerf to review it in nature I gave up and ordered it. Finished reading it a few weeks ago. A bit short, but well worth its money.
It doesn't need to be targeted at HN: members of HN are members of the general population, and the publishers/marketers of the book are understandably going to be doing their jobs which includes getting articles written,w which members of HN come across in the course of their lives. It's not surprising they would then share these articles on HN.
Say an actor is making appearances on a bunch of different talk shows promoting their upcoming movie. The fact that Alice and Bob find out they happened to see the same actor on different shows while at the water cooler doesn't mean the actor was targeting this particular water cooler or Alice and Bob in particular.
The mathematics of juggling definitely continues out from there, as well! [1] is a video to get a taste of some of the ideas of the mathematics of the patterns of juggling.
Then, when you figure out that a certain set of patterns are jugglable, you try to figure out state diagrams for things like "What are all the possible rhythms for juggling three objects, under some maximum number of beats in the air?" [2]
I've definitely caught myself idly drawing ladder diagrams[3] before, then plugging the mathematical results into Juggling Lab[4] to see what it would look like, e.g. [5]. :)
I once around age 12 saw a talk of the mathematics of juggling and it inspired me to go home and download some old software for playing around with juggling patterns which I then did for hours and hours on end.
I'm now wondering if it's the same software, although this would have been circa 1998. I recognise the use of "siteswap notation" though.
Off-topic a bit, but just want to say your juggling talk is very good (and IIRC got me to start juggling again). Although my friends found it odd when they saw it a second time and realised how even your off-hand jokes were all deliberate and planned.
The talk has evolved over the last 30 or more years, and is /significantly/ different now from 2 years ago. There are many common lines, many common jokes, many common quips, because I've kept the ones that are effective, but there are new lines, new comments, new jokes. It's always changing, but people remember the bits that are the same because they are the ones that are good. Which is why I keep them.
It's genuinely evolved, and the lines you see are the survivors.
I worked at a comedy club during university and this is totally normal.
We would usually have a set of comedians booked for the whole weekend, and in the main their performances over the three nights would be identical. There was the very occasional one who would do some ad-lib back and forth with the crowd for a few minutes, but even those you would start to notice a pattern of repeated jokes, or types of jokes if they were booked for more than a few nights.
What was interesting was seeing the same acts return months later and find their set was still 80% the same. They evolved material slowly over time.
The other day my neighbor dropped 'round. We were chatting about wireless networks. He asked if I knew anything about 5G deployments, citing the very high data rates he'd heard of. I responded that I doubted Shannon was going to allow the Marketing guys to fulfill their promises. He said "Oh that guy - he was weird, always riding a unicycle around". Turns out my neighbor attended MIT.
> He said "Oh that guy - he was weird, always riding a unicycle around". Turns out my neighbor attended MIT.
I bet that most top science/engineering schools have some interesting eccentric characters like that. A book collecting the stories of such people could be interesting.
For example, at Caltech when I was there in the late 70s and early 80s there was a guy in his 60s people called "Renaissance Ralph" because he was usually wearing a tutu and purple pantyhose that put one in mind of some kind of jester. He'd hang around the library and sit in on lectures, and most people had no idea who he was. We just figured he was some local eccentric who enjoyed attending science lectures.
The school paper ran a story about him and told us who he was. He was Edward E. Simmons, born in 1911. He got a B.S. degree from Caltech in 1934 and an M.S. in 1936, and then continued at Caltech. In 1938 he invented the strain gauge. Caltech claimed the patent rights, but Simmons sued and won the rights.
That made him a lot of money, and he apparently retired to a life of just hanging around Pasadena and indulging his sartorial eccentricities until he died in 2004 at the age of 93 from prostate cancer.
I would be interested in creating a program that makes use of deep learning to recognizes tricks and siteswap notation in a juggling video.
If anyone is interested in collaborating on this, drop me a line.
I haven't seen it posted yet here, but for anyone unfamiliar with mathematics in juggling (or anyone with an hour to kill watching something entertaining), there is a lecture/performance by Allen Knutson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38rf9FLhl-8) that I found to be a great intro (before I even knew I was looking for one!) and got me excited about the subject.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 69.7 ms ] threadIt's a great read, and there were quite a few snippets I didn't know - for example, I didn't know that it was Arthur Lewbel who tried to juggle upside down.
Thank you for this.
In addition to refusing to collect more data than it needs, this is a good reason to switch away from Chrome/Safari/whatever.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
I'd say they did provide a solution in the form of AMP, which of course is much better for them because at the very least they get to suck in more data (and still display ads!).
Of course it's also entirely possible that the Chrome team just hasn't prioritized this feature.
Maybe it's not a very good time to bring that up, as soon there will be little left to brag about in this regard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15071492
While I applaud your comment, I think there is more to consider. Initially the text has no formatting. Someone had to insert the markup. And why did they add the markup? Why not just give us the text and let us add our own, if we want it?
If we have a program, e.g. a custom text-filter, that can strip html tags and other markup (formatting) from original text (content), then why do we need a browser?
As a matter of practice, I use a text-only browser in VGA textmode. All text looks the same, same VGA font, and the look of every website is much more consistent than with a graphical browser, not to mention other benefits such as text being larger, no bright white page backgrounds, less eyestrain, complete absence of web ads, no auto-loading of tracking elements, etc.
With a text-only browser and without javascript many website design choices become irrelevant. All websites more or less look the same. This makes reading much easier and faster. It allows me to focus on the content, i.e., the data, instead of potentially being distracted by web design i.e. the presentation of data.
Needless to say it would be easy to write html "targeting" a text-only browser. It is very forgiving and "normalizes" variation that might otherwise be a problem.
(Do not misinterpret this comment: I have great respect for talented web designers but there are sometimes situations where design can get in the way of consuming data, as in the case of the OP.)
"Reader View" appears to be solving a problem that graphical browsers themselves created. These browsers make web design relevant and thereby enable not only spectacular, creative web design, but also difficulties in reading for some users, among other problems.
Not knocking use of "Reader View" - it is very useful - but just providing a different perspective on why markup is being used to begin with and other ways to achieve easier reading with larger text (and easily adjustable column width).
The very early ideology of HTML was to describe structure and content fairly minimally so that browsers could display it in whatever manner was right for the user.
But it turned out that content producers had more influence with browser makers than did content users (who after all don't pay anyone but the ISP). And they want to have control over the user's screen, speaker and (ultimately) brain. Hence pixel-perfect formatting, advanced CSS and of course JavaScript.
But that has sort-of changed for Mozilla. Their competitors have all the close relationships with content producers, so they are trying to become friends with users again. And thus their incentives have shifted to trying to recover the original virtues of the web out of the current set of technologies.
It's a tricky thing to do, and I wish them luck.
Made a example here to show you the difference: http://imgur.com/a/D6qUa
It's way easier to read the text in the second example, as I added more space between the rows. The font itself is fine.
For what I'm interested in (which is mainly just information minus all the cutsey Web 2.0 design nonsense), the emacs-w3m browsing experience is fantastic. It's 100% readable plain text, displayed consistently just the way the rest of my terminal text is displayed. It integrates 100% in to my editor, allowing me to use it to its full potential.
emacs-w3m is way more powerful and customizable than other text-mode browsers like lynx, elinks, or standalone w3m itself. Also, the kind of emacs/vim integration that Firefox extensions like It's All Text offers also pales in comparison to what emacs-w3m offers, as there is no context switching with emacs-w3m -- you're always in your editor. Firefox extensions like Pentadactyl and Vimperator are good but, again, they're limited compared to emacs-w3m and its tight integration with emacs, they're not written in elisp, and so the impedance mismatch between the browser, editor, and extension is greater.
I don't know if any of this matters to you, but if it does, you should give emacs-w3m a spin.
It doesn't need to be targeted at HN: members of HN are members of the general population, and the publishers/marketers of the book are understandably going to be doing their jobs which includes getting articles written,w which members of HN come across in the course of their lives. It's not surprising they would then share these articles on HN.
Say an actor is making appearances on a bunch of different talk shows promoting their upcoming movie. The fact that Alice and Bob find out they happened to see the same actor on different shows while at the water cooler doesn't mean the actor was targeting this particular water cooler or Alice and Bob in particular.
An information theory rollercoaster, the haunted house of entropy, that sort of thing?
Then, when you figure out that a certain set of patterns are jugglable, you try to figure out state diagrams for things like "What are all the possible rhythms for juggling three objects, under some maximum number of beats in the air?" [2]
I've definitely caught myself idly drawing ladder diagrams[3] before, then plugging the mathematical results into Juggling Lab[4] to see what it would look like, e.g. [5]. :)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1zSlvQtKM4
[2] https://plus.maths.org/issue52/features/polster/state1.jpg
[3] https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/juggle/images/b/ba/0123...
[4] http://jugglinglab.sourceforge.net
[5] https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/juggle/images/8/8f/86x4x...
I'm now wondering if it's the same software, although this would have been circa 1998. I recognise the use of "siteswap notation" though.
The talk has evolved over the last 30 or more years, and is /significantly/ different now from 2 years ago. There are many common lines, many common jokes, many common quips, because I've kept the ones that are effective, but there are new lines, new comments, new jokes. It's always changing, but people remember the bits that are the same because they are the ones that are good. Which is why I keep them.
It's genuinely evolved, and the lines you see are the survivors.
I do other talks on other topics too.
We would usually have a set of comedians booked for the whole weekend, and in the main their performances over the three nights would be identical. There was the very occasional one who would do some ad-lib back and forth with the crowd for a few minutes, but even those you would start to notice a pattern of repeated jokes, or types of jokes if they were booked for more than a few nights.
What was interesting was seeing the same acts return months later and find their set was still 80% the same. They evolved material slowly over time.
I bet that most top science/engineering schools have some interesting eccentric characters like that. A book collecting the stories of such people could be interesting.
For example, at Caltech when I was there in the late 70s and early 80s there was a guy in his 60s people called "Renaissance Ralph" because he was usually wearing a tutu and purple pantyhose that put one in mind of some kind of jester. He'd hang around the library and sit in on lectures, and most people had no idea who he was. We just figured he was some local eccentric who enjoyed attending science lectures.
The school paper ran a story about him and told us who he was. He was Edward E. Simmons, born in 1911. He got a B.S. degree from Caltech in 1934 and an M.S. in 1936, and then continued at Caltech. In 1938 he invented the strain gauge. Caltech claimed the patent rights, but Simmons sued and won the rights.
That made him a lot of money, and he apparently retired to a life of just hanging around Pasadena and indulging his sartorial eccentricities until he died in 2004 at the age of 93 from prostate cancer.
Here's some information about him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_E._Simmons
https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=79907...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNKFSpJIBO0#t=7m30
Intended for a general audience.