linguaz

> 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?

> 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.

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;
  }

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).