nologic01

The irony is that they are defending the right of a manufacturing cartel to limit the options of what these valiant freedom fighters can do with stuff they own (with the "hard-won" money they managed to rescue from the evil "taxman" :-).

But assuming they indeed want the "freedom" to have unrepairable cars, what about my freedom to want a market that offers them. Same with a market for cars that are not surveillance devices etc. Are their needs more important than mine?

Political extremism turns people into ugly entitled morons. Alas its not a sad circus to watch from afar. They are taking society down to their sociopathic dark world.

A repairability index is about as objective as can get: a list a components and their modes of failure along with a checklist of:

* what can be repaired by the owner using spare parts, instructions and common tools

* what can be repaired by an independend third party

* what must be repaired by the manufacturer

* when must something be junked and how much of it can be recycled

These are not "opinions". At some point we need to start calling out the criminal indifference of vested interests (and their shills) to the sustainability question

Very interesting find, even though not their target:

"Interestingly, there is in fact a noticeable downward slope in average sentiment over time for those topics as well"

I would speculate total sentiment on HN is trending down. Its the disillusionment with tech.

Python is now bigger than what even its most keen friends ever imagined might happen. This is not automatically solving the issues, nor make it more likeable to those who dislike it, but it does incentivise serious plumbing work.

Something I noticed about all these projects (and they are quite a few) is that they are quite old (some going back ~2 decades or so).

I wonder what is the dynamic behind that longevity. Music hasn't changed ofcourse but on tech side I would think there are significant new possibilities.

Is it something related to the difficulty of implementing low level algorithms (famously a lot of linear algebra stuff goes back decades and rests on C / Fortran libraries). Is it that there isn't enough interest to justify new efforts or are those systems already near "perfection"?

I think what you are asking for is for an abstraction layer that is on top of what the current systems do. LaTeX is a very good analogy, as it is a set of macros that hide away the numericity of the underlying TeX typesetting system. Once upon a time people did use TeX to write papers because LaTeX did not exist yet.

Such a higher level macro system must make tradeoffs between sufficient control and conciseness (though its typically possible to insert low level code in between the macros since before any macro can be executed, rendered etc. it must be converted to the lower level anyway).

Developing such a system is probably a task for tech-savvy musician rather than a music-savvy techie. Its value proposition would be precisely to crystallize composition "invariants" that are expressive and versatile enough to enable people to compose genuinely new things.

But you should keep in mind that all LaTeX papers look a bit alike :-) (though much better than Word papers).

Excellent storytelling, fluidly integrating geospatial data and other visual elements and statistics in a smooth flow.

Who knows, maybe one day such a "visual space" inside a browser would be interactive, a Google Earth type of thing as far as navigation goes, but with data queries that allow on the fly to populate various widgets. An expert could livestream a story or "save" it for later publication.

One day humanity will recognize that people have divergent tastes in programming languages syntax that have no obvious rational basis.

Me curly brackets, you no curly brackets. Etc.

Today is not that day.

Thats a rather incomplete business model description of banking.

There are at least three distinct elements and largely unrelated to core banking: payments infrastructure / gatekeeping the private/public monetary system, managing interest rate risk (which is what you describe) and managing credit risk.

Add to that countless "non-core" intermediation activities which nevertheless, depending on the type of bank can be major revenue sources.

Maximazing social utility is indeed the key question but how to do it in a sustainable and future proof way is hardly ever seriously asked.

Any references to narrow banking been tried and "not working"?

Separating the issue of private money from providing commercial credit risk insurance (ala CDS) should be possible.

There should be more of this. Much more. From different angles and view points but with the same clarity and directness.

Banking is in a deep, existential crisis for decades now and the march of digitization only increases the pressure to find a way forward.

In response techno-solutionists imagine all sorts of replacements, whether it is "fintech", or "banking-as-a-service" or "crypto" but all are hopelessly shallow and incomplete, almost insultingly crude.

What is entirely missing from these neobanking movements is any straight definition of what is the purpose of banking and bankers. What is their irreducible value proposition that cannot be delegated to machines and algorithms. What is their role in society. Are they allies or enemies of surveillance capitalism? Are their users clients or products? Can there be an honest relation with the sovereign monetary system and the lender of last resort or is private banking a scheme to privatize profits and socialize losses? Last but not least, what role, if any, should they play towards environmental sustainability.

The questions and challenges are pilling up and there are no breakthroughs worth mentioning. In a parallel universe we might have something like BN (banking news), where all sorts of individuals, teams small or large, would pimp their blogs, radical ideas, open source solutions or fancy software products, but above all a positive, forward looking vision for a crucial sector.

Is there some sort of citizen science we could engage-in with these datasets? When zooming in on Euclid’s view of the Perseus cluster of galaxies I see some very strange stuff :-)

Landed gentry owning the political process reminds of feudalism, not democracy.

The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state (and even more abstractly, the human collective comprising other nations etc).

Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.