tardygrad

Check out the reddit community /r/tressless including their wiki

While pointing fingers at Russia or impeaching Trump may be the options that feel good at the moment, I hope this is an opportunity to make sure something like this never happens again.

This is a pipe dream and I'm not sure this is even possible, but I think the best outcome of this is to pass legislation to try and ensure that:

1. Political campaigns don't engage in the type of behaviour in the first place, and

2. Make communications more public in general - official campaigns of people running for public office must operate under the light of greater public scrutiny

Democracy is only possible if accurate information is available, and the biggest takeaway for me in the last elections was just how many secrets all political players have.

One of the first things you see on that page (on mobile), even above the headline of the article, is a Facebook share button.

Facebook has its claws in deep. De-Facebooking the Web isn't going to be a simple task.

Bit of hypocrisy to say 'we're not advertising on Facebook anymore' while leaving those buttons in place. Would be ironic if people shared this article on Facebook.

Funny how it's always only the people who steal millions that go to jail, never those who steal billions.

I guess aiming big is the way to go in the finance world.

I've tried lots of docs tools, but the one I've found works best for me is a self-hosted Dokuwiki.

Dokuwiki stores it's output in text files (not in a database) so installation is as simple as unzipping an archive, and a cron job to copy the docs directory to s3 weekly takes care of backups.

As a plus, you can easily allow collaboration since it is a wiki after all. Needless to say, you can use it on any platform with a Web browser.

Lack of support for markdown is the only shortcoming, but the wiki syntax is easy enough to learn.

I found The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester to be a fascinating read about James Murray and how he came to write the OED.

It is ironic that the definitive book on the English language was compiled by an American, and that he made it while he was incarcerated in an asylum for murder just makes the tale more interesting.

Simon Winchester is an excellent storyteller and the Surgeon of Crowthorne is an entertaining and insightful book - highly recommended!

>This past fall, Facebook snatched up the teen compliment app tbh, and quickly integrated a similar Q&A feature into its social network soon after. This all took place before Tbh had truly established itself as a new social network. It wasn’t clear at the time if it was the next big thing, or just a flash in the pan. (It appears to have been the latter.) Onavo’s insights into Tbh’s fast rise and heavy engagement likely gave Facebook a heads-up. >it’s not likely that all Onavo users understand they’re actually feeding Facebook the information that allows it to take on any challenger to its social networking empire.

I wonder if it's be possible to make a social networking startup, optimise solely for Onavo metrics, and get bought out by Facebook.

Biggest takeaway for me is that the WSJ now uses Gawker level clickbait titles.

Amazon presumably. Without Amazon they would be making a living wage at a mom&pop store, and we would all be paying more for lower quality products with less choice.

I doubt this will take off, because developers seem to prefer Javascript as a language.

On the server where there is a choice of several languages both interpreted and compiled, Nodejs is still very popular. If there were a war against Javascript people would be moving away from Node.

My guess is that this is going to be another niche, underutilised technology (like WebRTC or even SVG) that is efficient leads to highly optimised products, and but lacks mainstream usage.

I think any vision of an open and equal Internet is going to fail in the long term, not only because it does not work in the interests of governements and major corporations - but also because people don't want it.

China explicitly censors its Internet as a way of control, whereas in the west news agencies implicitly censor news through selective reporting and giving greater weight to stories that support the narrative they want to push.

I'm not convinced one is any worse than the other, the west is slightly better in that you may not be sent to jail over a dissenting opinion - but good luck trying to effect any kind of change.

This is tangential, but I wonder if something like this could be (mis)used to break captcha - by feeding in the disabled-friendly audio captcha and passing the results back to the captcha server.

As voice recognition becomes more sophisticated I think captchas are going to have to evolve to kjeep up as well.

Or just use Firefox, even if it is slightly slower than Chromium it's at least a browser that works for you not one that treats you as a pawn.

A Chrome monoculture is harmful, even if Google has the best intentions which I don't think they do - they definitely value their profits over an open web.