After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still.
> After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.
Aside from the 1984 reference (which is appreciated), the fact is that hanging a negative prefix (or suffix) on an adjective doesn't actually capture the meaning of the antonym. Or if it is defined to be equivalent, then you're missing out on various useful shades of meaning. Consider the uses of the phrases 'not good', 'not very good', 'not bad', 'not too bad', etc.
For example, 'not good' often doesn't actually mean 'bad', it is (usually) closer in meaning to 'not good enough', or perhaps 'mediocre'. When 'not good' actually does mean 'bad' or even 'very bad' it is because the speaker is using understatement.
Orwell was trying to make a point about the totalization of language and constraining thinking to promote binary thinking (us/them, for/against, good/bad). But he failed to really account for human perversity, which would have immediately produced phrases in NewSpeak such as 'not ungood', 'un-doubleplus ungood', etc., not to mention the use of sarcasm, which in the UK can be so deadpan that it is undetectable unless you have a lot of context.
Oddly, while Orwell obviously understood both satire and parody, and employed both to great effect, sarcasm seems to have largely eluded him. His characters are nearly always earnest and sincere. A few are insincere, euphemistic, even mendacious, but I don't think many (or any?) are ever sarcastic. It's an odd omission.
Another thing that's useful is to be able to find things on a site. How do I
find that post I remember reading that talked about skipping over all the
sourdough?
Lo and behold, blog.txt has powerful fulltext search: your computer's built in
search engine is much better than most blog search engines. Just hit CTRL+F
and type "skipping over all the sourdough". Because it's all one page, you can
find anything almost instantly, just using your browser's page search.
Or you can skip the web browser altogether, and read my blog as it was meant
to be read -- in Vim:
Ok so you can’t link to posts, rendering it useless as a blog. Got it.
Edit: to the person below who got way to offended by this, newspapers are indexed by page. You don’t say “perform a linear scan through all 50 pages until you find an article with X in the title”, you say “check out the article on page 12”. That’s a hyperlink.
To the edit, you mean like, I don't know, referring to a unique date, key, and/or title? Yeah, that's simply impossible to do or manage in plaintext. Impossible.
I would direct you to Melvil Dewey, but I don't think you'd get the reference.
I’m not sure why you’ve got such a chip on your shoulder for terrible ideas such as this, or why you feel it’s appropriate to post comments with that tone. It makes you sound less intelligent than you clearly think you are.
Linking directly to a resource is a good thing. Nobody is saying it’s impossible to emulate linking with a single text file, I’m saying its a bad idea and a very, very poor user experience for regularly updated linear content like a blog.
Go ahead, publish your blog as as a giant text file. Or go ahead and print it on one giant continuous bit of paper and throw it out your window, if your aim is to disseminate your writing to an audience both are equally as effective.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Really, extending the todo.txt todo-list format (http://todotxt.org) to being a blog platform is as simple as having a heredoc style delimiter for each post. Then of course, you're just recreatin org-mode from first principles.
Social media is also merely the exchange of plain text and media files.
If only we had a simple and free platform that had the following features:
* Supports multiple simultaneous users
* Has simple user and group access control
* Treats everything as a sharable file
* Easy for admins to securely deploy out of the box
* Easy for users to securely connect out of the box
* Uses few enough resources that it can be ran on effectively any computer, no matter how powerful.
If only we had such a mythical system, we could decentralize the net. If.
I don't understand all those features you're asking for, but maybe some adaptation of https://fossil-scm.org ? It's a wiki, blog, DVCS, and bug tracker all in one program, using sqlite as a backing store. An instance of it runs in about around 2MB of memory on a small vps.
That's an old video promoting Unix, so I don't see what you're getting at. Unix is not a distributed OS. The web has to work over communications channels with fairly high latency, so you don't want a file-system-like interface either. If you have something specific in mind, maybe you could say what it is instead of being coy.
"You are a philosopher, Thrasymachus, I replied, and well know that if you ask a person what numbers make up twelve, taking care to prohibit him whom you ask from answering twice six, or three times four, or six times two, or four times three, ‘for this sort of nonsense will not do for me,’—then obviously, if that is your way of putting the question, no one can answer you. But suppose that he were to retort, ‘Thrasymachus, what do you mean? If one of these numbers which you interdict be the true answer to the question, am I falsely to say some other number which is not the right one?—is that your meaning?’—How would you answer him?"
As someone with more time, I prefer to maintain a massive whitelist for my router. Daily websites receive permanent privileges, incidental websites (such as peguero.xyz) receive temporary privileges (e.g. allow traffic for the next minute), everything else is dropped.
I don't have to worry about what chicanery advertising companies are up to when they can't reach me even if they tried.
"So the fourth herd of deer took up residence where the poison-grass sower & his followers couldn’t go and—having taken up residence there—ate food without venturing unwarily into the poison-grass sown by the poison-grass sower. By eating food without venturing unwarily into the poison-grass sown by the poison-grass sower, they didn’t become intoxicated. Not being intoxicated, they didn’t become heedless. When they weren’t heedless, the poison-grass sower wasn’t able to do with them as he liked on account of that poison-grass."
How do you implement that? I have a whitelisting transparent proxy for my kids (contrary to the popular meme around here that all kids are NSA grade hackers determined to defy your every attempt to protect them, it's uncontroversial in my house and works very well). I use squid for that and have a shonky web UI I made to access the logs and update the whitelist acl. I'd like to make it more capable (stuff like temporary unblock like you mention). AFAICT the only way to do such things is writing a squid "helper" that runs as a separate process (/processes). Is that what you're doing?
I use adblock on openwrt with a basic script to write to and revert the whitelist, and to restart dnsmasq. I use qutebrowser and made whitelisting a hints shortcut.
There's almost certainly a better system, but this works for me.
Honest question: is it worth it? Why would you spend your time on managing that temporary white list? Do you think that time is wasted, or not?
(I apologize if my phrasing is a bit rude, but i'm really curious about that, and want to understand your thinking)
I think people like this see it as a 'win' – as if they, John Smith, have beaten the dastardly BigCorp. Whereas, in fact, the most that happens is a Junior Marketing Executive at BigCorp says "Right, that guy falls within the 0.5% of techy customers who make things difficult for us. Ah well, it's only been 80,000 of them, well within our margin for this month."
True - however, IMO, the value is in the awareness of tracking and the knowledge of how to block things as such.
Its better to know how your network operates that you rely on for your daily life than to know nothing about its internals.
My biggest issue as I age is that I FORGET how to do some of the higher level networking that I used to know innately - and I also lose interest in doing such things and become lazy, complacent, and as I forget things, more and more ignorant to it all...
Take PC Gaming as an example, or server rebuilds.
I could build SUN 650s and many many PC based servers with a blindfold on.
I grew up gaming and ran Intel's Game Development Lab for some time and was super knowledgable about all things PC/PCGaming when I had the lastest and best hardware literally delivered to me every day at intel...
Now I don't knwo shit about 'PCMasterRace' and building these days....
The issue is that people like this fetishise avoiding tracking. It doesn't seem like they have a clear reason why they want to avoid tracking. Do they have sensitive data to hide? Do they ideologically disagree with large companies gathering data? Is it anything else? It honestly doesn't seem like it. It seems more like "stopping them from getting my data" is treated as an end unto itself.
I can’t speak for everyone but there’s a growing awareness of where all the risks to society with gathering and spreading all this data.
It surprises me how someone who understands the inner workings as well as the interactions of the systems that society has increasingly expected us to depend on are not scared shitless of how things will look a generation from now.
I too am unskilled at navigating unfamiliar codebases and demand clifnotes because my time as a user is more valuable than yours as a programmer. these gift horses are AWFUL
That quotes simply means that you shouldn't write spaghetti code, and that another _programmer_ should be able to read it.
Quite clearly, it doesn't carry a meaning of: "hey, every user now has to become a proficient reader of whatever languages this software is written in."
Ah yes, the famed clarity and readability of C, where people are so entrenched in the belief that the compiler limits identifiers to seven characters or whatever, and in the aversion to typing out a single word in full, that they still build whole new languages with module, function and variable names looking like alphabet vomit. And with ungoogleable (ironically) language names to top it off.
