OP here. Sorry if I misunderstood the guidelines, but these are not the same stories. The proposal to scrap the term limits was announced two weeks ago, which is what those stories talk about. This new story is about the proposal having been approved by the parliament (a couple hours ago). Though I suppose there was little chance of it not passing, I did think it's a historic vote, so I thought I'd post this as well.
They're not technically the same story, but the new information isn't enough to alter the topic (abolishing term limits of presidency in China), so the discussion is guaranteed to be the same.
It's only my impression, really. But I have seen a slew of articles about how jQuery is dead, and very few people still writing articles about it's benefits. Many libraries that use it are also unmaintained now (though they often still work, of course).
If you want some numbers, compare e.g. the dates on popular HN posts for jquery[1] vs react[2] and vue[3]. Most popular articles for jQuery are 4-6 years old, while for React and Vue the popular stories are much more recent. Of course, HN might be somewhat special.
This article alleges that there may be a hidden bias against female scientists receiving Nobel prices. If the author had included a long list of female scientists that deserved a Nobel price, but did not receive one, it would have gone a lot further to making its case.
However it only names one (Vera Rubin [1]). However one possible case seems insufficient evidence to prove a bias here.
Not saying such a list cannot be drafted - just saying it's not presented here, and so it's hard to buy into the bias argument.
I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc?
Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it.
I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 140 characters that matters, it's also all the other times when people don't feel social pressure to write up longer, perhaps more thoughtful messages, that's important here.
I agree with you that the 140 is iconic and it's probably not a good idea to abandon it. What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.
That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user names or media URLs don't count toward the 140, blurring the lines of what 140 means and losing the "creativity loves constraints" factor.
> What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.
>What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.
Indeed, especially as people have been already doing this by sharing longer posts as pictures of text
I was even thinking things like links to Twitlonger and Pastebin could be used for embedded text, the same way twitter knows how to handle imgur & youtube links and embed their content with tweets.
Better solution is to let users solve a complicated CAPTCHA when they want to tweet longer messages. That way, there is no social pressure to make long tweets (no reasonable person can pressure you to solve boring CAPTCHAs), while it's still there if you need it.
Or, phrased differently, they should make it harder to tweet longer messages.
I feel like the core value proposition is something like "public expressions that can be consumed quickly and produced with little forethought". I think it's important that Twitter gives you the excuse to be less precise: there isn't enough space.
It's a small thing sure, but if you look at the differences between the popular social platforms, it's all about small differences. If Twitter loses that which distinguishes it from everyone else, that may give them an initial boost when it's a new feature, but then the novelty will wear off and maybe they will have lost what makes them unique.
I'd like to compare this to Hollywood. It feels like the kind of alteration a studio might come up with by relentlessly screen-testing a movie using test audiences. It's one way to guarantee a bland, non-specific result, that won't command any lasting mindshare.
Clearly moving from 140 characters to 280 characters isn't yet that just-like-everything-else end result, but it somehow feels like a step in that direction to me.
Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish. When the platform limits his words, that works in his favour - no nuance can be conveyed, his utterances are sharp, authentic sounding, plausible.
Give him 1000 words to make his case, and suddenly he's stuck. His thoughts were never that deep, and they don't stand up well to being expanded on - there wasn't any substance to begin with.
Twitter is what it is in large part because of that 140 character limit. It allows boofheads of all stripes to sound convincing, because the platform was tailor made for short blasts of hot air.
> Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish.
There's no idiot shortage on Twitter (or elsewhere), but I'll bet an overwhelming majority of the people who read your sentence above thought of the same person.
Wow. I tweet very infrequently, and agonize over exactly what to say and how to phrase it so that it is intelligible and interesting in 140 characters.
Then again, I only have a few hundred tweets and endeavor to make each one count.
Twitter with no character limit is just a blog site. There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.
The exact number 140 is legacy, but the super-brief "microblogging" format is vital.
There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.
There's a slight fallacy here: that no single blog site is as successful as Twitter does not mean blogs as a whole aren't, and therefore that you need the character limit to be successful. I don't have any hard data, but my anecdotal experience matches that: almost nobody I know uses Twitter, whereas every computer/smartphone user I know reads blog posts at least occasionally.
Nobody I know voted for Trump, but here he is president. HN readers and their close friends are nowhere near being a representative sample of internet users.
Things fall into place by accident. I'd say there's no telling what would happen.
Imagine what this is going to do to president Trump. His short quips had a striking impact. He'll never again need to end a message with the one word sentence "JOBS!"
It's hard to compress your thoughts and present it in limited time or space while still keeping its essence and power. This is why lot of tweets are iconic: They are presentation of very strong ideas and opinions in tiny amount of space. You can wear them on t-shirt or thumb it out on smartphone while using just few seconds you have. Larger char limit means diminishing of this quality from writers part and also higher cost from readers part. The 140 chars might be accidental limit but it was just the right balance given the amount of tweets that already exists and able to express intent in that much space.
Can you explain what you mean by this? If you're talking about the 'title' of each search result, it looks like it's capped at a way lower number of characters than that.
For what it's worth, your message required a lot more attention from me than it would have, if you had used the word "number" rather than the strange glyph "#". I guess you were doing this with some sort of meta humour because the story is about twitter, but the point was inversed. Your attempt to abbreviate things to make them more legible, made them less so.
The lesson above applies, incidentally, to pretty much everything twitter.
Well, apologies. I got the impression that your argument was that you make a messages easier to understand by shortening them. I just gave you a concrete example of when a message got harder to understand because it was shortened.
But good job on deliberately missing the point as a discussion strategy. That too, was very twitter of you.
I don't use Twitter myself, but I think the reason behind the limit is that SMS can send 140 bytes in each message. When sending regular text messages a 7-bit alphabet is usually used, for 160 characters in total.
The SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).
> decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences
From what I heard, the SMS limit was actually a protocol limitation: it piggybacks on signaling messages, which have a small size limit (this is also why SMS can sometimes work even when everything else doesn't). Quoting from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS):
"Messages are sent with the MAP MO- and MT-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 bytes (140 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet. Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters."
That's not what is meant. Twitter was originally an SMS service, which would text you whenever someone you followed posted a tweet. In order for you to be able to tell who had posted each tweet, the message had to contain the poster's username. This is distinct from the username of whoever they were replying to.
I can vouch for workflowy. I've tried many to-do apps before, but workflowy is simple enough that I can structure it however I like and never feel like I've missed something. Unfortunately, I don't know how to handle repetitive tasks like dusting every two days.
Workflowy is the only list maker that I've ever stuck with. Most of them are so over-designed. I don't need videos and voice reminders and all kinds of nonsense; just compact, structurable lists.
I really like Dynalist.io I've been a user for about 6 months now. The mobile experience is surprisingly very good as well. Also their team is very transparent and responsive about their bugs and features (requests and planned). Finally they made it as an evolution to workflowy, which I find they've succeeded at.
This seems like an interesting approach to organize data. Are there any open source implementation that I can customize myself and host on my own personal server?
I have a self-hosted solution. It's in an alpha state, not ready for public consumption, but would love any feedback from people willing to try it out. Here it is:
I just tried dynalist.io and it is really nice.
I use Todoist everyday because of its simplicity and ease-of-use especially when making sub-lists. I didn't stick with Workflowy because it was too simple. But looking at dynlist.io, it might be what I've been looking for, with the right balance between simplicity and practicality.
Anybody care to enlighten me what this does other than being a simple outliner? I tried to find out, but, why not just use an outliner? What am I missing?
It IS an outliner. I tried using outliners back 10 years ago and became frustrated with options available. There were no good online outliners and the best desktop outliner, OmniOutliner, is only available for Mac. I tried a bunch on Windows but they were really buggy or didn't meet my needs. Then Workflowy came out and just worked.
Specifically, he compares compares blockchains to the Internet and railroads:
"It is a bubble. This is going to be the largest bubble of our lifetimes, and so .. remember, bubbles happen around things that fundamentally change the way we live. The railroad bubble, railroads really fundamentally changed the way we live; the Internet bubble changed the way we live. And so, prices are gonna get way ahead of what they should be. You can make a whole lotta money on the way up. And we plan on it. At one point you're going to have to sell."
My answer: Take a look at the dotcom bubble, adjust nasdaq marketcap for inflation (and maybe much more because of ZIRP) and there you have your target market cap.
Yes, the only question is when the dumb money is in. I guess dotcom is here a historical precedent.
Since we cannot really know, I will just use that number and gradually sell around it. Of course that might make me the dumb money but that's a risk I'm willing to take.
The term 'usage rights' is a bit confusing here. I think it may be intended to refer to 'use' as defined in the previous half of the sentence, i.e. 'including the rights to run, read, copy, change, distribute and sell'.
Maybe this should be made clearer somehow, e.g. 'and including any herefore necessary license to patents the authors may hold'.
I'm curious as well, my estimates based on data from a 5MT explosion being about 6.8 on the scale and various formulas, I'd get into the megaton range, then again, other methods do arrive at a sub-100kT range too.
