acabal

Stripe did actually have a great API at one point, when they just appeared. Their basics of charging a card and managing subscriptions was incredibly simple and developer-friendly compared to their competition at the time, like Authorize.net or PayPal. I don't think PayPal even had a real API back then - you had to use a `<form>` element with hidden fields.

Of course things change, and now Stripe's API has been rewritten to extreme complexity with scattershot documentation and unintuitive terminology. (I sell products, but in the API I have to sell prices??)

I think that is factually wrong. Chicago was building beautiful, ornamented buildings well into the 40s. Burnham & Root - your examples of "less is more"? - are in fact masters of beaux arts. Burnham designed the Railway Exchange[1] in 1903 and Union Station[2] in 1909. The Board of Trade[3], a masterpiece of ornamental art deco inside and out, was built in 1930. There are countless other examples.

In fact, Chicago didn't descend into ugly modernity until well into the 50s and 60s, when Mies van der Rohe started erecting generic black monoliths like Federal Plaza[4]. But he had nothing to do with Burnham & Root, or Graham Anderson Probst & White, the two major influences in Chicago architecture up through the 1930s and both producing highly ornamented and humanist buildings their entire careers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Exchange_Building_(Chi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Union_Station#/media/F...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade_Buildin...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_McKinley_Dirksen_Unite...

I think about this a lot. I live in a large city that has a rich architectural heritage, so there are old beautiful buildings all around me from various eras. Neoclassical, beaux arts, art deco, etc.

But of course the city suffers from the problem of new ugliness - nearly all modern construction is in-your-face ugly, with hideous blocks of primary colored plastic paneling, discordant jutting shapes, and headache-inducing asymmetry. At best, new construction is faceless, shapeless wall-to-wall glass. But that's a really sad best.

I often wonder if NIMBYS would be less opposed to new construction if new construction actually looked beautiful. I make a point to campaign to my representative in favor of density, but even I have to admit that a dense apartment complex built in the modern-ugly style is truly unpleasant to live around. The ugliness becomes quietly oppressive.

It's strange that Americans campaign so hard to preserve beautiful buildings, but when it comes to new buildings, nobody wants to build beauty any more. Truly sad.

The pictures of those lymph nodes are shocking. In the Methods section, they state that

> LN tissues were obtained from [...] LiveOnNY, the local organ procurement organization for the New York metropolitan area.

which makes it sound like the samples came from residents of NYC. NYC air quality probably isn't great, but those lymph nodes looked so bad that I assumed they must have come from a hyperpolluted megacity like Beijing or New Delhi!

Cars truly are the worst addiction our society has stooped to.

I have to disagree. I've been using Thunderbird for well over a decade and I appreciate that the UI hasn't changed much. As I get older I much prefer software that changes slowly and incrementally, if at all - and sometimes no change is good, especially in the UI.

UI is the part of software most prone to fashion. Fashions go in and out, and UIs and their usability goes in and out with them. I would rather stick to a usable, well-known UI than have TB be trendy and strictly worse, like the "flat everything" fad, or the "you don't need options" fad, or the "header bar" fad.

I use this all the time, it's invaluable. I also use it to remove sticky headers, which I find to be deeply annoying because they waste space and often break keyboard scrolling by scrolling the next few lines of text under the header.

In Firefox I've assigned it a keyword shortcut, so I can type `ctrl + l` to select the address bar, then `ks` `<enter>` to execute the JS without having to click.

That link says that there's an average of 702 heat related deaths per year. In 2020 there were 38,824 car accident deaths.[1] Yet everyone keeps driving, without question. Is it so much to ask to see if it's possible to tolerate living without AC for a while, just like humans did for several thousand years? Or is a tiny fraction of the number of auto-related deaths enough to make us throw up our hands and say "it's impossible, AC and climate change for everyone!"

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-traffic-crash-data...

AFAIK when you use "send to Kindle", Amazon takes your epub and runs it through Kindlegen (or whatever Amazon's current equivalent is) to create an azw3 on their end. They are not rendering the raw epub - it goes through a black-box conversion before you see it. Thus, all bets are off as to how the "epub" will look on your Kindle. (Indeed, Calibre does a better job converting to azw3 than Kindlegen! That's why we use Calibre when creating azw3 files at Standard Ebooks.)

I won't believe Kindle supports epub until I can transfer an epub via USB cable and have it available to for immediate reading. Anything else is Amazon "supporting" epub with very big air quotes.

Chicago IMHO is just about the only place outside of NYC or Boston that you can live a full life car-free, if you live within the right boundary.

The "Chicagoland Area" is huge and includes swaths of "city" that are suburbs in everything but name. But, if you live within, say, the rough bounds of Rogers Park in the north, to Humboldt Park in the west, to South Loop to the south, a car probably won't be strictly necessary. (With exceptions for some inner neighborhoods that are underserved by transit for historic reasons, like Clybourn Corridor.)

The El subway is great by American standards (but not world standards) and the bus system is comprehensive, with many 24 hours lines. You would almost certainly rely mostly on buses as for historic reasons the El subway was designed to service the inner city loop and not the outlying neighborhoods, so it rarely goes exactly where you want to be, unless where you want to be is always the office.

The bummer is having to wait on a bus when it's very cold or snowing out.

Biking is still quite bad by any standard except the jaundiced American one, but slowly improving after some recent high-profile killings of children on bikes.

Not sure, but even if Amazon allowed more free public domain books, it wouldn't make much sense to post there because their store is so saturated with low-quality junk editions. There isn't much point in being on the 20th page of search results for "Pride and Prejudice".

Kindle is one of the worst reading platforms and it looks like this kind of difficulty is one more reason why. If you're on your phone, try using almost any other ereading app and download our epub files instead.

Amazon expressly forbids any more free public domain ebooks on their platform. But our ebooks are available at the Google Play store and in the Apple store, for free.

Our source format is epub, and the conversion is part of our toolkit. Azw3 conversion is done using Calibre: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools

Yes - that's one of the main points of the project!

They only fake support epub - when you use "send to Kindle" to send an epub, it gets quietly converted by Amazon to either mobi or azw3 (I don't know exactly which of those two but it seems like azw3 is more likely). I assume they use kindlegen to do the conversion, even though Calibre does better azw3 conversion. If you're using SE ebooks on a Kindle, you should simply download our premade azw3 files as I guarantee they'll be better than whatever Amazon does to an epub sent over email.

We accept translations into English, but the translations need to have been published before 1927 for them to be in the US public domain. See our collections policy: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy

The Communist Manifest is already in our catalog: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-engels...

This is a not-uncommon request. The problem is that the publication date for many older books is unclear or unknown. Was Romeo and Juliet published in 1597? It certainly appeared in print, but that edition was so riddled with errors that scholars think it was pirated. Was it published in 1599? A better edition certainly appeared in print then, but that edition too was incomplete and filled with errors. Then was it published in 1609?...

This is a common theme for a surprising number of books, even going in to the modern era. For that reason we're only concerned with the publication date of our own editions. Interested readers can come to conclusions about the original publication date of particular books using their own research.

The Flying Girl would make a good first production, if you'd like to take it on! See https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...

Make sure to thank your wife on my behalf for her hard work at PG!

I'd be open to that but there's limited time in the day! If a volunteer wants to discuss making it happen, send a note to our mailing list or open a GitHub issue and we can talk about it.

Cover art must be in a fine art oil painting style, and it's up to each producer to find something thematically appropriate. Once they do we require proof of US public domain status. See https://standardebooks.org/manual/1.6.4/10-art-and-images#10...

Wikiart and Artvee are good places to start cover art research. Many museums now have explicit CC0 collections, too.

Finding good public domain cover art can be extremely time consuming - it's the part of the process most likely to make a new contributor give up. But when you find a great cover, it feels great!

Our editions are totally different than what PG does, our goals are different, our technical approach is different, and our collections policy is different. We would rather have our own curated catalog on our own website, than be another edition lost among many in PG's huge catalog.

PG does great work and we rely on them almost exclusively for transcriptions. But we're two friends working towards to different goals.

See here: https://standardebooks.org/contribute

Our number one need is ebook producers. If you're passingly familiar in a command line environment and have basic HTML/CSS knowledge, you can produce an ebook!

We've been front paged before without problems :) See https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-...

(Though that article is now out of date, as we now have a database running that handles things like patron registration, though it still doesn't index ebooks.)

I don't keep count but over the years I'd say the number is in the several hundreds, including one-time volunteers. We do have a core set of what we call "editors", who are volunteers in charge of managing individual productions, along with a solid amount of repeat contributors who work on ebooks as they feel like it.

I think people participate because it feels good to make something of quality, and then give it away. If you're passionate about literature, then you get to read a lot of great stuff while you're doing it, too.

The vast majority come from PG. When they don't it's another public domain transcription source, like Wikisource, Faded Page, or Project Gutenberg Australia. We usually don't create our own transcriptions.

Our producers can and do contribute back upstream! It's up to the individual producer.

This is a problem Project Gutenberg has had for years, on Amazon and other platforms. It's a game of whack a mole and ultimately not really worth pursuing. As soon as you shut one guy down, another one appears with the same great idea.

In any case almost nobody is buying these anyway, as there are so many other free ebook editions of just about all of these books already.

Line height is set to the browser/ereader default - it's not something we change as it depends on the font. Font size is also the ereader default, though if viewing in a web browser we increase it slightly.

Yes, that's going to happen. The books are in the US public domain and anyone in the US can do anything they want with them, including reselling them. Obviously we are not the ones selling these.

There's been some talk about improving the Kobo browser experience, if you want to take a crack at it! https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/126

If by "novel" you mean "modern", then potentially, but they would have to be actually good translations, and released to the public domain via CC0. We only work on public domain books.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, and A Tangled Tale are probably our most MathML-heavy books.

Books from the PD era are not very likely to feature math serious enough to require MathML. This is probably for the best... MathML support in ereaders is poor, with the exception of iBooks and Kobo. Raw MathML is retained in our "advanced" epubs, but it's converted to PNGs in our "compatible" epubs, for this reason.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta...

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-babbage/passages-f...

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/a-tangled-ta...

PGDP is an incredible project. We mostly work on the transcriptions they produce and we specifically avoid creating our own transcriptions, because PGDP already has such a good system in place. When people ask for a new transcription we point them to PGDP instead.

(We have occasionally done our own transcriptions, since in the past few years the US public domain has started expanding again. In these cases we may transcribe a popular book ourselves to have it ready at the start of the public domain year, instead of waiting for PDGP's process.)