d_j_b

I agree with the central point, that web analytics lacks rigor. But I don't think it's wholly true that the problem is that our own motivations cause our analysis to lack objectivity. I think the other reason the author gives is the really key one: analytics data tantalises us with the idea that it may be coherent, complete and realistic; in fact it is wildly diffuse and represents only a tiny slice of the lived experience of users.

I wrote a post on a similar topic this week. https://mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/failing-to-visualise-web...

There was so much to enjoy in Embassytown: the Hosts, the Metaphors, the Festival of Lies, biorigging, Immer, the super-cerebral ending. Anyone come across anything equally juicy recently?

I've been doing this too, with mine! A recent discovery is that if you keep all the Y pieces pointing in the same compass direction you seem to end up with a track which is always 100% traversable in either forward or reverse.

That is a short story called "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"

Silly Vice: it's "Perec", not "Pereca".

The Browser! https://thebrowser.com. I frequently see its recommendations percolating through to the front page of HN. 5 hand-picked articles a day drawn from every corner of the internet, covering philosophy, literature, technology and other things, linked, pithily summarised and available as email newsletter, RSS feed, or full-text Instapaper/Pocket auto-push.

Paid service ($34/year), but a month's free trial is available: https://thebrowser.com/try-the-browser

Disclaimer: I am associated with The Browser, but my affection for it transcends my professional interest :)

> In many private industries, even highly regulated ones like finance, the people who first successfully transitioned the industries to computer based systems are now dying of old age. The NHS hasn't even started.

They started a year ago: http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2015/08/will-nhsuk-be-next-...

Fair point. I'd accept the trade-off if it meant I could use quote-unquote Linux instead of macOS.

Because the power management never quite works as it should

When Windows Subsystem for Linux can run nginx, rails etc reliably, will seriously consider leaving behind MacBook Pro for something like this

Some right-wingers in the UK (e.g. the ones advocating withdrawing from the EU) would like to see it abolished (and the BBC diminished)

"For me, declaring code is not code," Page said.

This sentence sounds pretty odd to me. What does Larry Page mean?

"its whole syntax is the literal representation of one of it's core datatypes, the linked list"

"Your average Lisp process is code running on a Lisp VM, and the VM allows you to modify the running code"

Thank you. As a non-Lisper, this is probably the clearest explanation of Lisp's qualities I've ever read.

Mick is the author's name. I think it's a joke?

Google's model rests on the assumption that all the ads on the site will be Google ads, and as such this scheme comes with a fairly heavy incentive for content providers to carry Google ads only.

Declaration of interest: we're trying to do something in the same space with content-that-should-be-or-is-paywalled with Financial Times articles on The Browser (http://thebrowser.com)

ah, thanks! will try to remember that. seems to go some way to answering the original article's point, too.

iOS gets this really wrong. More than once I've accidentally swiped it to 'off' in an effort to hit the snooze button, then slumbered on for an hour. And then there's the fact that to disable the alarm during a snooze period, you have to go into the clock app and manually switch it off, which is a pain. And don't get me started on the pointless complexity of the 'Which days would you like this alarm on' feature - the price of failing to pay attention to that arcane option is that nobody will ever arrange to meet you on a Saturday morning ever again...

that is a fascinating article, thank you. i like the idea of 'push karma'.

This is great stuff - thank you very much.

>all those wonderful Python libs

As a non-mathematician I have no understanding of how wonderful they really are, which is why this sort of thing is so valuable.

Indeed - in principle. But that was back when MS handed down IE binaries from the mountaintop whenever it wanted and most people ran different proprietary OSes. WebKit is open source and it runs on every major platform.

Although there is a chance here for the -prefix-rabbit-hole to yawn wide, there's also an opportunity for a (nearly-)universally-supported rendering engine to emerge that could, one day, get into bed with the standards committee. Surely this would be a good endgame for the browser wars?

> That just doesn't seem like a smart bet to make. Opera was in some ways better than the WebKit browsers on mobile devices, except for broken Webkit only sites. That ain't going to get better now.

But a de facto standard (ie one defined by a popular implementation) forces sites to be compatible or be ignored. More monolithic standard => stronger coding conventions => more robust web. Or am I being totally idealistic?