klint

Yep. CCBill is one the bigger/better known in that space. I’m guessing Gumroad just doesn’t think it’s worth it.

Fraunces is lovely, free and open source, and available on Google Fonts.

Author here. This was a fun one to work on. Kept finding out about new things I wish I could have squeezed in there.

OP here. There are a few projects that I wasn't able to work into the story that I think are worth a mention (though some of them are in that Awesome Terminals round-up linked in the article).

The Cobra library is a huge one: https://github.com/spf13/cobra

Other stuff worth a look includes:

Tmux: https://github.com/tmux/tmux Kitty: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty Alacritty: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

I'm sure there's lots of other stuff I don't know about as well.

This article says local officials were also holding his passport so that he couldn’t legally leave: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/chief-mate-strand...

Here are a couple of round-ups of studies:

https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2014/11/...

https://www.truthorfiction.com/dyslexie-font/

This study looked at OpenDyslexic, and found subjects preferred Verdana and Arial:

http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/sites/default/files/good_fonts...

Whether sans serif or serif fonts are more legible remains contested:

http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-s...

ReaFir is amazing.

I'll second Metafilter. It's even from the same era.

I was going to reply with something along the same lines. Dropping the keyest keywords is a particularly big pet peeve of mine.

For those "needle in a haystack" type queries, instead of pages that include both $keyword1 and $keyword2, I often get a mix of the top results for each keyword. The problem is compounded by news sites that include links to other recent stories in their sidebars. So I might find articles about $keyword1 that just happen to have completely unrelated but recent articles about $keyword2 in the sidebar.

It also appears that Google and DDG both often ignore "advanced" options like putting exact phrase searches in quotation marks, using a - sign to exclude keywords, etc.

None of this seems to have cut down on SEO spam results either, especially once you get past the first page or two of results.

I suspect it all comes down to trying to handle the most common types of queries. Indeed, if I'm searching for something uncomplicated, like the name of the CEO of a company or something like that, the results come out just fine. Longtail searches probably aren't much of a priority, especially when there's not much competition.

That objection, and others, are addressed in the project FAQ[1]. It's already possible to open and edit a PDF in various applications.

[1] https://editablepdf.org/faq/

>But isn’t the whole point of PDF that you can’t edit it? No. The fact that standard PDFs are difficult to edit is more of an accident than a feature, as PDF’s roots are in printing, where only final-form documents needed to be transmitted. Many people believe PDF to be “impossible to edit,” but beware: minor edits in PDFs, such as swapping figures on an invoice, are trivial — therefore you need other technologies, such as digital signatures, to verify that your PDFs have not been tampered with. More extensive edits, however, are more difficult, as they require the document’s logical structure to be automatically detected, and this is an error-prone task.

[...]

>Are you sure we need such a editable PDF format? I believe one of the most important benefits of PDF is its concrete, solid state. The idea of Editable PDF stems from a real-world need to improve the efficiency in the way that we work with documents. Today, the only editable file formats are those native to the applications that generated documents, and none of these formats guarantees the layout to be preserved in the same way as PDF. Furthermore, despite improvements in compatibility, using a native file format still often requires the recipient to be using the same software (and often the same version) of the application, which may not be available.

PDF’s largest asset, its rock-solid visual presentation, will remain, and editable PDFs will be backwardly compatible with the current installed base of PDF viewers such as Adobe Reader and Preview.

I wasn't comparing Solarized's blue text to the color of television, I was comparing its gray background to television. In my experience, static is white and black (mostly white), not gray, which is why I thought of a blank television screen rather than static.

Hm, maybe but that's not what I had in mind. I was thinking of the way an old Magnavox looks when it's not displaying anything, like when you've just switched it off but it's still glowing slightly. My recollection, which could be incorrect (I was quite young in the early 80s), is that it also looked this way if you switched to a cable channel that didn't exist (I realize in this case it's not technically "tuned" to a channel). Anyway, that deep but luminous gray is what the opening line of Neuromancer has always invoked for me, and what the background of Solarized Dark looks like to me as well.

As another commenter pointed out, Gibson did mean static, so I suppose he must have been thinking of a much lighter gray, I guess illuminated by the Chiba city lights.

Author of the article here. I never interpreted that opening line as referring to static, but to gray of a blank television screen. Otherwise why not write "the color of television static?"

Is your new job writing Go, or do you just think learning it just make you a more attractive candidate?

And Jackson is really expensive. Not quite Bay Area expensive yet, but Seattle area expensive. There are some parts of the state that are cheaper, beautiful, and less wind blown, like the Big Horn mountain area where I grew up. But they're still cold, conservative places dominated by the extractive industries. I got out as soon as I could.

It is nice to see the state making an effort to attract new industries, but it's really hard going. This Bloomberg article[1] sums it up pretty well: The small population is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. People don't want to live there because there are no jobs, and companies don't want to relocate there because there are no people.

There's also cultural resistance to new industry. People (men especially) want their coal and oil and timber jobs back, not these new high-tech jobs. It's not even that the populace isn't smart enough to do them--mining is actually a pretty technical field at this point. But there's a deep rooted perception that sitting at a desk all day isn't a "real" job.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-19/why-wyomi...

It's pretty easy to miss IMHO. The project could probably benefit from having this spelled out on the homepage.

I've never heard the "hot lead' explanation or heard the word pronounced as "led." If I had to guess, I would guess that deliberate misspellings arose for the reason I find them useful: they get flagged by spellcheckers, reducing the risk that placeholder text will be published. I've wondered, though, whether the funny spellings predated word processors. Lede, graf, hed, etc. would standout to human copy editors and computer spellcheckers alike. A 1970s origin for "lede," if correct, would suggest it emerged alongside word processors.

Does anyone else find it bizarre that he writes "Quinn Norton, by her own account, physically accosted me[...] While it is admirable that Quinn wanted to defend the honor of another woman and the sanctity of marriage, perhaps she should have done so using the resources of the conference, or at a minimum in a manner that didn’t lead to her assaulting me," given that Norton's actual account is that he struck him because he put he grabbed her and put his arm around her?

"Most telling however is that she makes it clear that her assault of me was premeditated."

There's nothing about her account that suggests this.

I hope someone posts it soon. This sounds like a dream come true, but I'm a bit weary of punching my SFTP credentials into an app by an unknown company without any idea of what it's actually doing behind the scenes.

FWIW, Buzzfeed chair Ken Lerer says the company isn't slashing its revenue targets this year and that it did hit its Q1 target[1]. No one seems to be denying that they missed their targets last year, though.

http://recode.net/2016/04/12/buzzfeed-revenue-advertising-20...

Guardtime?

(Disclosure: I write full-time for Wired, but I'll try to leave my feeling about our content aside here)

Even if you pay for a subscription to The Economist, you're still going to see ads, both on their website and in their apps. Even though I'm a subscriber and logged in, Ublock Origin is showing over 100 blocked requests on an article I just pulled up there, some of them coming from the same third party ad networks everyone else uses. And my $1 a week subscription only buys me access to three articles a week.

So while, as the OP points out, The Economist's Tom Standage [1] believes that ad revenue isn't a futureproof business model, they still appear to be heavily reliant on it.

I don't know anything about the Economist's overhead, but the reason subscribers are still subjected to ads is very likely that subscription fees come nowhere near covering their costs. The truism in newspaper publishing is that subscriptions don't even cover the cost of printing and delivering the paper to a subscriber.

Subscription-only business models have historically been tough.

A lot of people ask "why can't all advertising be like The Deck," but the trouble there is that The Deck probably doesn't bring in enough revenue for publishers to operate a large newsroom [2]

Personally (not speaking for my employers) I like Brave browser's idea, but they're already facing legal threats. And while they're promising publishers 70 percent of their ad revenue, but even if that's a larger percentage I don't know if that will work out to more than publishers get through the third party networks they use now.

[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-...

I get dozens of emails like these every day and they drive me nuts. I wish people would get straight to the point rather than waste my time padding out the top of their emails with disingenuous small talk.

Hi, I wrote the Wired article in question. I hadn't heard about IRCv3, but it does sound like it would plug some of the holes in IRC that Slack users complain about. It wouldn't really have been a good fit for this article, since I was mostly focused on the two Slack-alikes with most traction, at least according to Black Duck's data (an imperfect measure to be sure) and IRCv3. As for why I didn't mention IRC in general, well, I alluded to it in the first sentence, but as many other people have mentioned, IRC just doesn't hold a lot of appeal in the business world, for various reasons.

Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily call MONDO 100% naive. There was a lot of paranoia about government surveillance and the misuse of technology in its pages as well.

I've been trying to track down copies or PDFs of Electric word and Language Technology to no avail. I'm really curious what the design and contents were actually like. Best I've found are some scans of the covers and a little info on a few issues:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080819193753/http://www.rynne....

I think a lot of people miss that it was in in part literally a joke. It seems a lot people look at that "R.U. a cyberpunk" bit and think that it was meant to be serious. Hell, it was all right there in the editor-in-chief's name.

But of course it was also more than just a joke. Have you read "The Guy I Almost Was," mentioned in another comment here? I asked R.U. Sirius about that when I interviewed him in 2002 [1] and he said:

"I say that all the time in public interviews, 'We made it all up.' Which in a sense is true — some of it we made up and some of it we didn’t. Mondo 2000 clearly wasn’t journalism in the conventional sense. It was mostly composed of interviews, very subjective, really dedicated to people speaking in their own voice. It was very playful and very surrealistic. I never really wanted to do journalism — I do now because I have to to make a living. And we do it at Thresher, I guess because it’s become a habit now. To say we made it all up is kind of flippant, but we weren’t concerned with responsibility or credibility. We were more concerned with creating a sense of excitement and energy and a sense of belonging to the next wave of culture. And we were concerned with making people laugh."

Voxel8 is a spin-off from Harvard's Lewis Lab. More info on their work:

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/526521/microsc...

That does seem to be the biggest limitation -- you have to trust that the issuer is running an unmodified version of the open source code.

"Another problem is that your employer will know that you signed up for an anonymous gossip/leak site."

Only if they check your email logs and see that a verification code was sent, which you could plausibly deny having requested. Of course, if you're the only person at your company to sign-up, and you're therefore the only one with one of those codes, that would obviously expose you.

Zim and nvPY are cross-platform and save everything as plain text, which you can open and edit on iOS with Dropbox or something similar.