mathnmusic

Android's Play stores makes a lot of money. So much so that it's quite comfortable reducing its fees from 30% to 15% for some developers.

Maps already charges fees for all location-based apps (cabs, deliveries, fleet tracking etc) like Uber. It may have to tweak its pricing, that's all.

GCP has a revenue model as strong as AWS. There's a reason why Google is pumping money into it.

Chrome is the only one that could be called a loss leader but given its dominance, it can figure out a model. If Adobe photoshop can survive as a paid software, so can Chrome and its Developer Tools.

Google should be broken up into 5 parts: Search/Adwords/Mail/Drive, Android, Chrome, Maps & GCP.

How do things stand on account portability? If I sign up at a mastodon server, build an audience and network there, but later if the server admin changes its policies in unfavorable directions, can I migrate to a new server with all my contacts and reputation intact - even without the old admin's cooperation?

(1) is now solved with link to text fragments.

Captchas solve the wrong problem. Abuse is what you want to prevent, and so you need to detect abuse, not humanness. Rate-limiting, reputation check, web of trust etc all are valid techniques.

Bots can be nice. Humans can be bad. Focus on the right problem.

The first principle should be to separate "documents" from "webapps". An article on NYTimes should be classified as a document which comes with a sandbox with minimal data collection. Of course, as things stand, every site wants to become an app because that's how the incentives are set up. "Apps" - which can collect more data - should come with significant user friction: permissions dialog, standardized ToS, disclosures etc. Similarly, sites that offer "documents" (i.e. no tracking), should be incentivized in other ways (share button, micropayments etc).

There's a lot that can be done.

I find that unconvincing. Great explanations are usually also great at convincing me.

I was recently forced to migrate my hobby FOSS project the other way: from DigitalOcean to AWS. The primary reason being: a generous quota of 60,000 emails per month to send via SES. Most mail providers give only up to 3,000 to 6,000 emails per month.

So, more than 1,000 users have signed up as of now. But because all content is public (does not require login), most traffic is unauthenticated. Some topics are ranked decently in Google, so users come and pick a resource and leave. Which is completely fine (that’s how Google itself works) but that does mean that the social features are currently underused.

OpenLibrary (relatively less known project by Internet Archive) is doing good work on collecting identifiers for books and works, which LearnAwesome leverages. But if you check in app/utilities/book.rb, you will notice that we have our own data enrichment pipeline to work with multiple sources.

One of the cool things that the knowledge graph enables is that you can follow “topics” and get learning resources like latest research papers for THAT TOPIC in your feed - even outside the main site. This is the power of ActivityPub which is really a distributed pub/sub for the open Web. My motivation for building this feature came from the reproducibility crisis: I want to be alerted when something I believe has come under question or has been falsified.

GoodReads is all but dead for many. A few months ago, they deprecated their API keys (without notice).

I started building a GoodReads-equivalent but realized that many people care more about learning from multiple media formats (blogs, videos, research papers, interactive explorables, podcasts, courses etc) rather than simply reading books. Because there are too many projects attempting to build a new GoodReads, I ended up building something more oriented for multimedia learners.

It’s up and running, open-source, built with Ruby on Rails and supports protocols like ActivityPub, RSS etc. There is a companion browser extension, integration with Slack groups, Twitter and more, and a WIP mobile app. Like GoodReads, you can build your learning lists and embed them on your sites.

It participates in fediverse so your reviews can be broadcasted to your followers on Mastodon, PeerTube etc but full federation is not yet there because it has an underlying knowledge graph that will need to be synchronised across instances.

I think many HN users may be interested in checking it out:

https://learnawesome.org/

https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn

Why is always them wanting to "say something" rather than "learn something"? I'd love to watch the story of somebody genuinely trying to learn or understand something complex.

No, Apple is free to stop operating in countries with such regulators. No business activity => No violation of competition-related regulations.

I just use a single static HTML file that lets me organize my notes and TODOs in five big buckets of life and track high level goals. All manually entered and data is only ever stored in the browser's localStorage so it remains completely private.

https://learnawesome.org/life.html

After all the popups, it needs a last one saying "this site works best in our mobile app".

You are right that an external queuing system might be useful in some cases. I was thinking of simple background jobs like sending emails while processing an HTTP request. Once persistence is available, why would this be any less resilient than an external queue? IIRC, this is the standard way of dealing with background jobs in Erlang/Elixir projects . Ractor should bring similar capability to Ruby ecosystem.

Why couldn't parallel execution in single process be combined with persistence? Store the job data, the continue execution of the job and at the end, clean up or mark it completed. One gets both persistence as well as an easy, single-process deployment.

I have been dealing with the same problem for curating resources at https://learnawesome.org. Projects like Openlibrary do collect unique identifiers for _books_, but for everything else, it mostly takes manual effort. For example, I collect talks/podcasts by the author where they discuss ideas from their books. Then there are summaries written by others.

This is a fantastic effort! Kudos :-)

I have been collecting learning resources and their reviews by experts at https://learnawesome.org/ (open-source, built with Ruby on Rails and TailwindCSS). Would you be kind enough to share the raw JSON files for their books?

LearnAwesome has its own topic taxonomy so it will still require tagging topics manually, but it can save me some effort on scraping/parsing LSE/Nature sites.

But there's a law against manipulating stocks.

Does this not serve the purpose?

Repo -> Settings -> Moderation Settings -> Limit to repository collaborators

If the dispute is with AWS abusing the trademark, license change is an exaggerated punishment that harms many others besides AWS itself.

I have been adding a number of these free books at https://learnawesome.org/

Do you really care about the format being PDF or is it about the books being FREE? I'd like to make common queries like yours easier. LearnAwesome is open-source, so of course you're free to contribute: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn

Yes. This is basically teaching how to give instructions to a robot that does exactly what you tell it to - nothing more and nothing less! Recipes are nothing but simple algorithms including branches and loops, may be even procedures.

For my daughter (she's now 7), I followed this sequence:

- Exact instructions challenge (from YouTube)

- LightBot app on Android

- Scratch with Harvey Mudd College's course on edX

Snap! has some nice features but the community aspects of Scratch are so much better that she's happy building games there.

Same as you, our goal was not to "learn programming", but just to have fun making things move with your ideas. Just creating rather than passively consuming something.

Because this "coding for kids" mania seems to have gone overboard, I collected links to all the resources I used in the form of a "syllabus" here: https://learnawesome.org/items/1c96e03a-ffff-4579-b69a-0387b...

Hoping that it's okay to share LearnAwesome's (my open-source project) computer-science topic page here: https://learnawesome.org/topics/2680f6d5-b662-4cc3-99e5-e748...

I think every new notebook project should take ideas from Julia's Pluto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAF8DjrQSSk

Working directly with the source files is just one of the niceties it has.

And a browser extension that suggests open-source alternatives based on the current page's URL: https://github.com/nileshtrivedi/better

It also allows you to submit new recommendations via the extension itself which submits a pull request to its GitHub project.

What's interesting is that: the extension lets you subscribe to multiple sources for recommendations (much like adblocking filters). This means that curation of alternatives can be done by people YOU trust and could incorporate criteria other than license: Ethical, Low-priced, Locally produced, Sustainable etc.

You know what would be a great goodwill-building move from Github and Microsoft? Them running a Matrix server instance and provide a chat room for each Github repo. This is what Gitter used to offer. Federation allows even competitors to interoperate.