paperpunk

My issue is mainly that Word doesn't really maintain the same structured hierarchy in the XML that HTML would – it's more like a sequential format. The users wanted a way to indicate certain types of content or annotations and they do so via coloring text in certain ways – but I found in practice this is very hard to reconcile since there is a lot of invisible formatting in word, the element may terminate and start again, with a new invisible element in between. Invisible to the user - but very visible to the parser.

Essentially it's a balance of attempting to remove all the spurious elements (`<o:p>`, or invisible empty formatting, etc.) and then reason about what remains. Much of that involves a lot of walking the tree to inspect neighbouring nodes because them being co-located can indicate something.

Look you may be recoiling in horror by now – it sounds horrific. Actually what we have is a remarkably stable system all things considered but it was built up over time. I think the only approach you can take is write a large amount of unit tests for the schema normaliser, with real MS-word samples and expected outputs, and then really put the system through its paces. Every time you find an example that breaks your model, add a unit test for that snippet, and evolve.

God forbid a Word update ever introduces a new format.

I think they are comfortable with it from using it for a long time.

In fact I find people do everything in MS Office products, generally in ways you wouldn't necessarily expect the software to be used. E.g. PowerPoint is the de facto tool for designing conference posters. To create 'versions' of documents, people will copy and paste the file and add a number at the end.

I think we often get so myopic about our perspective on technology that we forget that non-technologists have a vastly different relationship with it.

You define an internal schema, which is essentially just a tree structure according to your own use-case. In this way it lets you do editing of more complicated page elements than a typical WYSWYG editor.

You can provide (or use others') serialisers and deserialisers to convert between that representation and something else, e.g. RTF, HTML.

I've used Slate in a production application for about 2 years now, as part of a CMS for medical professionals to write rich content for other medical professionals and patients.

They tend to write the initial content in MS Word which they are comfortable with and then paste into the editor, then the editor has to reconcile this according to the site's structural elements. Then for editing, this works fantastically well, and allows more complex widgets and unusual design elements to be embedded and edited in the WYSIWYG context in the editor.

When the system was first being built we trialed 10-20 or so other solutions in this space, many with the same design concepts as Slate, but something about this stuck. Just brilliant.

Roll your own, untested function vs a small, widely used library with a well-understood, well-tested API that your devs have a good chance of being familiar with already. I too want to avoid bloated npm dependencies but this seems like a fair engineering trade-off..

I'm not so sure it's so clear in that page you linked to. Google do also sell the largest analytics/user-tracking platform that exists (Google Analytics). That page you linked to seems to hinge around what constitutes 'personal information' which I'm sure others have differing opinions about but does go back to the parent's point: Google is in the business of selling your data. It maybe does it in a controlled way, segregating by client properties, or removing certain personally identifying information, but it's still selling your data.

That's interesting, I always feel the opposite -- when I open a page about some software that doesn't have a video I often close the page immediately because I want to see how something works in practice not just in description.

Something of an off-topic conversation but I think it's quite interesting how modern language is evolving to include pictograms that are common between different languages, and not childish at all. Why must it be a problem?

Perhaps the same biases that might influence career progression/pay-rise discussions could also influence hiring decisions?

Though I agree with your secondary assertion.

Apropos of nothing, but you mentioning that brought up a memory of when I was in Helsinki this summer: I took a taxi back to the airport early in the morning and the taxi driver (a black man) asked me (white) to sit in the front rather than the back, otherwise he would get stopped by police. Not necessarily something I was expecting in Norway. But what do I know?

I do agree that Starbucks share responsibility but would you really say that 0% of the responsibility is with the person or people who actually set up the mining?

Forgive me for what may be a cliché but aren't we just going back to 10 years ago when we moved from layout in HTML tables to CSS? Only now it's `<div class="row"><div class="col-xs-12">` instead of `<tr><td>`.

I worry that the reason people started to swing back towards that style isn't really being addressed by things like CSS Grid. That being that it's very hard to maintain CSS because it's very hard to reason about what rules are being applied where unless you follow some strict personal naming conventions.

What are we doing to address this?

If you're ever interested in taking another look you might consider Docker for Mac. There should be no need to use boot2docker anymore. Docker for Mac is the official, recommended solution, and uses HyperKit for lightweight virtualisation and in my experience is a lot faster than using Vagrant with something like VirtualBox.

Because it's more complicated that. Hiring decisions, career progression decisions, salary decisions are not made by an algorithm trying to balance the sheets. They're made by humans with biases.

I can't speak for the natural sciences, but I'm an academic in an engineering department at a major university in the UK. My main criticism of the article is that it sort of lets non-humanities off the hook.

I've been sat in seminars in my group (on computer science or engineering topics) and had the same feelings as the author. People invent jargon to describe simple ideas and then convince themselves that it's more precise when it rarely is or, when it is precise, the precision isn't necessary. All it ends up doing is reducing the impact of the research. But it does help with the imposter syndrome of being an early-career academic – everyone else is using all this complicated jargon and you feel a bit like a fraud, so you need to get to grips with it quickly.

This isn't a problem unique to academia though it might be more severe there. There's a section on the gov.uk's 'Writing for GOV.UK' [1] article that I like:

"Government experts often say that because they’re writing technical or complex content for a specialist audience, they don’t need to use plain English. This is wrong.

Research [2] shows that higher literacy people prefer plain English because it allows them to understand the information as quickly as possible.

For example, research [3] into use of specialist legal language in legal documents found:

- 80% of people preferred sentences written in clear English - and the more complex the issue, the greater that preference (eg, 97% preferred ‘among other things’ over the Latin ‘inter alia’)

- the more educated the person and the more specialist their knowledge, the greater their preference for plain English"

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...

[2]: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/17/guest-post-clarity-is-kin...

[3]: http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&co...

I got stuck into a bad habit of browsing the internet idly anytime when I'm at home and then having to rush to get to work so I've created rules on my router to disable web access in the mornings before work and late at night before bed.

It is quite effective and I suddenly do other things but I do worry that it's a psychological crutch which is just going to make self-control even harder in the long term.

You described yourself in another comment as fluent in three languages – I wonder if you might be much more practised at figuring out things spoken in other languages than others.

I worry this will just funnel kids onto the kinds of porn web-sites that are unlikely to follow government regulations anyway, as they might have more damaging content.

Are there any cases where something like this has been rolled out elsewhere where the effects can be looked at?

She makes a good point when she says "I’m already here, people. So I’m not the problem you’re trying to solve."

I think what a lot of these kinds of posts miss is that efforts to bring women into tech generally aren't aimed at the kind of women who have always done tech, have always wanted to do tech, and participate in the tech community despite their gender. Those women are the die-hards who largely will ignore gender barriers because of their enthusiasm for the field. But if we want to improve the gender ratio we have to think about how to appeal to the women who don't fall into that category too.

I do consider myself a "woman in tech" but that doesn't mean I want special treatment. I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by smart, passionate people of all genders and don't really suffer much sexism with regards to my work. What I do want is more women colleagues and I support initiatives aiming to achieve that.

Full disclosure: I run a student branch of the Women's Engineering Society here in the UK, although we are far from a women's only group. Most of our events are about 50/50.

Soulver does it (Mac/iPhone), it just uses 'as' instead of '->'

E.g. "6Mbit/s * 1.5h as GB"

I've been using it for a while now and I can't imagine going back to a traditional calculator

For those unfamiliar with the works, it's a good reference. In 'Zen in the Art of Archery' Eugen Herrigel uses archery as a metaphor to initially learn, and then to teach Zen to a western audience because teaching it directly, intellectually, is indicated to be impossible.

Pirsig's novel references this because large sections of the book deal with the inability to express something on a purely 'classical' or intellectual level, the inability to define certain concepts, and the attempt to somehow bridge that intellectual leap of faith and explain things that cannot be explained directly.

So he tries to convey his ideas on a more intuitive level, using all the arts of redeemed sophistry through the means of creative writing, a story about travelling on a motorcycle with his son and discussing motorcycle maintenance.

It's interesting to me to what extent the huge amount of "Zen and the Art of.." books that exist these days are references to Pirsig's novel or to Herrigel's. My feeling is generally a lot of them are unaware of the existence of Herrigel's novel and the choice of phrasing does suggest Pirsig's. However, even right at the start Herrigel's title was a template for other books: only a few years after its publication his wife Gustie also published a book called 'Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement' with a similar treatment of Zen through the medium of Ikebana or flower arrangement.

All this survey reports are the things people consider to be restful. To that end it doesn't seem more valuable for your personal use than just asking yourself what you find most restful and doing that.

It's not actually a study that demonstrates a connection between what things people conventionally think of as restful – such as being in the natural environment, or reading a book – and whether there is any evidence this is more effectively restful than, say, getting coffee with a friend.

Do these people work more effectively? Sleep more soundly? Do their brain exhibit neurological features of restfulness? Do they get fewer illnesses? No data.

If we actually consult the research [1] we can see this was never the aims of the survey:

"The Rest Test sought to explore people’s subjective experiences of rest" (emphasis added)

What they do measure is whether people consider their 'subjective wellbeing' improved with rest. But what other people think makes them feel better may not be what actually makes you feel better.

So: interesting anthropologically, but not at all what the title suggests.

[1]: http://hubbubresearch.org/rest-test-results/

There is (typically) a difference other than pitch. Formants will be in slightly different locations [1]; the energy in the spectrum is balanced differently; there is more aspiration noise [2]. You can model the latter somewhat with this tool by moving the voice source box down.

I've been creating a speech synthesiser recently and it does seem like simple approaches produce a voice that is more passably 'male' than 'female', even accounting for the pitch. Aspiration added with white noise sounds better but doesn't quite get that breathy quality across. I think more sophisticated techniques may be needed.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220531604_Phonetic_...

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8653179

That's a fair point, but it does align with what I was trying to get across.

That being that achieving 'technological progress' with a milestone that applies only to the super wealthy is only one part of technological progress. Bringing it to millions of people at an affordable cost is also something worth considering.

I don't think it's reasonable to equate 'technologies that existed since the 60s' with 'technologies that are ubiquitous today'.

I'm in the bottom 15% of my country (UK) by income and I have access to things like: near-instantaneous hot water at all times, affordable next-day delivery services from a pocket-sized device I carry around with me, international air travel that is affordable for me, efficient fridge/freezer technology, fresh groceries from around the world at every local convenience store.

And yes things look a lot less impressive if you filter out information-technology related things. But advancements will always look less impressive if you filter out the most impressive advancements. The fact that we are close to permanently connected across geographical boundaries now isn't something to be dismissed out of hand. The level of effectiveness and miniaturisation of communications devices (e.g. 'true wireless' earphones with mobile internet) is really approaching the point of being practical telepathy insofar as it can be used.

I found that with my original iPad. I sold it after a while as it wasn't getting much use.

Just last year though I got an iPad Pro 9.7 with the Pencil. That's been pretty game-changing for me as far as making these devices actually useful. Now it's like a journal/lab-book, with extra features, that I carry with me everywhere and make extensive notes in. It doesn't replace my laptop, it replaces my written notes.

I still use the laptop extensively for my work that involves programming. However a lot of my work involves sketching diagrams and solving problems, work that I used to do on paper but now can do digitally.

If it helps people to improve their hygiene, by placebo effect or otherwise, then that's a good thing.

However, I ask because I did try it for several months, and did not notice any effect other than the minor irritation of having to keep turning it off when I wanted to watch a film in the evening (and the constant malfunctioning of f.lux – although hopefully those issues would not be present in Night Shift).

I'm not sure I would be able to detect an improvement even if there is one though - there's too many confounding factors. So I'd like to see some evidence so I can make an informed decision.

Is there any evidence for Night Shift/f.lux having impact on sleep? Last time I attempted a review I found plenty of explanations but no evidence.

A PNAS article about the use of e-Readers is often cited [0]. However, this compares a light emitting device to a book, and it's not clear how applicable it is to Night Shift vs. not Night Shift.

There is some research about the affects of light at different wavelengths on the human sleep cycle but I'm wary about using that as evidence for the efficacy of something like f.lux or Night Shift without specific studies done on their use in practice.

[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1232.full.html

If the unis I've looked at are any indication then many offer an integrated masters programme but most students will be on the bachelors route. At the institution where I work (Uni of York) many more BEng degrees are awarded than MEng.

There's some implication of a relationship between genius, mystique, and abuse, that seems to let it slide somehow. "Rationalized".

I wonder, if we were talking about Miles Davis being a particularly gifted accountant, would the same behaviour be written off so poetically?

I listen to Miles Davis a lot but was not aware of that part of his history. Should it change anything? I'm not sure.