Six years ago it was possible to use Dropbox as the files intermediary. With the current version (13) of iOS, there's a fairly direct access to files. There's a files explorer with support for connections to network shares & external drives. Apple is less interested in abstracting them away as they used to be.
You can very easily use your iPad as a reader for arbitrarily downloaded ebooks. Go to Gutenberg or Archive.org or the pirate site of your choice. Select a book. Select the format. Epubs and PDFs have the option of being sent to iBooks. Mobi can be opened with a compatible reader app if you have one installed. And the file can be saved to Dropbox or whatever file service you have installed. With the latest version of iOS (IpadOS) you can save to your Downloads folder or even to a connected storage device, or to a file share on your local network. You can also load books via Dropbox, local network, or connected storage.
I do this all the time. For me, it's convenient to use Dropbox as the intermediary, but there's plenty of other ways too.
You made something very simple and beautiful. I bought it right away, and had fun building a palette of the Kansas sunset while my dogs ran through the woods. I know I could do the same thing just by taking a photo and extracting a palette later, but I really liked the experience of doing it in the moment.
Just one request: I'd love a way to export a bunch of colors at once. Is there a way in the current interface? If not, please consider it for a future update.
I don't use my iPad much these days, but when I did, I used nPlayer: a media playing app which got around many of the iOS restrictions. Plays many different formats, has its own integrated file manager, and provides ways to copy files directly including Windows file shares or streaming files
Occupy didn't result in direct action or changes. However, it popularized the notion of the One Percent vs. Ninety-Nine Percent, and got people to think about class in a nation very averse to even acknowledging the existence of economic classes. Probably had a positive impact in terms of helping Obama get re-elected, since Obama was lucky enough to get a seemingly clueless one-percenter as an opponent. Occupy had laid the groundwork which helped attacks against Romney.
The Trump protests have already had an effect. First of all, it's motivated normally non-politically active people into action. The sheer size of the crowds at the first protest, the Women's March, has had a galvanizing effect. People at the marches were encouraged to sign up to various groups. Those groups, like Indivisible or Planned Parenthood, keep things going by organizing at the local level and by giving them easy things to do each day or each week. There's a direct line between the protests and the fact almost every congressperson has an overwhelming volume of calls. And the seeds are planted not only for future protests but also for future direct action.
The administration has already backed down on some issues due to the protests. I think it's arguable the anti-LGBT executive order was scrapped at the last minute because of the sheer size of the instant protests over the immigration ban. If that many people would show up over an immigration order which didn't affect anyone they knew, then it would be reasonable to predict the streets would be absolutely flooded at any attempt to renew persecution of LGBT people.
As an added bonus, the protests are clearly unnerving Trump. I have no idea what the long term effect will be, but at the moment it's causing his team to make some errors.
> Occupy didn't result in direct action or changes.
That was my point. It had as goals to limit the influence of corporations on politics, more balanced distribution of income, more and better jobs, bank reforms.
I can see maybe the secondary effects of electing Obama, so agree with that. Interestingly did Obama do much in regard to those issues. There was student dept forgiveness thing, that might be a claim. ACA might be another one. But what about others...can't think of any right off the bat.
> The sheer size of the crowds at the first protest, the Women's March, has had a galvanizing effect.
It was a beautiful thing indeed. It was nice to see others and have that solidarity. If it gets people more involved politically that's even better.
> I think it's arguable the anti-LGBT executive order was scrapped at the last minute because of the sheer size of the instant protests over the immigration ban.
I am behind on my news, what was that anti-LGBT executive order? This is the first time I heard about it.
Have you ever really thought about the phrase "the revolution will not be televised"?
More than anything you must fight apathy. Most people are busy and don't have time to pay attention to politics or get involved. Humans are also social creatures; knowing that you aren't the only one - that you aren't some oddball - makes a huge difference.
At some point people start to question their pre-conceived narrative. They stop wanting the status quo. The revolution begins when people's minds are changed. Visible action comes later. Sometimes that "later" is a decade or two when a new generation takes power and decides to do things differently than the generation before. Sometimes that "later" is next week and involves a literal revolution as we think of it.
But you can't say protest doesn't matter. It is the first step in changing hearts and minds.
> But you can't say protest doesn't matter. It is the first step in changing hearts and minds.
Well I was trying to say that it doesn't work as it used to compared to the Civil Right Movement, Vietnam War, Women's Liberation. Something is off. Maybe it is just my perception. We saw what happened in Ukraine, Arab Spring and other countries. There it seems to work. Here it seems less so.
> Humans are also social creatures; knowing that you aren't the only one - that you aren't some oddball - makes a huge difference.
That's a good point. I hadn't considered it enough. Just knowing you are not alone is great motivator.
> They stop wanting the status quo.
Interestingly, I think that is what changed the election completely. Both Sanders and Trump supporters, especially their energy and enthusiasm, despite the media blackouts and lack of support from major donors like banks and even whole countries, have shown that people stopped wanting the status quo. Sadly the DNC never stopped to re-evaluate how come a relatively unknown old white male, seemed to have gotten so many votes.
> The revolution begins when people's minds are changed. Visible action comes later.
Well voting produces a visible change not that much later, in historic terms it is rather instantaneous.
> Sometimes that "later" is a decade or two when a new generation takes power and decides to do things differently than the generation before.
Wonder if there is a chance now to form a new party. What happened to Sander's supporters. They were all mostly young, very enthusiastic, it seems like now should be the time to give them a voice and harness that energy.
Protests also help in building awareness. In that regard, Occupy was a huge success. Overnight, people and mainstream media were suddenly talking about class.
Also, I think it planted the seed in a way. There were huge protests around the start of the Iraq War, but those failed in part because they were mostly ignored by the media. Occupy found a way to get the media to pay attention, and used social media outlets as a way to engage people whether or not they showed up in person. The Women's March probably would have been a success if Occupy hadn't occurred, but I think Occupy did a lot in terms of making people in the US think protesting was viable in terms of getting attention, and thus the Women's March, and all the following protests, had a leg up because of it.
Tahrir Square / Arab Spring should also get some credit too, since they created the framework Occupy followed.
Here's a quick link about the LGBT executive order and how it failed:
I can't prove it, but I suspect the rapid response of protesters played a factor in shelving the order, based on the large numbers who hit the streets and airports shortly after the immigration ban was announced. The LGBT EO would have produced an even larger response.
At any rate, if you haven't already looked at the Women's March or Indivisible's or Planned Parenthood's sites or Facebook pages, I highly recommend you do. I'm quite impressed and heartened at the ways they're keeping people engaged. Little daily actions that anyone can do such as calling your Senator. Turning the protest highs into concrete action.
Strange how this new awareness about class lead to identity politics becoming the left's focus for the subsequent campaigns and activism efforts, resulting in a president who ran purely on her own gender losing to one who ran on economic grounds...
The Women's March was just more of the poison posing as a cure. Yes, they had a big showing, but like Occupy before it, it's entirely coopted by progressive side issues and the professional rabble rousers who need them to persist for their meal ticket. Just look at what's happening to the science march.
The biggest part of the problem is not being able to turn it off. I don't think most people would be bothered by the basic telemetry if this was an option for non-enterprise / education users.
That and not being able to see what it's sending out. I recently took a close look at the Privacy control panel on my iPhone. Not only does it give the option of turning off telemetry and ad data, but it also shows you exactly what is being sent back to the mothership.
Being an old Slashdot user, the first incredibly dumb thought of mine was "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!" With a pic of Natalie Portman for the watch face, of course.
But, one fun thing I could imagine doing is using it as an incredibly portable PirateBox. Or any other use of a file server hiding in plain sight.
Man, I remember when those jokes were old, 15 years ago.
Speaking of Beowulf, has there ever been an evolution of the concept? The closest I've seen since has been QNX's QNet, which allows transparent management and communication between process on nodes of the cluster. I suppose Hadoop or even Kubernetes can be seen as the continuation of the concept?
All of these machines are big clusters running Linux. Mostly on Intel CPUs.
But on the other hand, the idea of using commodity hardware is kind of a thing of the past. It's mostly Xeon CPUs, not desktop processors. And it's specialized network hardware. And more and more you see dedicated compute hardware like Intel Phi and Nvidia Tesla cards.
Yeah, it's pretty intense to see these clusters in person. In our data centers, we have 40G optical interlinks per rack overhead, 100G spidering across the racks to different rooms and the main network room.
And thinking of he main network room, with the amount of brocades in there, it's probably more expensive than the main enterprise pod just in sheer super-expensive network stuffs.
We're also behind the times in lots of our management. 80% of our servers are bare metal, with limited automation. But we also do "NOC in a box"... many of our use cases wouldn't cleanly work right using tech like docker and kubernetes.
That's a narrow definition of "commodity" -- the special networks cost less than the same speed of Ethernet, and Intel server chips (non-phi) aren't that different from desktop CPUs.
If you look through the archives of the beowulf mailing list, occasionally someone makes the argument you're making, and few people agree with it.
There is no 'same speed of Ethernet' for infiniband or omnipath or aries, etc. There is more to these networks than throughput, and the switches approach a million dollars apiece.
The rest of the non-phi/non-tesla hardware is pretty much off the shelf, but the interconnect is one of the two distinguishing features of a supercomputing-class cluster; the other is high-performance shared storage (which of course requires the interconnect to function).
It's a shame feel like I need to. There's no world where high-speed interconnects are as cheap as ethernet, nor is there a world where it is appropriate to replace them with ethernet. Congratulations on your successes but they're not really relevant to the accuracy of your post.
> Speaking of Beowulf, has there ever been an evolution of the concept?
I don't know if you'd call it an "evolution of the concept", but there are people who've made "low cost" clusters of Raspberry Pi boards (anywhere from four, to several hundred), not so much for practical purposes, but more for learning how to set up, use, and maintain such a system, without needing the space or power requirements a real system would need.
That's much too harsh. If someone is poor enough they can't afford internet access, then they're probably under some stress from all sorts of factors. Working two jobs, trying to keep their head above water, possibly a single parent, etc.
Having the kid bring the paper home can be a good reminder. Even my own quite devoted mother would occasionally forget it was grade time until I'd show her the report card.
I don't use Android currently, but when I did, PowerAmp was a great music player. Simple interface. Would automatically find sound files wherever you put them. Played most formats including flac. Worked very well with my BT headphones. Never had a problem with it.
I agree with you. HN should get rid of the downvotes. They don't really serve a useful purpose. It just adds needless friction and anxiety, puts a certain amount of negativity at the center of the discussion, and reinforces a certain level of groupthink. If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on. Downvotes also encourage some pointless noise in the conversation involving the downvotes themselves.
I could see keeping the upvotes as a way of helping to keep things positive (pun probably intended), but I'm not attached to them.
Is there a consensus on when to downvote? There are now quite a few people with enough karma to downvote, but from what I've seen there seems to be no clear guideline on when it's appropriate.
Should you downvote factual errors? Should you downvote hateful comments that don't contribute to the discussion? Should you downvote comments you don't agree with? Should you downvote for bad English? Should you downvote a comment like this one which is completely meta and not anymore relevant to the original post?
You need a certain level of karma to even give downvotes, so maybe the assumption is that people at “that level” should already know to how to use them.
I have the karma, but I'm not quite sure how downvotes should be used. For this reason, I almost never use them. A grand total of one of my own comments has received enough downvotes to get a total negative score, and I can understand why, but it's not enough for me to build a cohesive understanding on what the community means when it downvotes.
I don't know if there's a consensus, but I doubt it.
One way to think about downvotes is to keep them symmetric with upvotes. When I first came to HN, I expected downvotes to be asymmetrically reserved for people being wildly factually incorrect, or wildly negative. But, maybe if you upvote something on a whim because you lightly agree with it, it should be equally acceptable to downvote something because you lightly disagree with it. I don't do that, but I don't have any compelling reasons not to, aside from I don't like getting downvoted, it still feels more serious than upvotes.
When do you upvote things? I upvote for a number of different reasons including but not limited to when someone says something funny, contributes something valuable or different than others, posts data or relevant links worth bookmarking, says something that I agree with, shows a high level of nerdery and/or expertise in a weird subject matter, has a great attitude or meaningfully positive spin on something, etc. And as long as it's tastefully done, I'll even upvote the occasional correction or sarcastic comment.
I also tend to upvote people who engage with me, and respond to things I've said. Lately, it has been especially important for me personally to upvote people who are being critical or disagreeing with me, even if they're pushing my buttons. If my goal is for the conversation I start to bubble upward, then upvoting the thread is better than downvoting.
So, I'm only one person and I don't even have a consensus myself about when to upvote. ;) I don't personally expect consensus on when to downvote, other than a general wish that people use it judiciously - and I have to say that by and large, that is what I see going on. It's uncommon that I see or experience unfair or unreasonable downvoting.
> You need a certain level of karma to even give downvotes, so maybe the assumption is that people at "that level" should already know to how to use them.
I can only speak from my own experience and say that my ideas about how to vote changed between when I first started here and when I finally earned the ability to downvote. Not having the ability to downvote for a while did help me learn how to say more things that contributed rather than get stuck in the eddies of Internet arguments. If I'd had the ability to downvote from day 1, I would have used it a lot. Since I didn't have it, by the time I got there, I now don't see the need to use it, and so I don't.
> If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on.
I try to downvote poor conversation norms: a common one is replying to an argument that someone didn't make. (Especially when it begins "oh, so you think...") I'd be okay with flagging such things if we agreed that that was an acceptable thing to flag for. In the meantime, I think it's good to downvote such things.
Plus, it seems arrogant to say, but some people are simply clueless. Pointing out their errors is exhausting, and doesn't make them less clueless. They're not actually trolls, but they might as well be. I'm not sure about flagging such people, but I'm okay with downvoting them.
> I'm not sure about flagging such people, but I'm okay with downvoting them.
It may save your time, but a downvote doesn't explain why you think someone is clueless. Even link a link to something they could read to enlighten them to your point of thinking or a book title might be adequate in making your argument and would take maybe 30 seconds more, at most.
I've lurked on this site for maybe 4 years and only recently created an account. I find that I'm okay with downvotes on particular comments, but what kills me is having my score right there at the top of the page all the time. Just reminding me of how well I'm doing. It makes it harder to be sanguine about paying the price for an unpopular comment.
That said, getting past valuing fake internet points is a great exercise. I use reddit a fair amount and some of the subs I'm on are far more capricious than HN with the downvotes, often using it as an echo chamber reinforcement tool. I consider it good to acclimate yourself to paying the price for voicing unpopular opinions (without being a jerk obviously).
> If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on.
That depends on how wrong they are. There's plenty of fringe lunacy that's wrong but you could spend all your life uselessly rebutting. Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.
In this context, downvote is basically an eyeroll.
> Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.
Here we see one problem with downvoting lunacy: some people notice it where it doesn't exist, and others fail to see it where it does.
I'm not ancap myself, but I think the movement deserves respect; for example, I've not read The Machinery of Freedom, but I've heard good things about it, and I don't think you can dismiss it as fringe lunacy.
"Lunacy" more as a modality of discussion than a property of the ideas themselves. Usually involving taking the ideas as dogma and failing to think about practical application or relevance to the particular subject under discussion.
Another example: Marx wrote a lot of reasonable analysis of the mid-19th-century economic condition (and some bad analysis). Marxists tend to be tremendously irritating write-only dogmatists. It doesn't have to be that way. The right has a similar bunch of people who are Friedman dogmatists.
Although I agree with this point, I wonder if the removal of downvotes would alter the usage of 'flag' by a measurable amount, and flag be used by some as a proxy for when they would have used a downvote instead.
I think this is what dang means when he talks about building the technology to make the site YC wants. Users will use the features to get the results they want, often against the intentions of the site creators. reddit and the ongoing battle against 'downvote isn't for disagreement' in every sub is a good example of this. What mods want it used for is different from what users want to use it for, and obviously the users win.
Taking away the downvote button might seem like it would fix the problem, but as you point out, it would probably just shift the site behavior so that people use different features (flagging) to achieve the same result.
My guess is that the downvote system is an intentional encouragement of laziness in order to drown unpopular comments for whatever reason (sometimes valid such as noise, sometimes to intentionally suppress challenging viewpoints) while avoiding the heavy burden of moderation.
Just like Reddit's system, it is heavily flawed and easily gamed, as seen pretty much all the time here.
Having used things like Facebook, however, I don't think a single upvote is a better system; a bad post from somewhere or someone with enough momentum gets enough upvotes to perhaps go viral — even if completely factually incorrect. You need the -1 to balance it out, sometimes.
I don't tend to downvote if I disagree (and I'd argue, I think, that one shouldn't — if you disagree, comment); I typically only downvote if the post is extremely factually incorrect, not adding to the discussion (for example, repeating an earlier point or asking a question that is answered in an ancestor comment — i.e., not reading), or is rude. (I reserve flag for extremely bad posts — and often HN has beaten me to it.)
Not saying a +1/-1 system like Reddit or HN is perfect, nor is it the only alternative to a just-+1 system. One could imagine, for example, giving experts in various topic areas more sway in their vote, if you knew the topic of a given article (they should know what they're talking about); but that could just as easily backfire if a newcomer has a completely valid — if unconventional — idea.
