Live data from Hacker News

This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

321–330 of 458 posts

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#321
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you go to a restaurant you let the chef prepare food for you. Telling him to back off and let you cook because he can't know better than you (his user) would be absurd. Same thing with design and typography. It requires skill and taste, and hopefully people will be delighted or simply consume the content for what it is, because the design/cooking just reveals that content in a convenient/useful shape.

Most fonts picked by designers suck. Plain and simple. I override fonts for most websites I frequent.

Can you elaborate on why/how they suck? Do you have example links, to set a common ground for the conversation?

I think most fonts that get your attention suck, the best ones are invisible and get you directly to the meaning of text, without getting in the way. So maybe there's a kind of bias (selection or sampling bias?) operating here?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#322

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

>Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. I tend to do that, I also save a lot of scientific papers, ebooks and personal notes. I've found that doing so does not help me at all. The main problem I have is that when I need to look something up (an article, a book, a bit of info) I reach for google first, usually end up finding the answer…

I have exactly the same problem.

What I've found is that I need to spend more time deciding what is important, and less time consuming frivolous information. That's hardly a technology problem.

For things I really don't want to forget, I'm using Anki [0], a Spaced Repetition System (SRS). Anki is supremely good at knowing when you're about to forget an item and prompting you to review it.

Spaced practice and retrieval practice, both of which are used in SRS, are two learning techniques for which there is ample evidence that they actually work [1].

You still need to decide what is worth remembering, but that's something technology can't help with, I think.

[0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/

[1] https://www.learningscientists.org/

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#323

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

This was what made me convert from bookmarking to clipping pages into Evernote around 6-7 years ago. I realized I had this huge archive of reference bookmarks that were almost useless because 1) I could rarely find what I was looking for, if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place, and 2) if I did, it was likely gone anyway. With Evernote I can full text search anything I've clipped in the past…

Is there a good end-to-end encrypted alternative to Evernote?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#324
post #316
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And directly quoting the information has been endangered by modern copyright directives. I guess paraphrasing or summarising hasn’t been prohibited. > will aggressive takedown policies have forced a shift? Shifting to prarphrasing or to summarising doesn’t sound too bad.

That's not always possible without changing the subtleties and basic meaning, or even intention as well as discussing and questionioning what the author wanted to say with their sentence or paragraph. This is particularly tricky if you write political commentary on your site. Blog post of a politician or social media posts can't be quoted where there's already vaguely stated and often said politician removes the post…

In the case of StackOverflow, if you can’t explain an answer in your own words, then you don’t really know the answer and no one should rely on your links to a supposedly authoritative source.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've outlived and outhosted all of the third party hosts I've used.

I guess you can last 10 years, which is apparently what "This Page is Designed to Last" aspires to, but what if we have greater ambitions? Like 100 years?

If you have built something worth lasting 100 years, other people will help you ensure that it does. That reduces the concerns in this article considerably.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#326

bit disappointed, mainly because I was expecting something a bit different. I was hoping to see something that has some ideas that would make things last beyond the original author, say for 100 years. Of course that's hard to predict given tech will change, but what the best guess effort to make your page last as long as it possibly can into the future You need to address the problem of domain names...the author has…

> the author has a vanity domain name that needs to be paid for that will need to continue to be paid for, so may need to pigggyback onto another domain

This is a very good point. I host my blog with a vanity domain name[1]. The domain name was accidentally taken away from me[2] for a while due to which my blog became unreachable.

As a result of this experience, I now host a mirror of my blog using GitHub Pages[3]. Further, I have made sure that the entire blog can be downloaded[4] to local filesystem and viewed locally, i.e., all inter-linking is done using relative paths only.

[1]: https://susam.in

[2]: https://susam.in/blog/sinkholed/

[3]: https://susam.github.io/

[4]: https://github.com/susam/susam.github.io/archive/master.zip

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#327

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

I've actually been saving every page I visit for a good two years now and it has barely caused in dent in my NAS storage space. As usual though, I wrote a crappy extension and Python script to do that because I never bothered to look online. Thanks for introducing me to WarcProxy - I'll probably be making the switch very soon.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#328

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

I use DEVONThink on my mac, which has web archiving, full-text search, and auto-categorization.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#329

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

This was what made me convert from bookmarking to clipping pages into Evernote around 6-7 years ago. I realized I had this huge archive of reference bookmarks that were almost useless because 1) I could rarely find what I was looking for, if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place, and 2) if I did, it was likely gone anyway. With Evernote I can full text search anything I've clipped in the past…

I find Evernote's search isn't that good, at least in the free version. Often trying to remember keywords and using Google is faster.

I know about DevonThink, i read good recommendations. But it's IOS/Mac only.

Any Evernote alternative for Win/Android with great search ?

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shout out to https://joplinapp.org/ I was an Evernote user when I was on macOS. When I switched to Linux, a proper web clipper was something I really missed. I'm now on Joplin and it does everything I used to use Evernote for and then some. It even has vim bindings now! As far as longevity goes, I think they got their archive / backup format right - it's just a tarball with markdown in it.

No need of proprietary code and apps why not build it into browsers. I have seen Firefox and Chrome can download web pages. So it will be nicer if they can download the bookmarked pages and store in a local html, css, image folder. I think it's pretty easy to achieve. Also people need to move away from those esoteric reactjs, angular, vuejs and plethora of CMS as API or static site generators relying on some js frame…

This... I just found a plugin for the static site generator Pelican that is 7 years old that still works. After running Pelican you get plain HTML that can be hosted anywhere. I like Netlify, but other options like GitHub pages are also great. The author recommends not putting on GitHub Pages because they haven't found a working business model and might not be here in the future. But... GitHub has been taken over by Microsoft which is most likely not going bankrupt soon and Microsoft loves their backward compatibility so I am confident they won't screw GitHub up too much.
Post reply on HN