TFNA

10 ms·

211.
by TFNA 4mo ago
> Heck written Latin didn't even have punctuation marks, not even spaces. That's because it was only used by slave scribes. The nobility that could write, did so in Greek. Greek of this same era did not have spaces either, as a
212.
by TFNA 4mo ago
> You aren't required to identify yourself to get a phone. You can get a prepaid phone with no ID. Requiring ID to buy a prepaid SIM card has become the norm across the developed world. There are still a few holdout countries, but t
213.
by TFNA 4mo ago
I contend that John Berryman’s Dream Songs wouldn’t have come about without the poet’s alcoholism. The fractured syntax that makes it such a moving collection seems a reflection of a mind clouded by drinking, and a sober poet may have nev
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by TFNA 4mo ago
Pretty much all of the EU had Visa- and Mastercard-branded debit cards since the turn of the millennium, so one has been able to buy stuff from the net and travel abroad without use of a credit card for decades now.
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by TFNA 4mo ago
Except in Macau, where casinos remain permitted. Chinese can also cross to Cambodia, where Chinese casino tourism is probably the bulk of the country’s economy.
216.
by TFNA 4mo ago
Online betting was huge in several other developed countries first. America got late to a trend. If anything, a Great Firewall in the USA would have protected it from the trend.
217.
by TFNA 4mo ago
Finnish libraries still have books (and other media) and a very efficient system of moving them around the country to anywhere people want to borrow them.
218.
by TFNA 4mo ago
Russia has extended a surveillance pantopticon over the North Caucasus with Chinese tech and disarmed its population. Local ethnic elites and their families have grown rich through relationships with Moscow and only stand to lose all those
219.
by TFNA 4mo ago
> Arabs didn't have widespread alphabet until they needed writing their sacred text Many tens of thousands of pre-Islamic inscriptions made by Arabs are known. Arabs had been writing for centuries before the Quran, and the current A
220.
by TFNA 4mo ago
When OP said we have more free speech than ever, and some here quibble with that, it's not necessarily about coercion under legislation. The early web saw a hell of a lot of racist or angry flamer posts on any site where any reader cou
221.
by TFNA 4mo ago
As already pointed out, your awareness is very geographically limited. In my country (and in a few others I’m familiar with), what I most need a smartphone for is as the obligatory second factor for strong authentication to all kinds of ser
222.
by TFNA 4mo ago
The bulk of the Mastering Emacs blog is a decade old at this point, but its philosophy and the information it provides is still very relevant for any graybeard wanting to get up to date.
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by TFNA 4mo ago
Emacs is more than a dev environment for coders. Some of us here use it for everything that can possibly be represented in text form: our TODO lists, our calendar, our RSS reader, our mail reader, etc. Me, I even maintain billing spreadshee
224.
by TFNA 4mo ago
The price of homes has drastically gone up even in some communities around the world where no housing is being built because there is no demand for it; the given region is experiencing severe depopulation as everyone leaves for the faraway
225.
by TFNA 4mo ago
> The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point. This definitely varies by field. For example, there are some branches of linguistics where the
226.
by TFNA 4mo ago
I don’t know about clothing, but I’ve seen this a lot in the bicycle industry and in the outdoor equipment industry.
227.
by TFNA 4mo ago
> And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline We have had threads on HN before about C&H where people identify a slight but noticeable change in the strip in the last years. Watterson was naturally gro
228.
by TFNA 4mo ago
I’ve seen a few brands here and there boasting of the quality of the “select Asian suppliers” they moved their manufacturing to. It’s a clever way to preempt criticism that the brand is now no different from any of the competing brands that
229.
by TFNA 4mo ago
A number of European countries have allowed this; the 2010s were the heyday of this path. But it turns out that a lot of the people with big money to buy residence, got their money from organized crime, and it isn’t always easy to vet appli
230.
by TFNA 4mo ago
The industry that has sway over the Andes is mining. Against that, tourism income is negligible and in fact more tourism could threaten the mining industry.
231.
by TFNA 4mo ago
It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompet
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by TFNA 4mo ago
The typical medium for the internet today, even among many people who would have been computer nerds in days of yore, is the smartphone, i.e. primarily a consumption device. I can't see people becoming so pissed out that they would ove
233.
by TFNA 4mo ago
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit Reddit is a cesspool and an example of how we're in a post-peak internet like the OP says. If you actually browse Reddit the way the vast majority of people do now (i.e. n
234.
by TFNA 4mo ago
> What’s wrong with e-books? This article is about academic libraries. Research in many fields requires keeping multiple books open in front of you at the same time, because new research typically starts by synthesizing disparate previou
235.
by TFNA 4mo ago
Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that person’s underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed stacks, or perhaps moved to the natio
236.
by TFNA 4mo ago
Interesting to see the talk of “F-pattern scrolling through electronic publications”, which was new to me. As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-r
237.
by TFNA 4mo ago
That’s an overly cynical view in the context I mentioned above. Lenin was advocating for more language rights and cultural self-development opportunities for the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire years before he had any glimmer of h
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by TFNA 4mo ago
People travel for different reasons, including to interact with local people. For the last decade-plus, I have spent about six months a year traveling the world in a way (bicycle, off popular routes) that involves a lot of conversations wit
239.
by TFNA 4mo ago
Depends at how you look at it. You can also see cultural diversity as sticking up for the little guy against corporate behemoths and as decentralized bottom-up organizing, i.e. things the left has often claimed to pursue. Peoples being enco
240.
by TFNA 4mo ago
> these days Bill Hicks, the standup comedian dead for over three decades already, had a now-classic bit about being challenged for reading by a waitress. Reading has always been uncool to some people.

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