This is the second time in recent memory that I've seen a headline on HN that reminded me of one of my favorite musical artists... glad to see that one of the other 7 people that knows Imaginos by heart saw this too :-P
The article ends with the statement "The author declares no competing interests". I think this is very poor phrasing, as it's ambiguous: does it mean "The author has not declared any competing interests", or "The author has positively declared that there are no competing interests"?
(To be clear, I am not for a moment suggesting any hidden interests on the part of the author, and I think his point is both correct and important. It's only the wording that I dislike.)
I would trade all these things, in a heartbeat, for the ability to keep other tabs/windows working when one tab is in a hard loop. That one facility is the thing that means I can't let go of Chrome, even though Firefox is prefereable in so many other way.
That was exactly my issue with Firefox. They mostly fixed it in 2016 [1], though I still found a few issues. These days, it seems mostly to be a thing of the past.
> When peaceful Occupie Wall Street protestors were brutalized at scale, I think the whole world noticed, and this kind of peaceful mass protest is probably what the world elites fear the most.
Yes, it was great how that incident ushered in a new age of shared economic prosperity and political rationality.
Mike, sarcasm aside, I really think that it helped. Have we seen as progress as we want? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t try. Agree?
You simplify the problem. You're in power, they're in money. You dont want power that you already have, what you want is to win, and you'll do whatever it takes, even pretending you want to build a new world where "everyone" is equal, especially you.
Im not targeting you, mind you, but this idea that there are mysterious others in situation of power robbing us of our due.
There are no rule to life, nor any meaning. You go where you want and do what you want. Dont kid yourself into believing your ideal is shared in absolute by most people.
I just say that because you sound a bit like an idealist drinking his own koolaid :p
Let’s also not kid ourselves that belief in the status quo is shared across a majority of people.
70% of people in the US support Medicare For All across all political lines [1], but leadership across both parties essentially ignored the proposal as some kind of radical pipe dream. Why is that? It’s simple, M4A costs money and would decimate the health insurance industry. Donors to both parties don’t want to pay more in taxes or see their investments drop, so it’s off the table. If we had something resembling democracy, we would have single payer healthcare by now.
What we have now is a minority of powerful (moneyed) people who are making decisions for everyone based on their own incentives. What people like myself want is a more democratic distribution of this power.
So it’s not necessarily that activists want to force some communist utopia on everyone, but we want to change the system so that we (the people) can actually decide for ourselves what we want.
My understanding is that this is significantly more controversial if it involves removing private or employer-provided healthcare. A "public option" is something the current president, Biden, supported. And he's the president, so obviously not a pipe dream.
I think the question behind the sarcasm is really "Did Occupy Wall Street actually do anything?" Sure, it made the news, but was there any actual lasting progress from it at all? Admittedly I didn't follow it closely so I don't feel qualified to answer that.
For my part, I don't believe protests (in the US) accomplish anything. They could if it was possible to apply pressure on our politicians, but the question there is is politics the actual determining factor for whether a politician gets elects? Some would argue it's really money (my personal argument is it's name recognition achieved primarily through clever media usage, as seen with FDR on radio, Kennedy on TV, Obama on social media, and Trump on outrage media, but money's always a key component of that). If that's the case, then politics doesn't actually matter, it's all about amassing enough money to get your preferred politician into office.
I don't think GraphQL is used to query graph databases directly, is it? I've always understood it to be an API protocol that was built to serve some specific needs Facebook had (e.g. bundling multiple HTTP requests), not a full-on graph query language. I should probably mention that I don't really have extensive experience using it, though.
GraphQL is basically used as SQL queries over stupid API:s. 99% of the graph DB advocates does not even understand what problem the graph DB solves. Soooo funny to argue with people when you can say that, oh, yes, we did this 20 years ago with recursive CTE:s.
Any graph, when you traverse it from a specific node, with fixed depth, and you don't explicitly work with node references, but rather node "values", looks like a tree that sprawls from that node.
Anyway, PathQuery is a completely different beast regardless.
SQL is neither a graph or hypergraph query language, because relations don't define the graph (or hypergraph). The query does. Deriving a graph and querying a graph are two different things.
A graph query language implies you're querying a graph with specific edges, not ones constructed on the fly from the query.
GraphQL's goal isn't to be "advanced" either. Its goal is to allow access to any data structure (be it backed by graph, RDBMS, file system, NoSQL, etc. etc.) without burdening said structure with capabilities that are not characteristic to it.
Like, if you query a graph, the idea the query may provide any arbitrary join expression would completely drive that graph's performance into the ground.
I can get behind the idea that SQL is a bit too powerful to allow it to talk to other databases easily.
And not automatically joining by foreign key is a mistake that's going to haunt us for a while I bet.
However when we're arguing capability then it's just as capable of querying a graph as graphDB is. More if the version of SQL supports recursive joins.
The thing I can't seem to get across to you, is that you don't query a graph by specifying a join expression. Graph databases aren't built for that. So no, SQL is not "capable of querying a graph". It's capable of deriving a graph out of relational data. Two completely different things. It's a bit like confusing a restaurant's chef with the restaurant's customer. They both have a meal in common, but one is consuming what the other is producing.
And no, arbitrary join expressions are not a feature that "haunts" SQL databases, because unlike graph databases, relational databases ARE built for that, and it's one of the primary reasons SQL databases are very resilient to change in face of constantly changing ad-hoc query requirements. And it's an important feature of relational algebra that is used every day by countless applications.
SQL and GraphQL serve different purposes at different application layers. Both do precisely what they have to do. The fact they're a bit similar is not coincidental, but also they're not mutually replaceable.
GraphQL isn't really a comparable language, and PathQuery predates it by at least 3 years. While the paper is recent, GraphQL quite probably made zero to low impact on its topic.
> In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent
... writes a man who was evidently not paying attention to the US presidential election of 2016 or the UK Conservative Party leadership election of 2019.
I have to say this kind of announcement sticks in the craw. I get that Mikael Cho and colleagues created Unsplash and it's theirs to do with as they please: they don't owe us anything. But really, couldn't they just come right out and say "They offered us too much money, we couldn't resist, So long, suckers"?
I remember the day Crew.co (another Mikael Cho venture) was sold to Dribbble. I was a member of, and I've felt cheated. I was sold and paid nothing. I've contributed to the value of Crew.co and I was ousted from a day to another.
The official reason selling Crew was to focus on Unsplash. Another venture where network effects (free work done by contributors) can generate later a fortune for few.
So ... we've been tricked. Our collective efforts was monetized by a few. That's network economy.
if you sell your company to a Getty or Facebook or Zoom, for example, you really were just selling your customers and eliminating yourself as competition, for probably a nice payoff. if you had a bad VC deal, then you the founders/builders might even get nothing.
Has anyone made a complete archive of Unsplash, so that at least when Getty shut it down ("in order to serve customers metter by focusing on our core business") the images that have already been uploaded there will remain available?
Excellent idea. I'd be curious to see what the current compressed database size is... Their (wonderful and brief) license does prohibits "the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service", so this would have to be a personal archive.
Also, it might be hard to find a scraper, since Unsplash likes (or at least liked) sending "friendly" requests to authors of scrapers on GitHub to remove their repos.
I understand why people find Stallman irritating, but my word, he does tend to be right with terrifying frequency. (Come to think of it, that's probably part of _why_ people find him irritating.)
The classic answer is that commenters on a blog become a community, and that much of the value of a blog-post is in the discussion. No doubt that if often not true; but on both of my own main blogs it absolutely is. I'll point you at one of them: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week is a palaeontology blog with a knowledgeable and thoughtful readership that often thinks of things that I and my co-author did not. See for example https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-an-...
