> The worst library is still better than the best corporate bookstore.
We are talking about book stores, meaning there is a desire to own the book being read. You don't get to own the books in a library. As someone who heavily annotates my books—except fiction—I will need to own a physical copy (or a digital edition). I haven't been to a book store in a while, but I recall the last two times being quite disappointing. Meanwhile, on Amazon, or other online providers, I can find what I need more often than not.
The trouble is although you get billed for the book, the library does not replace it. I've had things on hold get cancelled with a note about "no longer available".
I've bought a lot of books from the thrift store that had library stamps in them.
It's very possible they don't replace them, but many libraries also have legitimate sells to clear books from inventory to make room. Usually over like a week or three day weekend once or twice a year, the last day having bags of books for $5. All of them have stamps/card holders/stickers designating the library. So those don't necessarily mean they were borrowed and never returned.
Depends heavily on your topic: There are many situations where all bookstores, even Amazon, will come up short. Studying history, for instance, it's amazing how often the main branch of my local library has books even third party sellers in Amazon won't offer, or where they'll demand outrageous prices.
Still, for availability, the real winner is the not-necessarily-legal archives where you can find, say, OOP foreign books that I'd have to cross an ocean to find in a library.
I wish there was a way to manually enable more friction for flagging. When I use the site on mobile I find it very easy to accidentally flag when I am trying to hide a post, a setting to enable a confirmation window would be quite useful to help prevent this.
I liked Slashdot's old moderation system, where you had a drop-down, and you at least had to choose from a few preset "reasons" for your moderation action. It's not perfect, but it might at least cause a few people to pause and reflect on why they feel such a strong urge to get rid of that headline.
For HN, you could map the drop-down contents directly to submission guidelines:
Especially when some things feel like they should have a low threshold for flagging (if 2 people agree it's obvious commerical spam, or terrible-quality content, or a duplicate submission from the past 48 hours), while others feel like they should have a higher threshold (e.g. if 5 people agree it's off-topic for HN, or a threshold proportional to upvotes).
I've also sometimes wanted to flag something for moderator attention, without wanting to give it a "strike". Like the discussion is worth keeping, but point to a better source or something. Your categories somehow solves that.
Like others in the thread, the first time I looked at my list of flagged submissions, there were 20+ just random things on there that I had obviously just fat-fingered on mobile.
and what currency that would be! make some successful shit posts and it gives you the privilege of silencing a political opponent in a debate! great fun
For an example implementation, downvoting in stackexchange costs you 1 point and takes 2 from the person being downvoted iirc (an upvote gets you nothing and bestows 10 points). You can only downvote if you've got a few points on the site, many fewer than on HN (the threshold here is 500 iirc). Flagging is always possible but afaik never leads to automatically killing the thing you're flagging, so downvoting is the way to downrank and fade out posts of people you disagree with. If you think this isn't a good system, it might be worth looking at how it works there, what the problems and benefits are and make a suggestion of what would be better
I'm always accidentally hiding things while scrolling, which I only notice when I see something vanish with no obvious way to bring it back. Who knows how many other things I've done by accident that don't have obvious visual cues. Likewise, I'm always fat-fingering downvote when I mean to upvote, but at least nowadays there's an indicator of what you've done and a way to undo your vote (for a long time, there wasn't!).
Back then I decided to never upvote anything, because hitting the wrong arrow was so easy and that I figured no votes was a better contribution to the site than frequently wrong direction votes!
It's fairly rare now that I accidentally click anything other than a (thankfully easy to reverse) up or down arrow, but I still 100% agree that anything like "hide" should be easily reversible.
This and voting up/down are a pain on the mobile UI. It's too easy to downvote instead of upvote, or flag something without even noticing in this case. (I just found two perfectly normal posts I've flagged)
I think the main reason is the Web1.0 design of HN doesn't translate well to small screens.
I find it highly unlikely that someone politely asked for help having an issue resolved and it gave the receptionist PTSD and required armed security. I expect you're instead speaking about a situation where someone showed up and acted in a violent/threatening manner, which the post you are replying to did not endorse, which should not be used to justify keeping upstanding people from trying to get support.
No part of Mountain View is set up to handle the queue of customers of Google seeking restitution. Other major corporates have this problem too. You don't fix the problem with your gas account overcharging by going to the Exxon head office.
Google is a bit of a shit company when it comes to customer service, but suggesting you can front into their space to get it addressed is really not ok.
The problem is the lack of a real service you really can approach. Not, that they wind up needing rent-a-cop in the lobby.
If people casually recommend simply visiting the campus of Apple, Meta, Google to get customer disputes settled, then its a low bar prediction it's going to get bad.
Saying "bit of a shit" about company who practically destroyed 20 years of someone data,by blocking account against all facts customer and police provided it not "a bit". This is pure evil.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-reported-dad-police-p...
There is also aquinas.cc which has the Summa Theologica as well as a variety of other works by St. Thomas Aquinas, with the Latin text on the left and English on the right.
You imply that there is only one "form" of his face depicted in iconography, but this is not the case. There is wide variation in how he has been depicted going back to the 14th century. Here is a selection of images from the 14th and 15th centuries which are closer to the reconstruction than they are different:
The idea that St. Thomas Aquinas was "portly" or even obese is likely an exaggeration that occurred over time due to overemphasis of certain aspects of his appearance. Early accounts depict him as being both very tall and strong having a big head, often with a build closer to a wrestler or football player than that of an obese man. As far as I can tell, St. Thomas was certainly an imposing figure but people have decided to engage in exaggerations based on some accounts of his appearance to the detriment of others.
For example, one of the earliest works covering St. Thomas' life was written by William de Tocco in the early 14th century, St. Thomas is described as "showing himself a robust and virile man" during manual labor. Contrary to the extremely exaggerated accusations of extreme gluttony by people like Shibley, William de Tocco emphasizes that the physical stature of St. Thomas was in accord with moderate and virtuous conduct which would preclude severe gluttony, "[I]t seems that God had fashioned his body as the noblest of instruments, which St. Thomas always held subservient to acts of virtue and which he never permitted to contravene the judgement of reason."
The iconographic tradition is also not uniform, with large variation across the centuries. I'll link some early depictions of St. Thomas Aquinas from the 14th and 15th century that don't match the "morbidly obese" claims:
It might be added that Dominicans had the explicit calling to crown their preaching by leading virtuous lives marked by poverty. As an example of this, especially in the early days, Dominicans traveled a lot by foot as a form of austerity. This could certainly work with having a bit of a girth, but the full experience of 13th century Dominican life is hard to square with "morbid obesity" or being "physically grotesque". We also know that Aquinas was humble, spiritual and deeply motivated to join this new mendicant order specifically. He resisted all attempts of his noble family to steer him in other directions that would have been more prestigious in the eyes of the world. I also remember reading that Aquinas ate only once a day to devote himself more fully to his work (not sure where though).
> Early accounts depict him as being both very tall and strong having a big head
The article, on the other hand, makes a point that the skull is quite small… (which seems to be the principal argument for the rather slim reconstruction)
At this point, it's probably really more a case of iconography (which, for the most, features Aquinas as one of the most prominent portly men in history) than of actual history. But, I think, any concepts or notions guiding the reconstruction should have been provided, and I'm kind of missing these.
For example, one of the earliest works covering St. Thomas' life was written by William de Tocco in the early 14th century....The iconographic tradition is also not uniform, with large variation across the centuries.
Isn't that kinda the point, tho? de Tocco was writing, what, about 50 years after Aquinas passed, and while he certainly could have (probably had?) first hand sources of Aquinas life, my instinct is that even so these are the sorts of passages of time where objective fact becomes muddled with both nostalgia and agenda, if not outright politics & intrigue. And over extended time, like most notable historical figures, Aquinas is reframed to suit the narrative of the time. I mean, it's not like Livy saying "that thing that happened a couple of centuries ago? This is how it went down, no doubts.", but isn't the real answer "we don't know and probably never will" for most of these questions of minutia like 'how fat was he, really'?
N.B. - not intending to distract from your very informative post.
The SponsorBlock extension has a useful feature where users can contribute a highlight point, which then adds a "skip to highlight" button. Many long form videos will pad the beginning with excessive background information to pad the length, skipping to highlight has saved me many hours. Because the data is crowdsourced the highlight qualities vary, but I've found them to be generally useful.
The documentation now says "Users who opt-out from their account settings, to which an option will be added, are excluded" so it appears that there isn't an option yet but that they will add it later.
The title was correct but they appear to have changed the policy since the post was made, likely as a response to feedback.
Notice that in the archive from earlier today the "Who is excluded from this account email-based new device verification?" section did not have the new fifth bullet point about being able to opt-out:
Thought it was worth pointing this out since I've already seen people reply to old comments thinking people didn't read the article without realizing it was later changed.
We are talking about book stores, meaning there is a desire to own the book being read. You don't get to own the books in a library. As someone who heavily annotates my books—except fiction—I will need to own a physical copy (or a digital edition). I haven't been to a book store in a while, but I recall the last two times being quite disappointing. Meanwhile, on Amazon, or other online providers, I can find what I need more often than not.
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