> As always, I asked the EC2 team for access to an instance in order to put it through its paces. The instances are available in Dedicated Host form, so I started by allocating a host.
Dedicated Hosts (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/) are more pricey than virtual instances (most EC2) and Dedicated Instances. Not sure if it's possible to containerize/sell as many virtual instances off a dedicated server without paying a separate high license fee to Apple.
Apple’s licensing terms for macOS permit only the licensing of one unit of Apple macOS running on one unit of Apple hardware to one customer for a minimum term of one day. There is no option to purchase a virtual-machine or other shared-instance license when macOS is involved.
(Nitpicky points: I believe the customer can do whatever they want with their licensed cloud Mac hardware, such as dual-boot different releases of macOS or virtualize to their heart’s content, as long as they are the exclusive user of the Apple hardware underlying any instances of macOS. “One customer per Mac per day, no more and no less” is probably a better summary in hindsight.)
Also maybe worth mentioning the PyPI team has 1-to-1 UX feedback/study for `pip` https://www.ei8fdb.org/thoughts/2020/03/pip-ux-study-recruit.... I'd be more interested opting in for open web survey (question and answer field) though. Nevertheless, great to see they're open to user feedback in forms other than Git issues.
This initiative is launched quicker than I expected, considering the pressure on federal budget due to the pandemic. It's part of National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law in December, 2018. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227
$75M is rounding error compared to anything being discussed in the vicinity of the pandemic; I wouldn't really expect it to enter into the conversation.
Mostly things against Russia. Only one thing that was particularly interesting that, unlike US, EU never did an investigation on possible influence of Russia in their 2016 referendum/Brexit even though they were aware of it.
> We have not been provided with any post-referendum assessment of Russian
attempts at interference, *.53 This situation is in stark contrast to the US handling of
allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, where an intelligence
community assessment54 was produced within two months of the vote, with an unclassified
summary being made public. Whilst the issues at stake in the EU referendum campaign are
less clear-cut, it is nonetheless the Committee’s view that the UK Intelligence Community
should produce an analogous assessment of potential Russian interference in the EU
referendum and that an unclassified summary of it be published
> A hypothesis suggests that, female birds may habituate to the common songs over time, and that drives the male bird to adopt novel songs to maintain female's interest.
> Other free ebooks don’t put much effort into professional-quality typography: they use "straight" quotes instead of “curly” quotes, they ignore details like em- and en-dashes, and they look more like early-90’s web pages instead of actual books.
True. I hope you guys get proper funding and keep this project on.
Mailing lists are superior for async communications IMHO for endeavors such as this. Nothing needs to be addressed immediately (and as everyone is a volunteer, realistic expectations should be set for response latency; email helps that, Slack/Discord does not), and the mailing list archive is a natural log of conversations and decisions that are open and accessible (Free Slack only keeps 10k lines of conversation history if I recall). A mailing list is also free (can be, not always, but can be), and does not require a chat client installed.
Mailing lists was superior in 90's-00's, now when discourse/slack/discord/etc exists there's no reason to use ML except nostalgia. Parsing tons of new emails isn't easy.
Also I'm prefer to avoid Google services 'cause privacy issues.
I soured on discord/slack/etc when their absurdly bad performance caused my laptop to get so hot it probably neutered me.
Seriously though, those services are fine on a powerful tower PC plugged into the wall, but if you're on the move on battery power, they are unbearable.
I like the combo of regular forum (Xenforo, Discourse, etc) and chat (Discord, Slack, etc). Unlike mailing lists, modern forums are actually usable, fun to use, and appealing. And chat provides a place for more conversational community-building.
For example, the Elm community has both. The Discourse forum is technical and business-only yet there's a clean record of these discussions. The Slack chat is where I hang out, get to know people, and participate in more relaxed chit chat about Elm, webdev, and building applications.
Elm used to just have a mailing list but it was obsoleted and shut down with the creation of the Slack group and Discourse forum which were far more popular.
They have all sorts of modern features more conducive to discussion and community-building like notifications that someone @mention/replied to you and even editing your post -- features that people generally like. If you don't think that's "fun", fair enough, but I also enumerated other benefits like their broader appeal.
Any community that only has a mailing list could benefit from experimenting with a proper forum. I've seen this experiment broaden a community time and time again as you move away from only selecting for the type of person who likes mailing lists. And notice that HN isn't a mailing list either.
For example, I would imagine that the sort of people interested in high-quality ebooks extend beyond mailing list loving super-techies. Even a subreddit would be a nice option.
Counterpoint: Old mailing list conversations are difficult to parse and encourage a "ignore it until the issue goes away" mentality if no one is enforcing a reply rate.
Mailing lists only really work for corporations imo
We're talking open source/free/non-profits here. No reply rate should be enforced unless by project owners (their time, their project, their rules). Some issues should be ignored until they go away. I myself ignore issues from some folks who engage me in my role as an open source tooling maintainer, after I have exhausted my patience working with them and they are not receptive to polite discussion.
> Mailing lists only really work for corporations imo
Fascinating subject. It seems like the difference between slack/discord and email, is the difference between a water cooler conversation and an actual sit down meeting.
That's a good point. I find Zulip better than Slack/Discord for discourse (even better than mailing lists, with some caveats, and it's Apache-licensed:
I knew about Zulip but wasn’t aware of the free hosted plan. I can truly see it now as an alternative for orgs who can’t afford running these things themselves.
It doesn't directly, only as a meme, or archetype. The same way that beer is not directly related to the concept of gratis, but you still use it in the illustrative phrase "free as in beer".
I was hoping I could contribute financially, which could help fund any software or hosting costs they have, but it doesn't look like they're accepting donations (which is also fine, and completely their prerogative).
But! If someone from SE is reading this and it turns out that you just don't have a way to donate because it doesn't seem like people will donate, definitely put a paypal button or something out there. :)
We have minimal hosting costs (ebooks are small) and no software costs, so the rest is just down to time. Luckily, the majority of the process is proof reading, which it turns out people quite enjoy doing regardless, and is easily parallelisable our across multiple contributors.
So so far not need for contributions, and it makes things simpler to not need them.
If your hosting costs ever mount, I can recommend Hetzner for hosting, they'll give you a whole bunch of bandwidth for free on their smallest plan ($3/mo) and you can even buy a 3 Tb pipe (IIRC) you can saturate for $20ish a month.
Otherwise, I'm sure some organization will be happy to provide some bandwidth in exchange for a shoutout.
So, not about curly vs straight quotes, but about whether to use en-dash, em-dash, minus, or hyphens on Wikipedia. For example, what mark do you put in "Mexican-American War"?
