It's amazing how much science just gets no funding to speak of. There are maybe half a dozen museums in the world whose palaeontology departments are not in a permanent budget crunch. There is no money to fund digs, to find new fossils. There is, critically, no money to prepare fossils out of the rocks. One very major natural history known to me had only a single preparator on staff: and the last I heard, that one preparator had been let go so that no fossil preparation at all was taking place, at least officially. And of course there is no money to fund actual research into the fossils that should be coming out of those rocks -- for example, dinosaurs, which you'd think would be a big win for any ambitious museum.
The part of this that baffles me is that there always seem to be untold billions to build particle accelerators. Spread the wealth, high-energy physicists!
I did wonder how much to soften this message, because yes, of course, there really ARE times when a breaking change is necessary. But I think those account for maybe 1% of the major releases we see these days. The rest are down to laziness, carelessness, or just not having thought about it at all.
This is an extremely uncharitable way to characterize how our understanding of a problem, our requirements, etc evolve over time and with feedback from users.
Making a good API is really hard. I think there's plenty of room for discussion about how we should break things, but "just do it right the first time" is not realistic.
And yet, it's what a lot of old-timey software engineers consistently did. Yes, we work in a more complex ecosystem than they did, but I can't shake my sense that 90% of the reason is that they held themselves to a higher standard. Heck, they still do in the Go community, where major versions are still a big deal.
Usually the best solution is not to ask for date of birth. I guess about one in ten of websites that ask me that actually have a legitimate reason for needing to know.
(In the present case, a UK Government website might well have a legitimate reason.)
If you're verifying (air quotes) something like whether someone is 21, I wonder if it would make better sense to ask the year of their birth, then ask the month and day only if they answered with the year where it mattered. You don't need to be that granular most of the time, so why put people through the hassle?
I tried to help my boss once to log onto Zoom for a meeting. The site asked for date of birth, and not wanting to give any PII I naturally entered some bullshit but plausible date.
Well Zoom locked him out for some time for trying to lie I guess and that meeting had to be moved to Teams.
This is interesting. What triggered them to think this was a lie? Had your boss previously entered a different birthdate, which they remembered and then compared to?
I have no idea what they may have gathered before but now that I think back, I did choose the date really quickly so it may be possible it thought I was a bot.
I’m not familiar with all the ways that is determined but I think it’s far-fetched but who knows.
I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many of the same people as the Deletion Police. A pox on all their houses.
What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother.
Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.
People say things like this, and I believe them. But can you provide some examples of edits you've made that didn't "survive the Reversion Police"? One very good thing about Wikipedia is that most of what happens on it is logged; Wikipedia Jurisprudence works for the most part the way people HN say real jurisprudence should work: with version control. Let's talk about specific examples! You should have a bunch, given what you just wrote.
Most of Wikipedia --- probably the most intellectually impressive project on the entire global Internet --- was built during the reign of the deletionists, just in case you're concerned about them "killing" the project.
Wikipedia is like, well, a lot of social knowledge tools where there's special roles (e.g., Stack Overflow, GitHub projects) - some people build prestige by contributing content, some people seek to build prestige by gatekeeping the contributions of others.
What tends to happen is that someone makes this complaint and either (a) provides no examples or (b) the examples show that reverting them was clearly a good idea. So I'm asking for three examples that make their case, because it might be even slightly convincing - because the bare statement tends to case (b).
Despite the complex chords, the bulk of the melody is that ultra-simple two-note semitone riff (IIRC Ian MacDonald’s book says it was inspired by hearing a police siren). When John Lennon said someday they’d write a one-note song I always figured this was what he meant -- that I Am The Walrus is a “two-note song”.
It's much easier to make clothes at home than shoes. I could probably cobble together an odd looking shirt given some time and instructions without needing to buy special tools, but leather shoes are an entirely different thing.
On a related note, this article reminded me of something one of my professors had to say about William Shakespeare.
There's a long tradition of conspiracy theorizing around Shakespeare, that he didn't actually write his own plays, that they were instead written by Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth or something ridiculous. These arguments usually start from his background: how could the son of a common glovemaker have gotten the sort of education necessary to write like this?
The thing is, glovemaker was a highly skilled profession. Exactly like you said, any dum dum could cut a hole in a sheet of fabric and call it a poncho, but handmade shoes and gloves take serious craftsmanship. This kind of profession would have put Shakespeare's family firmly in the upper-middle class.
This gets particularly amusing when the conspiracy theorists start saying that Shakespeare's plays must have been written by Marlowe.
They were born only a couple of months apart and had the same sort of background- the sons of skilled craftsmen working with leather (Marlowe's father was a shoemaker) who attended their local grammar school.
Both schools still exist- King's School Canterbury is a much more prestigious institution than King Edward VI School Stratford these days, but I'm not sure how much of a difference there is then.
The course of their lives diverged in their late teens- while Marlowe obtained a scholarship to study at Cambridge, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in some haste as she was pregnant with his daughter...
Why I missed that is not the meaning of the phrase "to cobble something together", but its root in "cobbler", which is - at least for me - something I rarely use.
Also Cockneys in old London would say cobblers if you were talking out of your hat. Also balls to refer to the pawnbrokers on account of their three ball shop signs.
Exactly. The article nods to this in a few places, but it's important to recognize that this is an accounting of "recognized" professions, something that left some kind of written account (most of the article is based on tax records it seems like). Which means at the end of the day this is mostly a list of what the men were doing.
Stuff done "at home" obviously involves work, but it wasn't a "profession" in a notional sense so it wasn't recorded. Certainly we should assume that there was trade within and between cities based on this kind of output too (i.e. "Is that one of Marie's sweaters?", "Here's a few coins, go to Sophie down the street and see if she has any more of that jam from last summer").
In tracing my family tree, I found a branch that went back to a small town in Scotland, and at least 3-4 generations back were shoemakers. When did my forefather leave the family trade? Circa 1850, when the Industrial Revolution apparently hit shoemaking hard.
He ended up keeper of a coffee shop in Glasgow, and his daughter was on a ship to Australia in 1891.
This statistic might also be a specialization for just this case/city. The author noted that Montpelier was known for shoes, which might mean people traveled there for shoes, or they were exported/bought by traveling merchants and sold elsewhere.
4% of the workforce being shoemakers seems enormous. One person working full time making shoes for every fifty-ish adults?
I don't know what the right comparison is today. According to [0], the fashion industry accounts for about 3% of world GDP. Perhaps shoes are a quarter of that?
I assume 1) people walked a lot more, 2) shoes took longer to make, and 3) didn't last as long which means more people necessary to handle demand. I could be completely off, though.
Point 3 is the key one - soles, especially. Rubber soles weren't a thing - they were made of leather (or sometimes textiles) and they wore out in a matter of a couple months or even a few weeks with heavy usage, especially give point 1.
Point 2 isn't really the case - your later period and fancier pointed-toe, lace-and-ribbon-bedecked shoes for the higher classes took probably some time, but a pair of common leather turn-shoes can be made in a couple hours.
Exactly, walking! Something few of us do these days even at short distances. I prefer shoes that can recobbled but I know from the dwindling numbers of cobblers that I'm a shrinking demographic.
That's an argument for needing fewer people, not more - since it happens in situations where it's less labour-intensive to repair shoes than to make them from scratch.
Not necessarily. If the materials are expensive, paying somebody to repair a shoe can be the cheaper option.
I think people still repaired socks after knitting them was automated for that reason.
The first automated knitting machine was from 1589. Queen Elizabeth I denied its inventor a patent “because of her concern for the employment security of the kingdom's many hand knitters whose livelihood might be threatened by such mechanization” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lee_(inventor))
Edit: maybe not. https://www.historylink.org/File/5721 learned me that gear for us soldiers in World War One was knitted manually. Maybe, those machines weren’t used (much) yet by then?
It does seem a bit strange, you're right. When you read into it though, this city seemed to have a higher cobbler population than most, as alluded to by the author.
> They were organized in different guilds, based on the street in which they kept their shops. In 1360, nine cobblers’ guilds were attested in documents, all situated within the city’s walls
I know almost nothing about medieval France, but perhaps peasants from smaller surrounding cities may have come to this one to learn or work, leading to this skew?
There's always an overlap of skills. Cobblers may have been tailoring on the side but wouldn't be counted as such. I've been to many dry cleaners that will do alterations or repairs on clothes but also will do some light shoe repair as well. They won't make you a shoe but can fix a broken heel just like I'm sure there are cobblers out there who are capable of clothing repairs.
When I was a kid there were vastly more shoe repair places than there are now. I guess if we plotted the graph backwards there would be way more several hundreds years ago.
As the article mentions, a lot of the "most popular jobs" is determined not by the popularity of the industries but by the fragmentation of jobs. If you have 20 people working on shoes and 40 people working on clothing, then if shoemakers are a single profession/guild but clothing has 10 people each working on a different stage of the product (which actually is the case, with the most labor-intensive tasks of medieval clothing production being in the multiple stages of making the actual cloth, not tailoring it) then shoemakers become a more common job.
I would expect that. Clothes last significantly longer than shoes (you can wear a cheap T-Shirt for way over 5 years, but even good midrange shoes start to fall apart after 2 years). It is also fairly easy to repair or even make clothes at home. But shoes?
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.)
The part of this that baffles me is that there always seem to be untold billions to build particle accelerators. Spread the wealth, high-energy physicists!