It’s interesting that property ads, and classifieds more broadly, benefit from a centralized platform but journalism itself does not. It’s an uneven impact of the technology shift from printing presses to digital. Why didn’t the drop in publishing costs make local journalism MORE accessible?
Perhaps it did in minor ways. Facebook Groups, NextDoor, CraigsList, etc make it easy for anyone to share information with their neighbors. Turns out most people just want to sell something or complain about nothing. These activities benefit the author but nobody else.
Local journalism has benefitted a little bit from this dynamic. Regional news organizations put together decent digital platforms and run articles. But they don’t seem to pay as well… again because the revenue spread out.
Honestly, I’d love to treat local journalism as a public good. Could you fund a credible local newspaper through taxes? It’d be WAY cheaper than a school or police station.
The problem is: how can you trust part of the government to keep an eye on the rest of the government?
Perhaps you could impose a mandatory journalism fee based on the municipal budget. Whatever you spend, a sliver goes to the journalists for oversight.
Local governments spend about $2700 per person. Population of 10,000 means a budget of $27M. Give 1% of that to a journalist and you have $270k… enough for a salary, website and some equipment.
You could require that money be paid to a non-profit as a grant. Probably better to elect an Editor in Chief though… that way you can appeal directly to the citizens for validation of the oversight. If you just pay a non-profit, they’ll be incentivized to serve whoever writes the grant… which would be the people you’re trying to hold accountable.
What you're describing is a lot like NPR. Which was great, until the people in power decided to pull that funding.
The problem with the government is it doesn't like oversight. So in this situation, you need to devise a scheme where the government is forced to pay something, but also has no control over that money. Which is a hard problem.
I don't know that I would describe NPR as "great". One specific example that sticks in my mind was a story they did about firearms. The host kept using the word "automatic". Knowing something about firearms, it was apparent to me that it was being used as shorthand for "not a revolver", but the host was implying that it meant "machine gun". Revolvers are so uncommon that there's really not any useful value being passed in attaching the word "automatic" when describing a gun unless you're describing something that is subject to the NFA.
Or, more recently, there was a deep dive into the Chicago parking meter deal. I don't think anyone needs convincing that it was a bad deal, but one thing that they said was that the new owners have "already received back all the money they paid out". Okay, but please expand. This was for an economics show, so is the recovery just a gross dollar comparison (e.g. they've received back more than $1.1B), is it inflation adjusted, does it exceed the time value of the money that was given to the Daley administration? It wouldn't have taken but another 30 seconds to make it clear, but by not saying I'm 99% certain they were focusing on gross dollar comparison and ignoring the value of 2008 dollars vs. 2025 dollars. In turn, that sounds like it's playing towards the audience members that don't understand why the total of payments for their mortgage is so much more than the purchase price of the house.
Is mermaid rendering implemented in Rust, or are you running mermaid.js in a JS interpreter somewhere?
On other systems I’ve run into challenges rendering markdown documents with many mermaid diagrams in them. It would be nice to have a more robust way to do this.
100% pure Rust! No JS interpreter. Parses Mermaid syntax directly and renders via egui drawing primitives. Supports 11 diagram types: flowchart, sequence, state, class, ER, pie, mindmap, timeline, user journey, git graph, gantt. Much faster than spawning headless Chrome!
I've been enjoying Typst. I worry that much of it is too complex for many end users. I'm musing about having end users draft stuff in markdown, then render that markdown with Typst templates.
My bar for super-rough is Servo, which doesn't have password autofill… and doesn't render the Orion page right.
Orion is less rough, but the color scheme doesn't work, and it doesn't have an omnibar (as in: type in the address bar, enter, and it shows search results).
My understanding is that modern mobile phone cameras do heaps of "stacking" across multiple axes focus, exposure, time etc to compose a photo that saves onto your phone. I believe its one of the reasons for the multiple cameras on most flagship phones, and then each of them might take many "photos" or runs of data from their sensors per "photo" you take. id love to see a good writeup of the process, but my gut says exactly what they do under the hood would be pretty "trade secret"ie.
Had a quick play with my iPhone 15. It doesn't give the sort of magnification you would need for insect close-ups. I will stick with my Nikon DSLR + 100mm macro lens!
Yeah it's far from being as good as a DLSR or mirrorless with a dedicated macro lens. Still, most people reading HN have one in their pocket and it can be a good test to see if you like the idea of macro. It does work with larger insects, on a pixel 10 pro my mantis fill most of the frame.
You can, depending on your definition of "useful". You can buy a cheap laser pointer, take out its lens, and put it over your camera lens. Tape it onto the lens for a temporary janky version or make a 3d-printed mount for something much better that you can easily take on/off.
I've personally found this little hack useful, but then again I don't have a DSLR and macro lens!
Design is slick. I like the sloganeering ticker tape. Wish it had dark mode.
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