skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
after this election i'm even less interested in any newspaper subscriptions than i was before.

they're all biased liars, or at least run stories buy such authors.
It would be enough for a friend having bragged about how they hallucinated about certain things. Words can convey very complex imagery like that and these experiences are encoded everywhere (in scripture, folk wisdom, idioms, songs, jokes, tales); in a web of distributed representations of the noosphere that we share via language. It is pretty much impossible to escape it and it seems conceivable that it might strongly bias our experiences under influence of hallucinogens because the mind is basically always concerned with interpreting inputs by the most suitable explanation (which will likely stem from stories and memories). Of course, we are only talking about a certain extent to which these experiences are determined by shared concept spaces, because there is no indication this is the only sensible hypothesis. The similarity of these experiences by different people may as well be explained by our shared cognitive architecture (e.g. modules for recognition of agency or venomous bugs) as other comments in this thread have suggested.
Out of curiosity, what was the most beautiful thing you've seen designed/made in LaTeX?
"Even if contact would be limited to prevent any cultural leakage the knowledge of the existence of intelligent life will lead to collapse of at least 3 major religions and their cultural frameworks."

Religion isn't that vulnerable to rationality. Christianity has survived Copernicus, Martin Luther, evolution, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and 2000 years of Jesus Christ failing to show up as promised.
21 Photo Backstories Scarier Than Any Movie
I'm not saying their all the same. I'm saying Wikipedia is generally better (though of course far from perfect), without trying to make difficult-to-quantify claims about how much better.
Me nods. I clicked on it with a 100% expectation to see Computer Modern Roman (CMR) font, only to be surprised. Not that I was repulsed with what I saw. Still nice, but I'd have also posted a variant with CMR. :-)
Background Story: A couple of weeks ago, a post on Dennis Forbes' blog which appeared to be a final suicide note made its way here on HN. [0]

Naturally, it elicited a lot of concerned discussion here, and was flagged for obvious reasons.

News at the time was that the outcome was pretty bad, and everyone assumed the worst. Personally, I couldn't stop thinking about the situation.

However, I revisited his blog again just to see if there were any updates, and it seems that he made it through the darkest of times, and seems to be on the road to healing himself. Glad to hear it, and I am sure many here would be also, hence my desire to share it on this platform.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13488607
It's totally possible to have a programming job that doesn't consume your life, and leaves you time to have a life. E.g. dating. Or a hobby. Or whatever you feel like.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Make sure you have 6 months of expenses saved up. This will be much easier if you cut your expenses, since 6 months' worth will be lower and you'll be saving more. This will make sure you have a good negotiating position for next step.

2. Cut your hours to 40 hours a week. If you can't do that at your current job, time to look for a job where you can do that. There are in fact many companies where that is possible.

3. With the resulting time, figure out what you want to do with your life.

I'm working on a book, "The Programmer's Guide to a Sane Workweek", with a whole lot more details, tips and techniques. Meanwhile here's a free email course if you're interested: https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/
I doubt that discussion and insight can happen without generalising. I also doubt that we need to cover 100% or even 99.999% of Windows programmers to be able to speak about what "most Windows programmers do".

Anybody who has experience from 2-5 different Windows shops and been to a few relevant conferences can make a quite accurate assessment of what "most Windows programmers" do.
> Even without any intention of malice Columbus would not have ended well for the natives.

I think that's true, but it doesn't change anything I was saying.
Are there any sort of proposed or theoretical FTL weapons?
Using Windows 10 on an Android tablet via RDP
What about a custom ROM (fork) of Android, sans Google apps? Not an option for typical end-users, of course.
The Skype bot just reach out to me
Wondering if I should remove from my contacts, or wait and see what this is about. What I received:

(hi) Hello! Skype here. We'd like to send you tips and hints so you can do more with Skype every day. We'd also like to tell you about other Microsoft products and services that we think you might enjoy. If you'd rather not receive these Skype bot messages, you can stop them at any time.
I work on supply chain optimization at Target, and we write lots of internal documents in TeX. Admittedly the team has a relatively academic background—many PhDs in math, CS and OR—but it's still industry use :).

Some Word/PowerPoint creeps in as well, but I highly prefer the TeX documents. They look better, are easier to edit/reuse and slot neatly into Git. I really wish more people used it (or Markdown or whatever) instead of Office nonsense.
Ask HN: What are some poorly written but very successful open source software?
>is the application I write still POSIX-compliant?

Obviously not, since you can't go and compile it on another POSIX system -- you are "abstraction compliant" (or rather "abstraction dependent" now.
My two cents using pandoc, LuaLaTeX (or XeLaTeX) and few TeX hacks. http://jill-jenn.net/résumé.pdf
This seems... Wrong. Consider, kids process images and sounds long before they are capable of sentences.
> everyone from HN should be able to freely read an article shared here, or no one. If no one can read it, then the link shouldn't be allowed here.

Then we'll have the laments: oh the ads, the humanity; or, why does all journalism suck?
Show HN: Recipebook – scrape and parse food recipes on the web
The recommendation to use a 1024-bit RSA key worries me. In an era of passive, bulk surveillance, that seems too weak if you're not going to be using any additional transport-layer security.

The performance argument is only relevant for the establishment of the VPN connection and any periodic rekeying ­— it shouldn't have any impact on the tunnel's perf.

It's a shame openvpn's easy-rsa doesn't provide a straightforward mechanism to generate ECDSA certificates, which would've removed any performance concerns.

--

edit: easy-rsa does support ECDSA[1]:

Support for generating an ECDSA certificate chain is available in EasyRSA (in
spite of it's name) since EasyRSA 3.0. The parameters you're looking for are
'--use-algo=ec' and '--curve=<curve_name>'. See the EasyRSA documentation for
more details on generating ECDSA certificates.

https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/blob/master/README.ec
Weird. Of all the things I'm concerned about @ FB...spam texts is not one of them
Rather amazing how inept management was. The amiga was way ahead of its time (the software architecture and design choices) and thus it might never have succeeded, but the management actively did things to increase cost of production (the a600, the various tower versions of the 2000 and 3000) and harm its own sales.
I'm aware of the theory of the "big lie", and the fact that neurons that fire together, wire together...

But what about Feynman's injunction: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." Is that kind of empirical principle just out of reach for the standard human?

In terms of repetition, I think David Hume's theory of causal inference is pretty relevant too.

Just because something is repeated regularly, e.g. seems to happen every day doesn't mean that on the day when it doesn't happen, our heads explode because we have built a rigid expectation. Instead we can usually discern possible, exceptional, reasons why it isn't happening.

I'm totally in agreement with you on the role of repetition in eroding the landscape of memory to create convictions. We might rarely remember a one off event that is never referred to. But you seem to be claiming that there's no higher-level activity, or even possibility of higher-level activity involved in mentally evaluating what to believe.

The famous Star Trek scene where Picard is encouraged/"brainwashed" to lie about the number of lights he sees comes to mind. He resists and continues to report what his senses tell him. This cultural theme of reason resisting the repetition of lies is a big one, and you haven't really presented any convincing evidence to discredit it.
> Elihu Yale was a slave trader.

That's an understatement! He was a president of the East India Company and an absolutely brutal slavemaster:

> The records of this period mention a flourishing slave trade in [Chennai], a trade in which Yale participated. He enforced a law that at least ten slaves should be carried on every ship bound for Europe. In his capacity as judge he also on several occasions sentenced so-called "black criminals" to whipping and enslavement. When the demand began to increase rapidly, the English merchants even began to kidnap young children and deport them to distant parts of the world, very much against their will. At a time when profits from the slavetrade were dwindling and pressure from the Mughal government to stop the enslavement was mounting, the administration of Fort St George eventually stepped in and introduced laws to curb enslavement
That's still more work than it takes to serve a static web page. Plus, you have to be a programmer.
That's usually the goal, but then teams have to work together for future projects not foreseen.
I am interested to know how all those payload are mounted on PSLV's payload adapter. Cartosat 2 Series is the primary payload, and remaining 103 satellites are co-passengers.

Usually, PSLV mission brochures used to depict how payloads are mounted on its payload adapter. However, it isn't shown this time.

a) Cartosat 2 Series - primary payload.

b) 88xDove (88x3U CubeSats) - 22 QuadPack[1] deployers.

c) 8xLEMUR (8x3U CubeSats) - 2 QuadPack deployers.

d) BGUSat (3U CubeSat), PEASSS (3U CubeSat), DIDO-2 (3U CubeSat), Al-Farabi-1 (2U CubeSat), and Nayif-1 (1U CubeSat) - 1 QuadPack deployer.

e) INS-1A and INS-1B are not in CubeSat format. So, they need to be mounted separately on payload adapter.

So, we have a primary payload + 25 QuadPack deployers + 2 nano-sats. Hopefully we'll get some info during mission live broadcast on how these payloads are mounted on PSLV.

[1] http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=0...
yes, wsj is politicized.
There's services like http://moltin.com , snipcart, and Stripe now has Stripe.js which I believe can handle payments 100% client side as well.
This seems a bit pointless to me.

If your aim is to hide your traffic from third-party networks you might be on (free wifi, school, hotels, etc) then a yearly VPN subscription is almost certainly cheaper than the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet. If you get a good provider (I use PIA but am not affiliated with them) then you get unlimited traffic, multiple clients, endpoints all over the world, tech support, all without having to setup and administer the server yourself.

If your aim is to disassociate traffic with yourself, your DigitalOcean IP will be tied back to you anyway.

If your aim is to stop government snooping, DigitalOcean is hosted in the USA so you may as well just send the NSA your browsing history.
High radiation readings at Fukushima’s No. 2 reactor complicate robot probe
Because non-Latin American corporations that own, control and benefit from production there, can let their local thugs and lackeys run loose on them, in a way that they wouldn't be able back home.

Then, the western (non latin american) country that hosts those corporations can play the moral high ground, and accuse the latin american country for corruption and such.
Joomla - both code and UI were beyond horrible, but I still turn down random Joomla projects on a yearly basis.
Is it me or is everyone using the First Amendment to invent all sorts of new stuff these days. Can I throw a rock at my neighbor's window and claim the first amendment allowed me to do so because I don't like them?
You don't need an advanced text formatting system to design a business card. Any system that allows you to place short strings of text at any desired (x,y) position will do just fine. In fact, such a simple system might be better at not getting in your way.
I was at Oxford from 2004-2007. There were two black students in my year (of around 3-4k), one of whom was an Old Etonian and stood as a Conservative candidate at the last election. I can fully believe this.
The short answer is no. The long answer is your bill is based on your salary from the previous year e.g. Jan 2017 bill will be based on Jan 2016 income, which is not nice if you don't have a job anymore. The good part is extensions are easy to get. Other than that it is free for poor people.
After you've gotten a lawyer to look at your current agreement, you may find it's enforceable and actually prevents you from building a side project.

If that's the case, you do have the option of finding a new job. Some companies have more lenient IP agreements. And if you're a desirable enough candidate and it's a small company, you can negotiate a custom IP contract.

I've done that twice!

If you negotiate an IP contract and you get back "but our lawyer says the contract is cool", what you do is have your lawyer propose amendments. Often it's not so much the content of the changes that gets pushback, just the effort and cost of the process. So if you pay your lawyer to do the legal work it can make it a lot easier.

(I hired Rex Baker - http://www.rexbaker.com/ - he's great.)

More broadly, negotiation is a key career skill, whether or not you want to be starting your own business. E.g. you can also negotiate a shorter workweek so you have more time for your side business.

I go into this a bit more in an email course I wrote on getting to a sane workweek (https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/), a very abbreviated version of a book I'm working on.
What scientific domains researched this ? I've been thinking about it for a decade at the shower thought level, but I'm eager to know more about this.
There is a great deal of effort involved in backporting updates to frequently-updated packages. Debian, for instance, doesn't update WebKit (or at least didn't last time I checked, and had a policy for it). Consequently, things like Evolution (which uses WebKit internally) are a walking CVE museum on Debian stable. The situation is similar for a lot of other packages, on a lot of other distributions with long-term support (Debian actually has a large enough community of skilled enough developers that they're faring well in this regard).

I don't want to minimize or belittle the work that they're doing, I only mention Debian because it's been my go-to distro for a very long time. They're also alleviating the problem in the most common use cases (e.g. they do update Chromium if you need a webkit browser). Codebases like WebKit's are simply too large, too complex and too quickly-shifting for a community-driven project to be able to backport fixes.

Even where the codebase is small enough, backporting is a nasty business. I've seen it done commercially, so with proper funding and proper teams and whatnot, and the success rate is not something that I'd consider encouraging. I've shot myself in the foot while doing it, too.

There are certain types of setups that lend themselves well to long-term support models. Server systems, up to a certain degree of complexity, embedded systems with a restricted set of packages -- maybe. A modern Linux desktop is not one of these systems IMO. A Linux desktop with four year-old packages is very likely to be very buggy in very nasty ways.
Well, as a member of the post-WWII Stasi, I'd like to point out that English generally has no universally accepted authoritative form of the language to which you can persuasively appeal :)
Unlike what most LaTeX users may think, LaTeX is actually not even widely adopted in academia, with less than 20% of scholarly articles published every year written using LaTeX (https://www.authorea.com/107393-how-many-scholarly-articles-...). That said, it is the only powerful option to professional typeset mathematical notation. And for that reason, it is used by few in some non-academic research fields (military, gov, pharma, tech, HN readers).
Nicholas Brown Jr., for whom the university was named, was an abolitionist.
That's why I don't use sapphire reserve for stuff other than travel and restaurant.
Desperate and emotional is no way to run a business
And that is what they call spin. Didn't they fire the people who write it?
Prior posting, 45+ comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13591601
The fact that they're using a single master software is already an antiquated concept in 2017
Elihu Yale was a slave trader, might as well rename the whole damned school.

Or we could stop freaking out that historical figures didn't have 21st century values, but that proposition is clearly too radical.
That's why I always install CMR in MS Word.

Handy link (because it's actually quite hard to find): http://concentriclivers.appspot.com/LatinModernTTFHinted.7z
Şirinevler Escort Tanıtım Sitemiz Ve Şirinevler Ucuz Escortlar
If they were advocating for the removal of the programs then it was an implication I missed. I think the posters only concern was that the classes contribute to the common misinterpretation of what smart is.

Maybe it would be better to just advertise them for what they are (according to that poster) and call them the "conscientious track"? That way kids who want in have something obvious and actionable to work towards other than "well, if you're smart you'll get accepted and if you're not, welp, enjoy burger flipping!"
Exactly. Good TeX should simply yield to good typography. Nice ligations, etc.

I dont like Computer Modern too much. I am very fond of Gentium [1]. For math, I love Euler [2], which is used in Concrete Mathematics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentium

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler
On the contrary: Wikipedia users are just as much (if not more) subject to their own wishful thinking and dirty politics when writing internal policy pages as they are when writing regular articles. Especially that there is no requirement to cite sources for the former. The policies as written may fail to reflect how editing actually looks like; hell, they might even not be actual policies at all. A single person could slip a passage in a policy page that supports their own opinion without anyone else noticing, and later cite that passage as if it were authoritative. (Or imply authoritativeness by simply placing a mere 'essay' in the Wikipedia namespace.)

Nobody cares what should happen 'in principle' unless the principles are enforced — which they are often not. See for example how the enforcement of the verifiability policy looks like.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_lacking_sour...
I used it, but:

- it was poorly advertised (irony!); I only found out about it from a Google engineer that said, "This is probably the kind of thing you'd pay for"

- US only
fwiw the lounge access on the CSR card is nowhere as good as the amex, as you have to pay for anyone travelling with you. The CSR is comparable, but there are definitely trade offs.
English has a word for that too: grit.
I've had people say they'll find me on Facebook and message me and when I tell them I don't have a Facebook they've said well, bye and left with out any interest in giving any other kind of contact info. It's where you put people politely when you don't really want to interact with them ever again but can't quite say that yet.
> I don't think listing a bunch of models nor even listing your ranking is beyond the comprehension or ability of journalists, lawyers, or activists.

IME this greatly overestimates how hard this is for typical end users.

Imagine if you were asked to understand and implement a technical legal function. Maybe you could do it, but it would not be trivial, you'd have to figure out what the heck it meant and what was going on, and then try to implement it. You would need to hope you received good advice, because you have no way of discerning good from bad, and that the instructions were accurate, clear and complete.

At HN we are inside a bubble where these thing are trivial. As another analogy, appendectomies may be trivial for surgeons but incredibly difficult for me.
As far as I know, 3 minutes is the standard time slot for radio play, and a song that's longer than that will be more difficult for DJs to schedule and thus will get less air time. Thus, musicians try to fit their songs into that time slot to maximize royalty revenues.

This doesn't seem to come from any physical constraints of old media, since a 7-inch 45 RPM record (the standard "single") had a recording capacity of about 5 minutes per side.[1]

Billy Joel, in his song "The Entertainer" (1974), has the following lines: [2]

I am the entertainer
I come to do my show
You've heard my latest record
It's been on the radio
Ah, it took me years to write it
They were the best years of my life
It was a beautiful song
But it ran too long
If you're gonna have a hit
You gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05

Wikipedia says that this "references the shortening of Joel's song, 'Piano Man', from 5 minutes and 38 seconds to 3 minutes and 5 seconds to fit a radio slot".[3]

[1] http://history-of-rock.com/record_formats.htm

[2] http://www.metrolyrics.com/entertainer-lyrics-billy-joel.htm...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entertainer_(song)
Yes, their web & mobile client https://riot.im is very polished now. They are also rolling e2e crypto.
Actually in this case presuming is not understandable, there is no evidence or reasonable grounds to support his statement.
The people that intended to do evil merely waited until those who didn't intend to do so finished implementing the things they were implementing.

Then they used that sound infrastructure to do evil with, as they had intended to do all along.

Those people that took the slogan seriously were used.
ferraris are toys where each copy bears an unavoidable cost of production.

news articles have a single upfront cost, but subsequent copies carry near-zero production cost.
If you're able to sell something at the same rate with an increased price, you should've been doing that before you heard about the credit cards' cut.
RxSwift https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxSwift is gorgeous. Cycle.js and RxJS also. Chromium + LLVM also (minus the x-platform parts but those suck everywhere).
> Are there any sort of proposed or theoretical FTL weapons?

No.
This is good to know! Thank you!
Greenwald has been at the Intercept for quite some time now: https://theintercept.com/staff/glenn-greenwald/
Cruise ship - less than $100 a day if you do it right. Plenty of food and lots of good nooks to code from. I've met several developers who take a week off on a ship to really get work done without distractions.
I'm not sure why that's relevant to the parent comment.

It's also not particularly surprising if you consider the history of the Cherokee specifically (compared to other Native American tribes). The Cherokee tried to have diplomatic relations with the Union (the United States), and the US stabbed them in the back. Of course they'd want to break up the Union - it was the only shot they had at reclaiming their sovereignty.
There's no real difference: both require being able to send matter/energy FTL.
The author addresses this in the second paragraph.

> I picked LaTeX because I want to have a platform independent implementation and because why not? I really like making LaTeX documents, so this seemed like something other than creating long documents.