skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading the study about musicians, it compares the gray matter in musicians and no musicians. In particular:

> The cluster of cerebellar gray matter differences in our study is located in [...] This region may correspond to the area of the cerebellar finger-hand representation as shown in some functional imaging studies [...]

In the paper there is relation with IQ or any other metric of intelligence or language ability.

And the study about coding says:

> Here, we used fMRI to investigate two candidate brain systems: the multiple demand (MD) system, typically recruited during math, logic, problem solving, and executive tasks, and the language system, typically recruited during linguistic processing. [...] We found that the MD system exhibited strong bilateral responses to code in both experiments, whereas the language system responded strongly to sentence problems, but weakly or not at all to code problems. [...]

Also, in the paper there is relation with IQ or any other metric of intelligence or language ability.

So, none of the research study support the claims of the press article.
The biggest feature for me was zstd compression
It's always fun to read about things that have come to be believed about famous authors, without a basis in fact, whether through hoaxes or by more innocent means.

The following line from the linked blog post stood out to me: "As a Tolkienist I would love [for] many cities A, buildings B or persons C to have some sort of link to my favourite author…"

That reminded me of the hoax surrounding a purported 1862 meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, which came to light in the early 2010s.[0] The story gained legs because of how badly many Dickensians wanted to believe it. It was a less sentimental Dostoevskian who took it upon himself to unravel the whole thing.

There has been some discussion on HN of the Dickens-Dostoevsky affair.[1]

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/07/true-sto...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21150906
How did this waste of time article even get popular on HN? I just want to assume that it's got popular so that it can be ditched.
It is enormously disappointing to have to wait yet another cycle for officially supported updates on aarch64. For a relatively well funded project, FreeBSD should be able to meet this kind of goal and they should be asking what went wrong here and how they can improve.
The author misses the point. The root of the problem is that electricity is not carbon free. What the electricity is used for is irrelevant. What the author suggests would be similar to saying, "let's stop climate change by minimizing our driving instead of transitioning to electric transport."
> the work put into the network is exactly the scarce asset that is being invested in.

No! No it isn't! Gah! I'm sorry but it is so frustrating to hear this nonsense repeated over and over. Bitcoin is not valuable just because you wasted shedloads of energy to make a bitcoin! It's valuable because somebody else will exchange something of value for it.

It's incredibly maddening how so many crypto-libertarians suddenly turn into believers in some Marxist "labor theory of value"[0] when you press them on bitcoin's incredibly wasteful Red Queen's race[1] of ever-escalating wasted energy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
No joke, I want to apeal to the Greta Thunberg type activists/followers and Extinction Rebellion crowds; so, if Franck Leroy wants to have a chat (your misguided attack is absurd and BTC just hit another ATH in the time you wrote that) I extend a friendly open-invitation to discuss how as an environmentalist myself with a background in sustainable Ag, farmers rights, farm to table, and anti nuclear activism we can get to the bottom of this.

You have a clear misunderstanding of this matter and I see it as an opportunity to get other activists involved.

> This is so stingingly dumb it reads like satire

Perhaps, but its also an opportunity to settle this matter once and for all and get the aforementioned crowds into BTC.

In typical HN logic: downvoting doesn't disprove his absurd thesis, only coherent discourse does, but go ahead and downvote it because you don't want to hear your views challenged.
Indeed. For VPN, use Wireguard. It’s open source, easy to configure, and works excellently.

https://www.wireguard.com/
There’s a phenomenon for that called Baader-Meinhof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
Don’t destroy Bitcoin. Invent a more efficient alternative for people to switch to.
Hacking the Git Shell Prompt
Nice catch!
There's probably an interesting story behind the evolution of input too ...
For housing this might be good, diy a window. Or even prototype labs, glass making looks pretty hard without a factory. But for mass produced consumer items like food and drink jars ect I think this is a bad idea as it will just add to urban waste and recycling problems.
I haven't read this book but I thoroughly recommend all programmers to study operating systems and write your own toy OS. It really gives you a deeper understanding of what it means to program a computer and operating systems require use of all the classical data structures. I like the book Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach because it walks you through the design and implementation of a real operating system that is small enough to understand in its entirety. But whatever path you take, studying operating systems will make you a better programmer and really set you apart from the majority of your peers. Plus it's fun!
One of the nicest "hidden" RFCs is RFC2468.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468

("2 4 6 8, who do we appreciate")
No, even if the electricity were carbon-free there would still be an opportunity cost in wasting ever-increasing amounts of it doing bitcoin mining instead of, say, aluminium smelting, or powering electric trains, or any other useful thing.

Also just for the record, minimizing driving is a good way to combat climate change.
*Wesh fong imbobo.

To bi imbobo bik fut *wesh fong imbobo belang wit bap deting finyish sera fo welte.

Desh kaxa mali fo mesach xiya.

> vedi ere kaxa

Da kaxa im finyish sera.

> openg kaxa

To openg da kaxa unte vedi wa mesach mali.
LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs
I don't know where you're from, but referencing a prayer in response to hearing that someone was infected with a dangerous disease isn't "far over the line of good taste." To those who are religious, it's core to their identity, and their prayer doesn't affect you at all unless you're religious, then it would be seen as very supportive.
One common use is to secure vnc, which has no crypto built into it.

On the remote host, have the vnc server listen only on localhost:5901

This assumes everyone who can ssh to the server should be allowed access.

On your workstation, form an ssh tunnel to that remote host and its port, and link it your own localhost:5901

Open your vnc client GUI and set it to open 127.0.0.1:5901, voila, vnc session.

More fun things: say for example you have a big remote xen dom0 with a lot of unique qemu HVM VMs running on it. Configure each of their .cfg files for xen to spawn a vnc server on localhost only and a unique port number per domU (5902,5903,5904,etc). Then use the same method to connect.
The strategic goal of having domestic food production and growing specific foods don't necessarily go hand in hand. While it makes a lot of sense to counter a famine with potatoes, in normal times you want to mostly produce what your population consumes. The corn subisides are much higher, because the corn production is much higher. The US produced 330 million tonnes of corn in 2009 [1] and just 55 million tons of wheat in 2012 [2] (that's the numbers I could easily find, and unfortunately they seem to use slightly different types of tons which differ by ~10%, metric system anyone?). Taking this into consideration, wheat subsidies are actually a bit higher per ton produced than corn subsidies.

The US consumes a lot of corn, either directly through corn sirup, or indirectly through meat. So it does make sense to have a significant amount of domestic production of what your population actually consumes. That corn might not be healthy is another important topic on it's own.

So subsidizing local farmers isn't the same thing as optimizing for a worst case scenario. In case of a large-scale multi-year war that triggers a famine, you could still order your farmers to switch to growing potatoes, when you have enough actively harvested farmland to begin with. That means subsidizing what is actually consumed during times of peace.

But I'm not saying that's the only reason for the subsidies. Lobbying definitely plays a big (the biggest) role and the largest industries have the strongest lobbying power. But when you have the strategic argument in hand, lobbying for subsidies becomes a lot easier, especially in a country that spends more on the military than any other.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_production_in_the_United...
Deliberately making bitcoin worse would incentivize users to switch to alternatives like Libra or Ethereum (which claims to be moving to proof-of-stake).
You sound afraid to express your opinions. That, in itself, is a sign of the problem. Some people are not so freely willing to allow this, and that is how revolutions and civil wars begin.

The rational people rationalize it is not worth risking their livelihoods and reputations to condemn restriction of their ability to express themselves. The irrational people then rise up in this case and dominate society as their voices become dominant.

How to reverse this process (without using authoritarian claims of dis/mis/noninformation) to promote proper discourse before a powder keg erupts even bigger than what we have seen this past year and does it for us?
The energy in mining is not being wasted, it's being converted into something of perceived value.

The real waste of energy, one could argue is pornography, which hogs around 30% of the internet, with little value output.

Imagine replacing those servers for something more productive for humanity as a whole.
I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized system running.

I see this call to destroy it as akin to the 1969 Apollo mission protests, when civil rights leaders argued that the space mission resources would be better used on Earth.

https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-launch-p...
The scarcity has nothing to do with the complexity in proof of work. The complexity made it costly to attack it. The scarcity comes with the idea of the number of bitcoins will be available is a hard limit.
Or that the sisters help?
Math epubs can be done properly using mathjax; equations can be written in typical TeX notation and rendered into MathML or SVG or various other targets.

Also, modern unicode fonts have good coverage of math symbols, so a lot of abstract math can be written inline without even resorting to mathjax. Algebra, set theory, and things like that.

I think the delay there is the many older ebook readers and apps that have quirks that require workarounds to get mathjax to work. Why bother, when publishers could just render equations to images or SVG and hardcode them? Mathjax just takes that rendering step out of the publishing pipeline.

Text flow... are you talking about inter-word spacing and rivers? My take on that is: full text justification was always a bad idea, only promoted for aesthetic reasons and to show off fancy layout engines that reduced rivers and other bad artifacts. It seems some publishers are doing away with it in new books. Poetry and plays rarely used it.
If most candidates cannot solve it in 25 minutes (while being a simple task), then it is a valid test

[(c, sum(1 for _ in same)) for c, same in itertools.groupby(s)]
Idea: Change BTC protocol to include a new field in coinbase transactions documenting the CO2 emissions of each block. Introduce an uncle block reward like ETH. Miners agree to audits of their reports. Make block reward dependent on carbon emissions. Use rest for offset programs.
I think the point was that POW specifically is an inefficient method of verification. They weren't arguing against the notion of using energy to run a virtual currency, just that Bitcoin specifically is needlessly wasteful, so we should move to alternative cryptocurrencies. So actually I think they are arguing for 'switching to electric transport', to use your example.
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have a new trick now
I think it’s getting used to it, for example I would never confuse a-b with a - b, but that’s because I’m used to using hyphenated identifiers.

I can see others (beginners) getting confused, but it’s something they will very quickly get over. For example I didn’t know JavaScript was case sensitive, but it was a very quick adjustment when I learnt this
Grab the Best VPN Deal of Year
Your reasoning is purely tautological and contains no actual explanation. Wondering why cannot see that yourself.
> GP?

Google Play?
“He didn’t know what to think” is translated to Portuguese “Ele não sabia o que fazer” which is incorrect. Fazer is “to do” not “to think”
In the UK, high rises are cheap social housing, and rarely have any of these features.

(it's possible a few nice ones were built here at there, but those are the exception - people here value houses and gardens, and nobody builds high rises with large floorspace.)

C.f. the fallout from the Grenfell Tower fire. Most of our tower blocks are like that, and all the flats are currently impossible to sell because they all have the wrong, dangerously flammable cladding on.
Sometimes repositories have duplicated packages, I'd be surprised if packages in earlier named repos didn't have precedence over later named repos. Meaning Microsoft couldn't just replace bash.
There’s a perfectly plausible charitable interpretation offered by the reporters in comment 10.

They say that they filed this bug before they had devised their attack on the favicon cache; and so they reasonably asked, “why isn’t Firefox caching it like everyone else and as we believe everyone should?”—because as :mossop explains in comment 13, the spec suggests it should be cached, by remaining silent on the point.

Then, they developed the attack, and reported it to the affected browsers, which excluded Firefox. Certainly it was not great to leave it open without adding a comment saying “hey, don’t go ahead with fixing this yet, we developed a fingerprinting attack if it does get cached”, but it’s easy to understand this being overlooked. Also, as the reporters of the issue, they would receive any progress on the issue by email, so if you assume good faith, then they would have pumped the brakes if someone had actually gone ahead with implementing the initially-requested caching.

It’s possible that there was bad faith, but I find the good faith explanation entirely plausible—that there was a minor error of judgement only.
Making Bitcoin deliberately worse would also hinder the development of those future improvements in efficiency, perhaps actually leading to proof-of-work systems being around for even longer.
If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin?

Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion?

I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.
I have heard Discordianism described as "a religion for people who think ALL religions are parodies" and that seems largely accurate. The internal contradictions are an essential part of it.
I didn't quite get your last comment. Don't you have blueberries in your store already? Or was it a point about price?

I definitely prefer bananas over blueberries so maybe I'm just confused.
Industry Sectors Eligible Up to 100% Foreign Ownership in UAE
The catalog of one of the most popular retail networks in my country shows that 78% of the smartphones they sell have two sim slots
I am always amazed at what is possible with the linux command line, and it‘s something one can really fall in love with.
If you and the rest of us were not allowed to post on these forums, fewer people might be offended.

If we outlaw all vehicles (including bicycles) and required everyone to walk, all traffic accidents would be avoided already. Full stop.

If we ...
Political power is just one form of power, with economic power being the other great influencer in our capitalistic world. Given that capital can accrue exponentially, I'd say that capital power would outweigh political power in this theoretical world.
Have you tried 1Password?
I always though dogs were "canis lupus familiarise" ans we're the same species as wolves - just a different subspecies or something.
Question: If I live in a house made of this stuff, would it be ok to throw stones?
Let me compare this to physics. We theoretical physicists will publish an experiment that we think is perfectly feasible. When we show it to the experimentalists, they will laugh and implement a very basic version of it with lots of simplifying assumptions, because that is all that is possible within technology and budgetary constraints. They will write a paper about it. The theoreticians will understand things a little better and publish simpler variants of the experiment that are better than what the experimentalists did. This goes back and forth for years, sometimes decades, until both sides have come to an agreement on what is possible and yet useful.

I don't think this back and forth is what happens between architects and contractors. Contractors are not paid to produce knowledge, and they have no incentive to better conform to regulations. So I expect the convergence between architects and contractors is very slow.

I don't think the solution is to regulate architects more, but rather to create a system where contractors actively provide feedback, so that processes can be iterated upon.
> The closest alternatives that I found

As said here few times, try Astree[0] & Foucault2[1] (FLOSS alternatives to Zemax software).

[0] https://github.com/edeforas/Astree

[1] https://github.com/edeforas/Foucault2
> change the way the world works

Change how exactly? To me bitcoin seems like this:

Expectation: the world ditches banks, dollars, euros, etc. People switch to bitcoin and everyone lives happily, paying for everyday stuff with bitcoin.

Reality: people do not use bitcoin to buy groceries. In fact, people do not use bitcoin per se - people are only interested in buying and holding (speculating).
Bitcoin is not a protocol for honest people to reach spontaneous agreements. It uses algorithms to create consensuses, and audit might be powerless in this system.
In some infix syntax, one might then need to escape characters. Example 'infix' for Common Lisp:

(let ((foo-bar 29))
#i( foo\-bar - 3 * foo\-bar ))
Based on the long response time, I think we've hugged the IETF httpd to death which is somewhat funny considering who runs it.
I’m not sure that’s true. We had gas filled double glazed windows made for us in Eltham, an outer suburb of Melbourne, during a renovation about 6 years ago. We replaced all the single paned glass with double panes. And we were on the edge of the Yarra valley, not particularly close to the city. So my experience doesn’t match this at all.
I also found it curious that the main sources of tin in ancient times don’t seem to coincide with the earliest known instances of bronze: [2]

- 4650 BC Balkans

- 3500 BC Mesopotamia

- 3300 BC Indus

- 3150 BC Egypt

- 3200 BC Aegean

- 2900 BC Gansu

Makes me wonder how early metallurgists discovered bronze. Maybe they worked with smaller local sources of tin? Or maybe this is just another gap in our knowledge of ancient history…

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age
The funny thing with people like you is even if they are proven wrong they are still "believing".
> Using a formal term, other than meat, would help to reduce confusion about the source material

Is there significant consumer confusion over this, though?
> ... Ethereum uses POS ...

No, Ethereum is at least not using PoS for now.
I think the best way to make bitcoin "green" is to make it more energy efficient by pushing the Lightning Network. As a nice side effect it also gets more practical.
Cutting down A/C usage is, in fact, an important climate change mitigation.
The idea that Bitcoin can only be useful if it completely replaces all existing financial instruments is a strawman
Some people think the internet should be beyond the control of a single government, and perhaps by extension so too should the financial system. There are a lot of caveats to this idea.
I made a typo above when I said glucose provides nitrogen that should be hydrogen.
Forcing budget reform because the government wouldn't be able to rely on printing money.
Hey HN, With all the recent hacks breaking the news, I thought that there is still clearly a lack of knowledge about how cyber attacks are performed.

In the book we will put ourselves in the shoes of attackers. From theory to practice, we will explore the arcane of offensive security and build our own offensive tools from scratch in Rust: scanners, phishing toolkit, shellcodes, advanced RAT...

Here is the accompanying GitHub repository: https://github.com/skerkour/black-hat-rust

Important: This is work in progress, feedback is welcome :)

In order to thank all the people who will help me make this book a reality by buying it in early access, I prepared a special bonus: a curated list of detailed analyses of the most advanced malwares of the past two decades. You will find inside great inspiration when developing your own offensive tools.

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