The Prophecies of Q - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/ <comment><USER2> Wait, Q started with a clear and verifiable prediction that a thing was about to happen very soon, and then that thing 100% did not happen? And then it grew from there? I thought I understood how the scam of fortune-telling worked, but apparently I do not!

<comment><USER3> Not the first time a religion was started on the basis of a prophecy that failed to deliver. A spin off of the Millerite Church predicted the end or the world in 1844. The fact that it did not come to pass, a non event that later became known as the Great Dissapointment, had many consequences including the founding of the 7th Day Adventist church.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism)

QAnon is absolutely a cult derived from the ideals of Christian spiritual warfare, apocalypticism, and associated eschatology.

The last time it was this bad was during the daycare panics of the 80's and 90's a movement I myself was a victim of.

<comment><USER4> +1

As soon as I heard the stuff about satanic rituals and drinking babies' blood I immediately thought of the McMartin trial. Sorry to hear you were caught up in the SRA mass hysteria, hope it is not still affecting your life.

<comment><USER3> Sadly its had a very profound effect on my life. From external appearances I am a successful individual. On the inside, I am a depressed, anxious mess and have trust issues with relationships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The real hilarious conspiracy is how the media latches onto these troll communities with breathless reporting. One of the founding beliefs of the "movement" is that birds aren't real, they're government drones.

I can't wait until The New Yorker is telling me about how a new dangerous cult is worshiping meme magic and praising at the altar of Kek. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if that's already happened.

It reminds me of when the NYTimes caught wind of the NPC meme* and their initial reporting was along the lines of "ARE THESE RUSSIAN BOTS? IS OUR DEMOCRACY BEING ATTACKED?." No you out of touch ivory tower fools, it's kids in their 20s with too much time on their hands who love the attention you give them.

As a side note, I know someone who fell deep into the gamergate hole as it was happening and then realized how toxic it was and did a complete 180. Now they spend all their time arguing with conspiracy theorists on the internet about how their logic is faulty. There's a certain type of person that is susceptible to this kind of stuff in general, for or against.

*[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/politics/npc-twitter-b...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/politics/npc-twitter-ban.html)

<comment><USER6> My sentiment as well. This was an overly too deep a dive into an otherwise uninteresting subgroup. An article 8th its length would have sufficed.

<comment><USER7> Its important because there's at least 1 QAnon supporter that's going to be walking the halls of congress next year.

<comment><USER6> And the US seems to have a supporter already sitting in the oval office.

Frankly this group is not interesting. It is just another group of conspiracy theorists that are spewing out a even more ill defined and crazy theory than most have before.

What would be more interesting to look into is why they are getting traction with people that previously were seemingly well informed ([n=1] the man in the article that had watched CNN for years before switching). That is more important. Why is it happening more and more that people get sucked into these 'obviously' lunatic groups and beliefs, and what can be done to make sure it doesn't happen.

Deep diving into the nitty gritty of the posting history of this Q person was way too much detail that did little to nothing for the article in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have no reason to believe these Q conspiracies but I understand why people believe them, when we know about all the past shady activities like COINTELPRO, MKUltra, WMDs in Iraq, all the involvement South America, NSA spying, etc.

<comment><USER9> your bar is pretty low if you think the fact that actual conspiracies exist justifies engaging in believing arbitrary conspiracy theories.

This is akin to believing that all women cheat just because it actually happens to be the case that you met one that actually did, or thinking all Jewish people are trying to get your money because you were once defrauded by one.

The problem with paranoid mindsets is not that they're always incorrect, it's that they're pathological in their structure.

<comment><USER10> So what, we should disbelieve all conspiracy theories by default? In the rare case it happens to be true, it'll probably be too late to act upon, just like COINTELPRO and MKULTRA.

We can assign the possibility of Q being true without actually taking a side and acting on it. I can say "this is both compelling and unlikely to be true, but as I long as I don't have to act on it, it doesn't matter if I believe in it or not". We can let the evidence over time build a stronger case for it or destroy it.

The only reason I can see not to do that is if it introduces unacceptable consequences in the meantime, as the article is suggesting, but it seems like the reporting against it is ridiculously cherry picked and disingenuous. There's probably a much stronger case for stopping BLM as a organization at the moment, but I don't think I've seen an Atlantic article suggesting that.

For the time being, Q seems like a harmless movement. It would be a red flag if Q denounced a group of people without justification, but Q has been pretty specific about the things and people it denounces, and if things go according to Q's plan the people it's denouncing are going to have their chance in court .

<comment><USER11> Our prior probability for most conspiracy theories should be low, and we should update our probabilities in an approximately Bayesian way.

<comment><USER10> The point of my first post was to say we don't have to assign any probabilities at the moment.

I'm just viewing it as compelling entertainment. Outside of this thread, I haven't mentioned it to anyone. It's probably premature to unwaveringly denounce or support it. When we have to actually act on it, or if it causes actual crime in the real world, that's when it helps if you take a stand.

<comment><USER11> If knowing for certain one way or the other would influence one's choices, a truly rational agent (which humans only approximate) must always at least implicitly assign a probability.

Some people are appealing to people who believe it in their political campaigns. I think this is sufficient to make it relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Q has become somewhat of a global phenomenon at this point:

[https://twitter.com/kos_data/status/1299746985554173952](https://twitter.com/kos_data/status/1299746985554173952)

</comment><comment><USER13> The public will usually not have to tools, expertise, or mindset to perform more technical kinds of intelligence gathering/sharing. The public is, therefore, generally limited to relying on human intelligence operations like Q.

However, human intelligence has consistency and credibility problems which make it easier to attack and undermine. The problems are magnified by anonymity and the resulting lack of accountability.

I am not sure how to solve those problems. The Q faithful should remember the inherent instability of that type of operation and work to solve it, not attack anyone who is in any way critical of it.

</comment><comment><USER14> So this is not Star Trek related?

Oh, you sweat summer child me.

</comment><comment><USER15> This type of fractured epistemology, where subgroups derive truth from truly weird conspiracy theories, while other groups in society continue with a connection to reality, is how a society falls apart, or becomes easily prayed upon by dictators or outside forces.

When people no longer have any idea about what could be true, they have to trust, usually a strong-man leader. This is how Putin maintains such control of his country. It's how he spread discord in eastern Ukraine, with wild stories about "they want to kill and eat your children." You hear Lukashenko say the same sorts of things as he struggles to keep power in Belarus (the villain being NATO forces...)

I beg of everybody on HN in the US: if you have family that starts to fall into these conspiracy theories, hold on to your relationship with them and try with all your night to bring them back to reality. We are at a scary stage with a pandemic and economic disaster, and many people are quite vulnerable to the false sense of order that these conspiracy theories provide. I think that familial connections might be one of the only things stronger than the strange pull of these conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER16> The situation in the US is exceptional. To put it mildly, US big corporate media would prefer that the current government executive be someone else, and their reporting is guided by that animus.

This creates an appetite for alternative sources of information, even if those sources are of very low quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, how is it different from other bs those folks used to believe in?

</comment><comment><USER18> What scares me about Q is what the narrative enables. If Trump overthrew the institutions of democracy, and had his enemies killed and jailed, then all Q would need to do is whisper is that the cabal has been defeated, and all the Q-adherents would cheer.

<comment><USER10> I don't think there are enough of them to outweigh the rule of law. I would drop Q in an instant if it operated outside of the courts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm starting to think that the media's breathless anti-Q reporting is more dangerous than QAnon itself.

Okay Q is a wacky conspiracy theory. What's the headline real-world event here though? Some kid walked into a pizza joint with a rifle. That's pretty much it. He didn't shoot anyone, didn't explicitly threaten anyone, didn't break anything. But that makes this cult a massive danger?

Meanwhile, hundreds of nationwide riots have been going on for months, burning down thousands of businesses, destroying livelihoods, but don't you dare even question the legitimacy of that.

<comment><USER20> > Okay Q is a wacky conspiracy theory. What's the headline real-world event > here though? Some kid walked into a pizza joint with a rifle. That's pretty > much it. He didn't shoot anyone, didn't explicitly threaten anyone, didn't > break anything. But that makes this cult a massive danger?

People are red-pilling. Once they are awake, they cannot be put back asleep. This is what makes this cult dangerous.

And its not just conservative America that's red-pilling:

[https://www.mesabitribune.com/news/6-greater-minnesota- mayor...](https://www.mesabitribune.com/news/6-greater-minnesota-mayors- endorse-trump-pence/article_7725e452-e96a-11ea-914e-e35a54938cf8.html)

[https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4852367/user-clip-democrat- ca...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4852367/user-clip-democrat-call)

<comment><USER21> Red pills are what they hand out in cults when Kool-Aid is too expensive.

When reality contradicts beliefs, the mind would rather adjust its filters on reality than adjust its beliefs. I've spent enough time chatting with flat- Earthers to watch the process in action.

<comment><USER20> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24180668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24180668)

People are leaving the Democrat Party.

<comment><USER21> Gallup numbers don't really bear out that hypothesis. [https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party- affiliation.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx)

The plurality of Americans declare themselves independents, but there are more people affiliated to either major party than neither.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Q is probably infiltrated by secret CIA operatives and will probably be dismantled soon, and will take on a new guise. Anyone remember the hacktivist group Anonymous in their heyday? Completely infiltrated and dismantled, by who knows? CIA?

<comment><USER23> I doubt Anonymous was "dismantled" by anyone. Groups like this just aren't stable. People get bored.

<comment><USER18> This was part of the story [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Notice how only 1 post out of thousands by the so called Q we're shown in the making this article?

Notice how immediately they point to one case of violence which was denounced by Q. Seems like an attempt to emotionally connect Q with a single nutjob.

Do you think it would be fair to write articles about everyone based on the actions of a single supporter with clear mental illness? Why the double standard?

If what Q is saying is so dangerous then why not actually show that material and debunk it directly?

Just like the podesta emails the content is always completely ignored because the people writing these articles don't want you to be informed here. Ask yourself why? What is their agenda here? Is it in your best interest?

Read the drops qmap.pub and think for yourself.

If you haven't read any of the drops how can anyone take your opinion seriously on something you know nothing about?

<comment><USER25> Are you a believer in the Q contents?

Was there a defining a moment that made you believe in it, if you do?

I'm not going read drops or maps, I'm not even sure what that means and don't plan to spend my weekend figuring that out, there's only so much time and we have to pick and choose ya know, so if you could expand, please do.

<comment><USER26> Look at their comment history. I've asked folks this question in other forums and they never answer. But their comments always defend Q

<comment><USER20> If you announced you were QAnon, you'd probably be outed and end up fired, maybe get death threats.

Its why the silent majority exists.

<comment><USER26> QAnon is wayyyy too far out there for the silent majority...that's just not a fair comparison.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why "direct" PostScript makes sense - <AUTHOR> http://www.anastigmatix.net/postscript/direct.html <comment><USER2> I've written piles of "Direct PostScript" code for the NeWS window system -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS> ...

Pie menu widget: <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/piemenu.ps.txt>

PizzaTool graphical Pizza ordering gui: <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/pizzatool.ps.txt> Illustration: <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/pizzatool.gif>

VT100 terminal emulator: <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/newterm.ps.txt>

UniPress (Gosling) Emacs display driver: <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt>

Metacircular PostScript interpreter: <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/ps.ps.txt>

PSIBER Space Deck (visual PostScript debugger and programming environment): <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/litecyber.ps.txt> More about that: <http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97>

A lunar lander game James Gosling wrote in 1988: <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/lander.ps.txt>

HeapSort by Owen Densmore: <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/heapsort.ps.txt>

QuickSort by Don Woods (an incredibly twisty maze of stack manipulation, by the Adventure dude): <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/quicksort.ps.txt>

BubbleSort by Bobo Leffler (he was afraid this might come back to haunt him): <http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/bubblesort.ps.txt>

</comment><comment><USER3> Since we're all admitting to have done this at one point in the past, here's mine; PSTab, a guitar tablature typesetter I wrote in 1994. The code is...not great. <http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/pstab>

I heard from a guy in NZ a while after that he'd used it to typeset a book of banjo music - it was the only software he could find that supported anything other than 6 strings.

</comment><comment><USER4> PDF displaced Postscript for two reasons: (i) lower resource usage, and (ii) better handling of fonts.

Since then PDF has become more sophisticated, handling metadata, tagging, and embedding media. It's been a long time since Postscript has been "the universal language for graphical and printed work".

A shame, since Postscript is fun.

<comment><USER5> re: "PDF displaced Postscript."

Not exactly. A PDF is generated from PostScript, as noted in the article:

"A PDF file is a static representation of the result of executing the PostScript file on a single occasion."

A PDF is a more compact version of a PostScript file - we could call it compiled PostScript, to use a term many on this site are familiar with. Just as a compiler has many output options, distilling PostScript can result in many different file sizes and levels of quality. (Check out the Distiller output settings.)

<comment><USER6> PDF is typically directly generated these days. There's no need to generate it from PostScript first.

The main difference between the two is that PDF is a declarative definition of the page whereas PostScript is a turing complete language. You can write a PostScript ray-tracer which will execute on the printer itself something which would never be possible in PDF. On the flip side, PDF is far more efficient as an electronic document format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My first job out of college, I had a Turbo C compiler, a DEC PC, a database app (government) written in Foxbase, and a Postscript printer. No real reporting tools, so all my reports and add-ons were written in C and outputted Postscript directly to the printer. Was a very interesting learning experience.

The Blue and Green books are a must for a new Postscript programmer [http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/index_arch...](http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/index_archive.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a toy Forth compiler, VM and visual debugger I wrote in PostScript:

<https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Four.Ps/blob/master/four.ps>

</comment><comment><USER9> A few years ago I took a look at this Unix circuit schematic editor, which seems to be still going strong. Symbols are kept directly in Postscript, if memory serves.

<http://opencircuitdesign.com/xcircuit/> : _"XCircuit regards circuits as inherently hierarchical, and writes both hierarchical PostScript output and hierarchical SPICE netlists."_

</comment><comment><USER10> It'd be really cool to have an ebook reader that converts epub files, and runs either TEX directly or postscript implementing the TEX paragraph formatter.

It's really bugging me that my kindle is incapable of running Knuth's algorithm, preferring instead to avoid hyphenation entirely, serving up an ugly hodgepodge of justified and ragged-right text. C'mon guys, this is old stuff...

Any open hardware with e-ink?

<comment><USER11> Sadly the iRex Technologies Illiad is no longer available (but it met your criteria)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I wanted to investigate fractals using Scheme, I had the Scheme program spit out PostScript output, then ran it through gs to look at the results.

PostScript is really tractable as a language to work directly in. Basic line- drawing stuff is almost as simple as the Logo I played with as a kid.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure I'd ever try it myself — for one thing, PostScript would only be useful for preparing documents destined for print, not HTML — but if I ever did need such a thing, I'd be interested to try it out.

<comment><USER14> Whether the rasterization in the end targets a printer or it ends up in a .png doesn't really matter at all.

But yeah, sadly there's no readily available system nowadays with true Display PostScript. Not very likely that Oracle will release the NeWS sources, and OS X switched to DirectPDF.

Have to check GNUStep…

<comment><USER15> Yes, OS X uses direct PDF to write to the screen, and will helpfully rasterise PS to PDF on the fly.

The 3B2 typesetting system does write display PS to the screen, though. Even the old DOS version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's a whole lot of text with very, very few code examples. Is the code too scary to show us more?

</comment><comment><USER17> Killed because it was very copyrighted...

Time to move on guys. Any newer ideas?

<comment><USER10> Ghostscript runs postscript and is opensource.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like hand-coding PostScript. Been doing it since the early 90's. It doesn't need to be a mess and can be beautifully concise and clean. It does have some odd ideas for the beginner (the page always starts at the bottom left coordinate and goes up, not down) but that's not hard.

Its a very cool language -- Forth derived.

<comment><USER18> I like to write Perl scripts which generate Postscript pictures. It gives me better interactivity of Perl development combined with the exactness of the results of Postscript.

The end result is usually a PDF file.

Still I've never learned to embed external fonts in my scripts, does anybody have some straightforward text about that part? As far as I know I'm legally 100% clean if I manage to use any font as long as I only distribute the PDF at the end.

<comment><USER19> It's been a long time since, but as far as I remember it basically boils down to pasting the pfa into your file (pfb2pfa is your friend here).

And it totally is a murky legal situation, many fonts don't allow embedding into a pdf, and you may not use almost all fonts in any way at all if you do not have a valid license. Fonts in the abstract may or may not be copyrightable depending on where you live, but the actual pfa-code you put in your file and the representation generated from that when converting to PDF definitely are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice. FWIW, We emit "direct" postscript for most of our generated warehouse documents like packing slips, gift cards, snail-mail gift certificates, invoices, etc.</comment>


Wash Trading Bitcoin: How Bitfinex Benefits from Fraudulent Trading - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/wash-trading-bitcoin-how-bitfinex-benefits-from-fraudulent-trading-8bd66be73215 <comment><AUTHOR> I think this house of cards is going to fall even harder than the one MtGox built if/when someone gives it a push.</comment>


Ratas – A hierarchical timer wheel - <AUTHOR> https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2016-07-27-ratas-hierarchical-timer-wheel/ <comment><USER2> _rathas /ratha_ Actually means a chariot (horse powered, two wheeled, for warfare) in Sanskrit

 _rat_ ("t" pronounced as dental) means wheel

</comment><comment><USER3> I was intrigued by the name—"ratas" means "wheel" in Lithuanian, but the author appeears to be from Switzerland and neither first nor last names are even remotely Lithuanian. Even more intriguing then…

<comment><USER4> Not so intriguing i think, ratas also means Wheel in Finnish which matches at least the authors first name. For reference: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ratas](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ratas)

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Interesting it's from PIE via Lithuanian - I hadn't thought about it before but it is cognate with English _rota_ , _rotate_ via Latin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This version still has to tick, yes? The whole point of optimizing ticks- until-next-event is to support nohz tickless modes. "Optimizing for high occupancy" also means low granularity - since the more granular timeouts you need, the more likely buckets are to be empty.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't need to tick in the sense of being driven by a predictable timer interrupt, since it's totally agnostic to the actual time source. The primitive for finding out when the next event expires is there for anyone wanting to operate it in a nohz-like manner. It's just a different tradeoff: make insert/delete a little faster at the expense of making ticks-until-next- event a little slower.

This is perhaps coming from a very different direction than the kernel use case. There it's totally plausible to have no events expiring for a long time (like the next second), and there is real value in going completely idle for a long period (lower power use).

But there are application areas where this just isn't the case. For example applications doing poll mode network IO can't possibly afford to go idle for a second. Even a millisecond would be stretching it. There's just no value in being slightly faster at knowing whether the next expiring timer is in 100ms or 110ms. The application will be waking up far earlier than that no matter what.

To put numbers on it: my thinking is that if a timer tick is e.g. 20us (so 50 ticks per ms) and there are no events expiring in the next 10 ticks, the system load must be so low that it might as well be completely idle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also: [http://25thandclement.com/~william/projects/timeout.c.html](http://25thandclement.com/~william/projects/timeout.c.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> wow, the idea reminds me of epicycles (the Ptolemaean model of the solar system where he planets did loops within loops).

Now i wonder if you save a lot with having to promote all these entries from the outer wheel(s) to inner wheel, one option is to pick a large enough wheel size (so that the wheel would cover most typical timeouts) and just allow collisions in the timer buckets if a timeout requires more slots than the maximum size of the wheel (just would require you to do more checks when there are collisions).

Another problem is that one has to do a lot more work when you do a full revolution of the inner wheel (due to promotions within between the outer wheels); so that each tick does take a uniform amount of time.

Another point is that these linked lists + indirections are not very cache friendly; one could try to use some sort of unrolled list (however this will eat up more memory).</comment>


Ask HN: Is ML/AI a good long-term career path? - <AUTHOR> ML/AI careers are perhaps the sexiest jobs in tech now, offering high salaries and great job satisfaction. How good of careers are they long term, though? It seems like it's very possible that those very jobs would be the first to be automated away. Or will they always be required, and low-skill jobs will be automated away instead? <comment><USER2> It's very easy to write yourself out of a job, but if you have specific domain knowledge (art and creativity for the field) then you have a huge advantage. I think ML/AI are incredibly useful tools that still need the guiding hand of human creativity. I suppose it depends on how much entrepreneurs are aware of the benefit of AI (and how realistic that expectation is). You could make a career out of improving existing platforms with AI/ML but also Apple just released some powerful stuff to all App makers that can utilize a Neural Net for recommendations and learning gestures without the need for any complex coding. So, I think an AI/ML expert is like someone with really long arms able to reach fruit at the top of the tree. We can sometimes just bend the whole tree down, tie it, and call it a day. You may have to spend your whole career moving from forest to forest to find more trees to pick fruit off. Ideally, you can turn these skills into some sort of passive income stream and then you can pursue your passion projects full force.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on what you focus on if you think taking a 4-month bootcamp is going to give a good long term career you are mistaken. BLS claims that mathematicians and statistician jobs are growing faster than any other area: [https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/mathematicians-and- statistician...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/mathematicians-and- statisticians.htm)

I take this to mean if you focus on the fundamentals of AI/ML instead of just learning how to use the newest framework you will always be able to find work.

Even if this area does become highly automated you will need to be people who understand how the tools work, what sort of problems they solve, and how to identify these problems.

No one knows for sure, but I would be surprised to see people who understand AI/ML fundamentals not being highly useful in the future.

</comment><comment><USER4> No, b/c there is no "long-term" for ML/AI. Look at what brought the current ML explosion: Moore's law held just long enough to make ML work reasonably well w/in the human attention span. Nobody anticipated this. It overrode other interests and now dominates AI (for the moment).

The same thing could happen again and another technology could sweep ML/AI aside. ML/AI itself is not a predictable "career path" like chemical, electrical/petroleum, or mechanical engineering are. ML/AI is more like the Wild West: maybe you're a wildcatter who has a new idea, thinks he can find oil and strike it rich.

If you want a predictable career path that covers most of the same subject area then choose statistics, mathematics or data science.

<comment><USER5> Considering how murky the definitions are, it's ridiculous to say that ML has no future but data science is a predictable career path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's software engineering with a lot of statistics. Even if the titles and hype-cycles change, the core skills will be in-demand for a while.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think when it comes to any technology, it is important to keep the Hype Cycle in mind ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)).

Will there be long term career options in ML/AI? Maybe. Most probably for a while. Long term, probably few.

Will those skills be transferable to other technologies? Who knows.

</comment><comment><USER7> You need to be in and stay in the top 5-10% of ML practitioners

<comment><USER8> Can you please elaborate on the skills needed to be in the top 10 percent in this field? Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> tech is general isnt a good long term career path</comment>


The myopia boom (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120 <comment><USER2> I always thought it was because all of the "far away" stuff is outside and a person who spends 90% of their time indoors never has to look at anything far away.

What are the rates of shortsightedness among people living in dense forests (or some other cramped outdoor environment)?

<comment><USER3> I think the eye damage is more to do with looking at something of fixed distance for long periods of time (computers, tvs, tablets, & phones).

A person living in a dense forest would still be constantly adjusting his/her focus.

<comment><USER4> > In the early 2000s, when researchers started to look at specific behaviours, > such as books read per week or hours spent reading or using a computer, none > seemed to be a major contributor to myopia risk.

is no one reading the article?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Discussion from 3 years ago (311 points): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9227541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9227541)

</comment><comment><USER6> Jan 2018 thread on eye health, 99 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16146106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16146106)

Jan 2018 thread on vision therapy, 140 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16194580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16194580)

</comment><comment><USER7> What if we make cellphone screens which emit 10,000 lux? Boom. Problem solved.

<comment><USER8> I know you are being facetious but it's probably important to note that the LED and oLED light used in phones is not wide spectrum.

I think attempting to generate the equivalent intensity of natural light means unnaturally high intensity three component narrow band frequency exposure?... I can imagine that might pose a non obvious risk to eyes because it _looks_ visibly equivalent.

(sorry I am unable to reference it but there was some research into the negative effects of this recently given the advent of LED lights replacing incandescents)

<comment><USER8> Found it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575725)

Note: the top rated post has focused on editorial quality and glossed over the fact that it is narrow band light and cannot be compared as equivalently in wide spectrum terms beyond perception (e.g colour temperature), this is pointed out in the 2nd immediate child by sandworm101.

I should point out that the properties of the light beyond perception _are_ important due to ipRGCs: the mammalian retina contains ipRGC photo-receptors that do not relay images to the brain but are responsible for various reflexive responses. These receptors are sensitive to a wide spectrum of light peeking around blue [1]. Ultimately these ipRGCs release melanopsin which is known to affect circadian rhythm, and is thought to control sleep wake patterns [2].

I expect you've heard about this vaugley before as I have, but what is interesting in the context of LEDs is that ipRGCs appear to respond to more of a continuum of spectrum, so unlike our cones they would be "perceiving" LED light quite differently to our consciously perceived images.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Function)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Control_of_sleep/wa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Control_of_sleep/wake_patterns)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I can only imagine the problem getting much worse in the future. Wherever I go, I see kids of all ages hooked on cell-phones - either on mobile games, youtube videos or on instagram/snapchat. This is probably significantly cutting down their natural light exposure.

<comment><USER9> Why would cell phone use cut down on natural light exposure compared to books or TV? The whole point of a cell phone is that you can use it anywhere, including outside. Based on the thesis of this article, all you need to do is play on your cell phone while you're outside to prevent myopia.

<comment><USER10> I use my cell phone a lot more indoors than outdoors. I don't _go_ outdoors because my cell phone enables me to connect with people indoors when I would normally be required to go outdoors to connect with them without a cell phone.

<comment><USER11> When I was a young child I was on my computer or playing video games on a TV all day, rarely going outdoors. When I got my first smartphone, it was actually very liberating. Now I could be outside anywhere, and still surf the internet and play any number of games at any time.

<comment><USER12> Afaik that's a very generational thing, people a bit older than you spend a whole lot more time outside.

My first smartphone (the first iPhone one) gave me the same liberating feeling you describe there, but it didn't take long for me to realize that mobile gaming isn't for me and while I can do most stuff I want on a smartphone, I can do it better and more efficiently on a full-blown desktop/laptop with proper peripherals, so that's where I still end up doing most of it.

In recent years my smartphone even feels more of an annoying hassle than an actual asset, except for the occasional use for navigation and regular use as mp3 player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is an interesting article, but I found I was able to read it, for the most part, by reading the first sentence of every paragraph. That shows how much fat there is in the typical magazine article.

<comment><USER14> This is actually something many authors aim for. Few readers need all the details, but some do, and this makes it obvious where to dig. It's harder than it looks to pull off, without sounding stilted... perhaps because it's the opposite of storytelling, where you build up to a punchline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any article about myopia which doesn't mention anything about nutrition is "shortsighted" (pun intended).

One of the most interesting discussions around causes for myopia is centered on nutrition, and how growing faster than our ancestors can negatively effect our vision.

I looked for a specific reference to share here (something I've read years ago), but I didn't find it.

<comment><USER16> That's because what you eat has nothing to do with the shape of your eyeball, and there's no scientific basis for bringing this up in the context of myopia

<comment><USER17> It has. Drinking milk for instance is directly correlated to your growth

<comment><USER18> Filtered cows blood causes growth?

<comment><USER19> No. Growth hormone given to cows which winds up in the milk.

<comment><USER20> No it's not. The modern increase in the average height is caused by the accessibility of protein.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> After reading this article, I think it's borderline cruelty to give adolescents detention during recess for misbehavior. If anything, this enables more pent up behaviors which could lead to myopia.

<comment><USER22> You make it outdoors detention, where they sit and watch other kids play.

I don't know whats more cruel.

<comment><USER12> No reason to have them just sit and passively watch, let them do something outside, like tending to the school garden.

That way they do something valuable and vent whatever is frustrating them through the physical exercise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> TL;DR "After studying more than 4,000 children at Sydney primary and secondary schools for three years, they found that children who spent less time outside were at greater risk of developing myopia."

</comment><comment><USER24> I thought this was talking about figurative shortsightedness for the first sentence or two and I was like "Hmm, yes, interesting."

</comment><comment><USER25> There was a thread on here recently about the Trades Industry, and many people warned that even though you are up and using your body, not looking at a screen 8hours a day, there are still back injuries etc related to that mobile profession.

I suppose though on average non-sedentary jobs with minimal indoor computer screen jobs have a lower rate of myopia increase..

Is it worth the pay raise to work in tech if our eyes , one of the most imporant senses is put at a higher risk? What about the whole population of young up and comers.

I think e-ink screens will help in 3-4 years when refresh rate is high enough. More people can work on screens in direct sunlight.

<comment><USER26> I guess living kills you.

We should all try to be more like Jeanne Calment. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment)

She was well educated in France with a liberal arts degree, married well and never had to work, went mountaineering with her husband on holidays, hosted German soliders during the second world war but didn't mind it very much, spent her mornings in prayer, had an elaborate skincare routine, smoked, drank, ate lots of chocolate and rode her bicycle every day right up until the end at age 122.

Basically, fuck working.

<comment><USER27> Or Frida Kahlo. It's pretty easy to become an idol of art or health when you're born into money.

All those traditional mid-century Marxist "class is the only thing that matters" people don't sound so bad now, huh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What about Hyperopia?

If sunlight exposure is the cause of too long eyeballs, shouldn't kids which are at hereditary risk of developing too short eyeballs be put in darkrooms?

</comment><comment><USER29> My question is, can increased time outdoors prevent eyesight from degenerating further after myopia has already developed?

</comment><comment><USER30> Hidden variable: looking at screens.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't have any real evidence, but anecdotally I suspect that diet also has an effect on vision. Could be just a coincidence, but my vision declined as a child during a period when I was regularly stuffing myself with sweets, and know others with similar experience.

<comment><USER32> Is the diet in East Asian countries (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore & South Korea) significantly worse than it was in the 1920s? As the article details, myopia is increasingly common in China as well. The Chinese suffered numerous famines between 1920 and 1960.

I'm sure diet plays some role in eye health, but nutrition has likely improved in all of the countries they're discussing.

<comment><USER23> The value of a diet isn't just a single interval between "hungry" and "fed".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> light intensity does that

try this: take a picture, same object, no flash, ... one under normal bright sun and another in a room under normal bright lighting. which one is sharper?

set phone brightness to lowest, another on highest. try to read something and measure your arm's length. adjust brightness so you can still focus at farthest arm's length as comfort dictates. don't save on power juice. your eyes are more important.

drive outside and then go to underground parking lot. you'll notice it's harder to look.

use your normal glasses in a normal lighting room. go outside and swith to lower power (say your previous glasses). notice the difference.

the problem was i used the same power glasses all the time, out of habit. the very same glasses for reading far (chalkboards) and for reading books. it's somewhat not practical to switch glasses every time you copy something from board and write to your notes. using lower powered glasses and move my seat to the front mitigate this problem.

tldr; try to get maximum amount of light to your eyes as comfort dictates. if you really have to use glasses, choose the one with lower power that's sufficient for your need. practice to never use glasses for most tasks (adjust brightness on smartphone). you'll be surprised on what ur eyes can do without glasses.

<comment><USER34> More specifically it's the bright light triggering the iris to close that improves the focus. As the aperture narrows (iris closes) the incoming rays become more collimated (less scattered) and so the image falling on your cornea appears sharper even if your eye's lens is not able to focus it correctly. At it's extreme this effect allows the pinhole camera to work without using any lenses at all to focus the image.

The thing is though, while using lower powered glasses might help you train the muscles around your eyes' lenses to be stronger, mitigating the myopia slightly, the root problem still remains: your eyeball is the wrong shape and there's only so much your eyes' lenses can do to make up for that.

<comment><USER33> not really...

seeing things under sun is not equal to squirting ur eyes to focus the incoming rays

it's just that much light coming, the intensity of light to be exact.

that's why camera, given the same setup, gives sharper image under bright sun light

I never get as tired playing outside as compared to squirting my eyes all the time just to focus in a room. sun light is just that intense, rooms lightings are much less intense.

<comment><USER34> Cameras only give a sharper picture in bright light because this allows you to reduce the aperture size. The image is not sharper if you increase the shutter speed instead of reducing the aperture. This is basic physics. Bright light is not magical.

Squinting your eyes is a very poor approximation to what your irises are doing. The light collimation is not reduced uniformly in every axis and your eyelashes partially obscure the light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sunglasses are something else to consider. There is zero scientific evidence sunglasses protect your vision in any way. (There is suspicion UV exposure can lead to some eye diseases, but it's not a proven link, nor are the mechanisms understood). If increased exposure to sunlight is correlated with better vision, we better revisit our completely non-scientific sunglasses dogma.

<comment><USER35> The evidence is firming up that UV (esp UV-B) exposure is linked to cataracts and macular degeneration.

[https://nei.nih.gov/news/briefs/uv_cataract](https://nei.nih.gov/news/briefs/uv_cataract)

[https://www.macular.org/ultra-violet-and-blue- light](https://www.macular.org/ultra-violet-and-blue-light)

Blue light from LEDs that are out of spec can also be a problem. The EU already has standards for this.

[http://www.cree.com/led- components/media/documents/XLamp_Eye...](http://www.cree.com/led- components/media/documents/XLamp_EyeSafety.pdf)

<comment><USER36> Are those "blue light wakeup devices" a risk for this?

<comment><USER37> Given their intensity they very well could be. I actually stopped using one after a few months due to this concern.

<comment><USER36> I just realized the one I bought is supposed to mimic daylight. Same issue regardless dur to incomplete spectrum?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Docker Desktop: Your Desktop over ssh inside of a Docker container - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docker.io/2013/07/docker-desktop-your-desktop-over-ssh-running-inside-of-a-docker-container/ <comment><USER2> If you're sort of confused as to what advantage there is to this way of doing things over just running a VM in VirtualBox or using Vagrant, you probably aren't yet aware of what the Docker project is doing.

It's creating the VirtualBox of Linux Containers. Docker image files are extremely light weight when compared to VirtualBox images and use Union File systems to allow for complete isolation rather than using VM volumes.

An example scenario for when you'd want something like this is if you want to load an experimental library for a specific application that some part of your system depends on the stability of. Fire up a docker image for just that application with the experimental library replacing the stable library and _just_ the applications inside the docker image will see it. No need to even play around with library versions or links. And since the Docker images are so light weight and incur extremely little performance penalty (I think it is limited to just the cost of using the Union FS over your normal FS), you can do this for dozens of scenarios at once.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused with the advantage over "pure" LXC and a couple of scripts for the mounts, what does it provides for this kind of usage? Or is it not using LXC and basically implements its own interface to the Linux namespaces? (that'd be actually cool... :P)

<comment><USER2> Docker combines LXC along with a few other isolation and security technologies. What the Docker maintainers are also doing is setting up a system for distributing LXC based images. Beyond this, since Docker works with these union file systems, it also lets you build on top of other images.

Eventually, there may be some way to merge images together, though I imagine that will always be a little harry compared to a simple stack up.

Documentation is more than a little sparse right now, unfortunately. It took me a few days to figure out how all the pieces work together.

<comment><USER4> Can you be specific about the other security methodologies docker rolls in? Everywhere I read, people say "LXC != VM-level security," specifically, I hear that root on the container means root on the host. These suse guys at least say "If you want to be secure, kvm is still your answer." : [http://unixcal.com/s/a4mn](http://unixcal.com/s/a4mn) . Thoughts?

<comment><USER5> Root on the container doesn't mean root on the host. Machine-level virtualization has received more scrutiny than LXC, so as of today, many people consider traditional VMs to be more secure. But KVM or Xen are not intrinsically more secure than LXC or OpenVZ. They all have their histories of exploits and privilege escalations.

One key thing is, that it makes sense to run containers without root privileges (greatly improving security), while it is much harder to realistically run a VM without root processes. As a result, it could be said that containers are much safer, because before even thinking about breaking out of the container, you have to work on a root exploit - on a system which, by essence, only runs the processes that you really need, and has a much smaller attack surface.

We're working on a more elaborated answer, to be included within Docker docs!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > root@host:~# curl [http://get.docker.io](http://get.docker.io) | sh

No no no. Do NOT do this. Kids these days...

<comment><USER7> This also sucks because the scripts always assume some variant of Ubuntu or Debian. Um, no, thank you, damn hipsters.

<comment><USER8> Exactly _what_ is your qualification for debian being lumped in with hipsters? Some of us have used it as the most rock solid STABLE linux distro for servers and desktops for quite a long time.

<comment><USER9> He's an avid Yggdrasil user.

As an aside, I miss some of the raw diversity that was present in the old Linux distros. Slackware was my drug of choice due to its steadfastly BSD flavor. I guess Slackware is still around, but have no idea what its status is and whether Patrick ever moved it over to system v-ish convention in order to be more like other Linux distros. I guess that distinction is even a bit anachronistic given all the fancy changes to the way init is done nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> IMHO here's an even cooler hack-

Gtk+, the widget toolkit used to develop GNOME and many free software applications, supports rendering applications via HTML5. One of the developers has demonstrated using it to run desktop applications on OpenShift, Red Hat's PaaS, that you then access via your web browser.

[http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/03/19/broadway-on- openshif...](http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/03/19/broadway-on-openshift/)

[http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/04/03/more-gtk-in-the- clou...](http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/04/03/more-gtk-in-the-cloud/)

<comment><USER11> But... but... how?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This could be made VERY interesting if you also add an NX server in the mix. I find basic X11 connections via ssh to be rather laggy and unpleasant to use when the internet connection is not top.

The idea behind NX is to "fake" an X client on the server side and fake a NX server on the client side. This reduces the number of roundtrips required for each action. The improved responsiveness is dramatic -- even on a low speed and high-latency link, using the remote desktop feels like a local machine...

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology

Unfortunately, the two open source projects which aimed to reproduce the NX functionality seem to have been abandoned.

        http://freenx.berlios.de/
        http://code.google.com/p/neatx/source/list

Is anyone using NX these days? Perhaps, people stopped developing these because they work well already?

<comment><USER10> Take a look at xpra instead. The performance is much beter than X11 forwarding when you don't have a low latency connection.

[http://xpra.org/](http://xpra.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply! I tried xpra and it seems to be much better! It also fixed the issue with the keyboard messed-up on Mac OSX. I will publish an update on GitHub soon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can see usig this to get perfectly replicable, easy to upgrade/rollback and movable works environment - for both local and remote use. I.e., use locally on powerfull machine or rdp to closest powerful machine you can access from slow device. Or have several workspaces similar to virtual desktops for multiple projects...

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. You can easily do that with Docker Desktop :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I got excited when I saw the Windows installation instructions link, but that is just how to setup Vagrant with VirtualBox to host a Linux machine.

Is there any open-source equivalent to things like Citrix's XenApp, VMWare's ThinApp, Microsoft's App-V, or independent tools like Sandboxie? [http://alternativeto.net/software/sandboxie/](http://alternativeto.net/software/sandboxie/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, but for now it's the only way to install it on Windows. Thanks for asking j_s.

<comment><USER15> But why Vagrant? It's an unnecessary dependency that requires installation of more stuff I don't use. Why not distribute a pre-built VBox image and torrent it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, if I understood that correctly, it's just a virtual box image of ubuntu or debian that you run headlessly in a linux container (via docker) and then run a Xserver on your actual machine OS and connect to it via SSH with Xforward?

how is this any better than simply running virtualbox on your OS to begin with?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. It's better because you can build that image anywhere where there is docker installed and it can be easily moved/upgraded and ready to run. But if you think only locally, then there is no much difference, despite that docker lighter and faster.

<comment><USER17> Further, the VirtualBox instructions are only for Windows users, to get Linux installed (which is a requirement of Docker). You don't need VirtualBox at all. But if you don't have Linux, you can try this with VBox (it's a virtualization tech that nests safely inside of vbox... unlike say, virtualbox inside of virtualbox.)

<comment><USER16> if i already have linux installed i can carry fat binaries and a kernel for chroot'ing an environment. all in a tar file... I think this is just new way kids does common things of yesterday. or maybe linux containers kicks chroot a __in performance?

<comment><USER17> to me it's not about performance... it's about rigorous isolation. LXC is like FreeBSD jails, though there are things you can do with the cgroup namespace stuff now that are impossible using jails... eg. disk io accounting.

in a jail, one user who attempts to monopolize disk io will succeed. in a cgroup, he can be restricted to exactly 10% of available i/o bandwidth, so you can guarantee that he doesn't starve the other containers.

there are also easy and documented ways to break out of a chroot if you are able to obtain root in the chroot. those holes are plugged by lxc and docker. Most notably, access to devices can be restricted.

I don't know what you mean by "carry fat binaries and a kernel for chrooting an environment" \-- you don't need a separate kernel for chroot, any more than you need a separate kernel for docker. There's no advantage to static linked binaries (fat binaries?) when you can put the storage of your containers in a zpool or btrfs with deduplification. Same as your chroots.

Try out docker. Read about cgroups. I first gave LXC a try a few years ago and I was really sad about the extent of support for creating guests and keeping them properly isolated. It was really not friendly at all. You basically had to commit to using kernel patches that made your system pretty unusable as a desktop. (Was that xen dom0 or lxc?)

Everyone was saying, "Ohh, LXC is no better than a chroot." It's insecure, easy to break yourself out. Not so much anymore, with the current state of Docker you don't even have to know all the advances in cgroup and namespaces.

It's worth a look. Really, go check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's a recipe for using vnc to get pixels out of a docker:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16296753/can-you-run- gui-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16296753/can-you-run-gui-apps-in- a-docker)

</comment><comment><USER19> Linux != Debian

<comment><USER20> The script is actually Ubuntu specific, not Debian (it uses Upstart).</comment></comment>


Windows Executable Walkthrough Graphic - <AUTHOR> http://pe101.corkami.com/

<comment><USER2> One of the things that's held back Windows and made it so complex, according to an MS engineer I recently spoke with who's been with the company since the 80's, is that it contains thousands of pieces of code to fix bugs in third- party software.

In other words, there's code in Windows 7 that prevents crashing due to a rare bug in Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego v1.3 (hypothetical example). And so on.

<comment><USER3> Relevant Old New Thing post: "The real cost of compatibility is not in the hacks; the hacks are small potatoes"

(The Old New Thing is a blog by veteran Microsoft shell team developer Raymond Chen, and it's a must-read for all developers.)

[https://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/07/23/4003...](https://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/07/23/4003873.aspx?Redirected=true)

<comment><USER4> "a must read" for all _Windows_ developers.

<comment><USER5> Other operating systems have similar issues as well.

<comment><USER6> I'll go one further and say _all_ software has similar issues.

To give you a more concrete examples a game project I work on has many characters with skills. There is a lot of shared code across the skills, which is a good thing. A handful of skills are of the "charge" type. Press a button and lunge forward, each with it's own variation. Knockback targets, grapple targets, throw, throw backwards, apply buff to charger, apply debuff to victim, leave acid trail of damage, etc.

The whole setup has been built up over years and is tragically fragile today. Adding in a new charge variant requires being _very_ careful you don't break any of the pre-existing skills. It may seem safe, and even appropriate, to make minor changes in the sequence of events but there's a good change it will break one skill in one particular case where multiple, infrequent combination of factors are in play.

<comment><USER7> This is obviously off topic, but do you happen to work on a MOBA?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/wqzc9/windows_e...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/wqzc9/windows_executable_walkthrough_graphic/)

In the reddit thread the original author said: "I will also do a linux (ELF) version, but not in the near future."

For a Mac OS X version he would need a Mac (which he don't has.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice one. I'd love to see a walkthrough for .NET executables[1].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable#.NET.2C_met...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable#.NET.2C_metadata.2C_and_the_PE_format)

<comment><USER10> <http://www.ntcore.com/files/dotnetformat.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For any new reverse engineers in Hacker Newsland, another win32 PE classic is Ero Carrera's diagram from 2005: [https://www.openrce.org/reference_library/files/reference/PE...](https://www.openrce.org/reference_library/files/reference/PE%20Format.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Ero is actually planning to release his other 2 commercial diagrams, that you can see <http://blog.dkbza.org/2007/10/openrceorg-goodies.html> in preview He's just lacking motivation ATM, so contact him if you're interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> \- The PDF takes forever to render in Adobe PDF Reader 9.

\- The Content-Type of the SVG is text/plain so Firefox doesn't render it.

\- The JPG has a Content-Disposition of "attachment" so Firefox forces me to download it locally.

Not a pleasant experience.

<comment><USER12> I don't control any of these sadly. the image is easily viewable at <http://imgur.com/a/t33Rr> though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "made entirely under Inkscape" +1

</comment><comment><USER15> This is great but why is English the only version that is in jpg rather than png?

<comment> iso-8859-1 because you do not deserve better if your browser supports neither PDF nor SVG?

<comment><USER15> I was browsing on the original iPad. For some reason, certain PDFs seem to stress it out when rendering and it really lags. It also did not correctly display the SVG link.

So all I was left with was the JPG link which was unfortunate because of the lossy compression which makes the finer details slightly blurred.

A PNG would have been perfect and I noticed that all other languages had a link to a PNG but english.

<comment><USER16> I was browsing on an iPad 2 in Chrome and had similar problems. SVG displayed as text, PDF and JPG were blurry and wouldn't zoom correctly. Once I got on my laptop the SVG still displayed as text but the PDF and JPG were perfectly clear. Still not sure why the others are PNGs and the english version is JPG; clearly PNG is better suited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is awesome. I would love to see versions of this for Linux and OS X.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is awesome :)

<comment><USER19> Or sad. Depending on your outlook ;)

<comment><USER20> Is Mach-O on OS X or ELF on Linux any more or less sad?

<comment><USER21> Don't know about Mach-O, but ELF is actually a rather nice and clean design.

Much of the hate PE gets is because of the silly overloading with .NET assemblies.

<comment><USER20> Oh yeah, and now also WinRT metadeta.

It annoys me mildly that .NET requires you to have a little native stub in assemblies, but the Windows loader does not actually execute it.

<comment><USER21> It annoys me more than just mildly to see .exe and .dll on linux. And that silly native stub!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


QEMU Advent Calendar 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.qemu-advent-calendar.org/ <comment><USER2> Hi, I run the QEMU Advent Calendar and hope you enjoy the images that the QEMU community has put together for your holiday season enjoyment.

We still have a few slots free so if you have a cool disk image to contribute, get in touch! stefanha at gmail com

Rules: Must be freely distributable (e.g. open source). Small image size is appreciated.

<comment><USER3> Wow, this is really good stuff. I've seen advent calendars of other open source project, but this trumps them all, in my opinion. Congrats!

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How about a boot to guile day? [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile- user/2013-02/msg001...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile- user/2013-02/msg00131.html)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I've taken note of the link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How bizarre that the Slack image is 30 MB (compressed!). I suppose it really is a full system. I'm sure there must be some of those old Linux images out there that managed to fit both the kernel and the initial ram disk on a single 1.44 MB floppy ?

<comment><USER6> Tom's rescue boot disk is what I remember as essential for system administrators for some time... [http://www.toms.net/rb/](http://www.toms.net/rb/) (1.7 MB floppy), but I can't find a working download.

But tux.org has "pocketlinux", which seems to be similar. [http://www.tux.org/pub/distributions/tinylinux/pocket- linux/](http://www.tux.org/pub/distributions/tinylinux/pocket-linux/), with a 1.44MB download. (in Virtualbox add a Floppy controller, rename floppy image to ".img")

Here's a screenshot: [https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/1iF0BQtIdQ3hPXUAlwfpg9...](https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/1iF0BQtIdQ3hPXUAlwfpg9MTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink)

EDIT: OF COURSE I should have used Qemu for the screenshot: [https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/DPVXIuWlDKTSEan-5TY9xN...](https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/DPVXIuWlDKTSEan-5TY9xNMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any chance you can add a RSS feed so we can follow the updates?

<comment><USER2> [http://qemu-advent-calendar.org/feed.rss](http://qemu-advent- calendar.org/feed.rss)

(Still populating the feed but you can already subscribe.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those unfamiliar with the season of Advent:

[http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Advent](http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Advent)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent)</comment>


Blue Apron Plummets to Record Low After CEO's Conference Comments - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-07/blue-apron-shares-drop-to-record-low-on-profit-margin-concerns <comment><USER2> Interesting how fast Blue Apron fell out of favor.

I'm curious what, if anything, will turn it around. Is boxed-shipped-meals a fad that is over with or is there still room for innovation?</comment>


Mark Hofmann - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hofmann <comment><USER2> Mark Hofmann is my (ex-)uncle (by marriage, not by blood). Needless to say, the whole affair isn't something we really bring up at family gatherings. From a historical/detached standpoint the events are all certainly interesting and scandalous and fascinating, I'm sure. My main reaction to it all is just sadness at the pain he put his wife and kids through because of it, and how they've been able to show strength by moving forward in their own lives. It's times like this I feel extremely blessed that our own extended family is close-knit enough that we can support each other.

</comment><comment><USER3> So nobody wants to say it ? Ok I will.

Hoffman profited because the entire history and founding of the LDS was and is b.s.

Hoffman got caught and tried for forgery but perhaps the greatest forger and conman of them all in this narrative was Joseph Smith himself. People have known this for a long time: Joseph Smith's criminal record, his sexual proclivities, unverified 'visions' (as if any visions could be verified); the evidence abounds but we act like the church elders in the article - afraid to peek to closely let we find the truth. To be fair, this tendency to swallow up fairytales is not a restricted to mormons, it is probably the foundation of all religions, major and minor.

When grown men and women believe fantastic revelation stories uncritically and build great structures of worship and institutions around such beliefs, once in a while these sorts of events occur that expose the inconsistencies.

<comment><USER4> No one said it, because it doesn't make any sense.

>Hoffman profited because the entire history and founding of the LDS was and is b.s.

Huh? Sounds like you are just itching for a chance to speak ill of a religion you don't like (or religion in general).

Forgers that are good, profit, regardless. Hoffman fooled many very well respected experts. As do many good forgers in many different fields.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hofmann is also believed to be responsible for a "mule" 1959-D Lincoln cent with the wheat reverse[0]. (1959 was the first year of the Lincoln memorial reverse, so no more wheat cents should have been made.) The coin surfaced in 1986 and was authenticated by the secret service, yet no one in the coin business will either condemn or authenticate it. The coin has been sold several times since then for larger and larger sums of money.

——

[0]: [https://www.pcgs.com/news/the-mystery-of-the-1959-d-mule- lin...](https://www.pcgs.com/news/the-mystery-of-the-1959-d-mule-lincoln-cent)

</comment><comment><USER6> Religion is again topping used car salesmanship :

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hofmann#Salamander_letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hofmann#Salamander_letter)

Perhaps the most notorious of Hofmann's Mormon forgeries, the Salamander letter, appeared in 1984. Supposedly written by Harris to W. W. Phelps, the letter presented a version of the recovery of the gold plates that contrasted markedly with the church-sanctioned version of events. Not only did the forgery intimate that Smith had been practicing "money digging" through magical practices, but it also replaced the angel that Smith said had appeared to him with a white salamander.[28]

After the letter had been purchased for the church and become public knowledge, LDS Church apostle Dallin H. Oaks asserted to Mormon educators that the words "white salamander" could be reconciled with Smith's Angel Moroni because, in the 1820s, the word salamander might also refer to a mythical being thought to be able to live in fire, and a "being that is able to live in fire is a good approximation of the description Joseph Smith gave of the Angel Moroni."[29]

</comment><comment><USER7> Anyone interested in how the events of his forgeries and subsequent murders unfolded should listen to this podcast episode [0] (parts 2 & 3). The tale is told by one of Hofmann's former friends, Brent Metcalfe. Brent's boss, Steve Christensen, was one of Hofmann's victims.

[0]: [https://www.mormonstories.org/podcast/brent-metcalfe-mark- ho...](https://www.mormonstories.org/podcast/brent-metcalfe-mark-hofmann- salamander-letter-bombings/)

Edit: even as a former Mormon, I find this history fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's a collector in Provo that has the original case files (including, I believe, DVD recordings) from his trials. (Source: I've seen the physical media.) There's a lot of answers to the public's common questions in there.

</comment><comment><USER9> The extent of Hoffman's forgery and its impact on LDS scholarship reminds me of Leopoldo Francioloni, a 19th century Italian antiques dealer who passed off so many fraudulent works that, per Wikipedia, "[t]o this day his work is a barrier to the scholarly study of instruments of the past."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldo_Franciolini](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldo_Franciolini)

</comment><comment><USER10> Attended BYU 1980 - 1984. I remember the headlines in the "Daily Universe" (campus newspaper) about Hoffman.

</comment><comment><USER10> Better info: [https://www.ioba.org/standard/2002/11/genuine-fakes-mark- hof...](https://www.ioba.org/standard/2002/11/genuine-fakes-mark-hoffman/)

<comment><USER11> If you believe the Wikipedia article to be inferior you can improve it.

<comment><USER12> The other article doesn't comply with wikipedia standards and those changes would be reverted

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It makes me wonder what other historical artifacts we believe are genuine are actually forgeries.

How was Hoffman able to forge letters that were supposedly 100+ years old? Wouldn't modern materials dating techniques reveal the fraud immediately?

<comment><USER14> He would take pages from old books. The blank pages at the start/end, etc. Not sure how he spoofed the ink

<comment><USER15> IIRC, you can either recreate the ink from a recipe, find old ink and re- dissolve it, or if you have the patience you can extract it from old pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "You bend the structure of reality too much... it snaps back at you"

</comment><comment><USER17> I prefer Erving Goffman.

<comment><USER18> Could you elaborate?</comment></comment>