Cynddl

I found biking in London much easier than in many large European cities, especially since a large fraction of drivers keep enough space on the left for bikers to pass, making commute fast even in heavy traffic. In France or Belgium on the contrary, you often have to slalom between cars, either on the left or on the right.

I wouldn't say it's much safer in London, but definitely a little more than Brussels for instance, where many small streets are a nightmare.

Same in France. I've never bought a single textbook, as we either had to take notes during classes, or study documents printed by professors for us. Many professors would actually either write handouts notes, or ask student at some point to write one and would let anyone download it the years after.

They sometimes recommended books for us, that were sold for 30-40 € in any library.

I don't understand the article. They explain than going in and out of the airport is burdersome, and that taking the Eurostar from London to Amsterdam is a much better experience, except for the change in Brussels

A London to Amsterdam is currently 4 hours and 38 minutes (incl. a 47min change in Brussels). With a propre planning between Eurostar and Thalys, the route could be done in less than four hours.

Taking a flight, on the contrary, will likely be much longer if you include the time to go to the airport, arrive 90 minutes in advance, and the time to leave airport in Amsterdam. Eurostar seem to have a clear advantage here, with prices often competitive, especially if you include Snap tickets.

> The simple fact is, if you drink untreated water, you’re taking on a non-negligible amount of risk.

I wonder how much the propensity for American backpackers to filter water comes from the actual risk faced while drinking water in US rivers, and how much come from the crazy risk aversion in the US society nowadays. In Norway or Sweden, backpackers often don't carry water bottles and drink directly from the river with a cup. In France, I've never met someone filtering water.

The same way, parents can't let their children play outside or go to school alone in the US, while it's often the norm in many parts of Europe. There is indeed a “non-negligible” risk, but individuals put the threshold higher.

It can actually be considered as a form of harassement or defamation. While it might be a gray area in the US, it is likely not going to be the same in Europe.

If you were expecting anything more than Google trying to k-anonymize your datasets, you will be disappointed.

“K-anonymity was born out of a desire both to quantify the re-identifiability of a dataset, and to balance the usefulness of de-identified people data and the privacy of the people whose data is being used.”

Researchers have also shown recently that many high-dimensional datasets (mobile phone metadata, online ratings, etc.) cannot be de-identified without loosing all their utility [1, 2, 3]. In that case, there is no distinction between quasi-identifiers and sensitive data. All the information in the dataset can be used to identify an individual. De-identification algorithms such as the one used here make strong assumptions that the data collector knows which information can and cannot be used to re-identify individuals.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376

[3] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221/536.full

The deletion page she refers to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

Seems like a reasonable debate.

I still find that Louvain-la-Neuve have failed to build a city for cyclists, but I can't pinpoint exactly why. There are very few people who bike there, almost zero bike parkings despite being a car-free city. The city is small but still, some places are quite far by foot (>30 minutes walking from one side to the other).

> Our computations show that trapdoored primes are entirely feasible with current computing technology.

Can anyone explain to me what is the risk with such trapdoored primes? Thanks!

Despite the title, the article raises an interesting point: why do we prefer new code, with less features, to old but robust projects.

> Unfortunately, we were affected by cognitive bias: old code is bad code. But the truth can be the opposite. The old code is battle-tested by thousands of users in hundreds of different projects. Most of the critical bugs have been fixed, the documentation is complete, there are tons of questions and answers on StackOverflow and Quora.

I'm quite guilty here; I've realized that I always check the date of the last commit on Github before testing a project. I feel like I do this more for small projects where documentation and use cases might be missing, and for which I'm expecting help from the community.

There is also pyinfra [1], which provides the same sort of features for both local and remote devices, yet designed for consistent deployments and state diffing.

[1] https://github.com/Fizzadar/pyinfra

I'm not sure when the website was built, but it seems relevant to share it. The content is well presented and their FAQ section really clear, amazing job!

That's a interesting study about strong and weak ties on Facebook. I wonder if the result apply (or not) for other social networks, and what is the impact of recommendation algorithms on our own information retrieval.

Thanks!

Posted six months ago on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8525237.

> We will soon release the implementations for these algorithms described.

I would like to see them now.

> Improbable was started three years ago […]

That sounds like a wonderful project. Alas, not a lot of details on their website/blog. I found this talk on their Facebook page:

https://youtu.be/1fpaoKLxSE4

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9184479 from two days ago for more context.

Its name is http://openpds.media.mit.edu, developed at MIT.

OpenPDS is a service acting as a middle datastore, between the user (who can even host the service themselves), and the data consumers. The key issue here is to guarantee privacy, by responding with ‘SafeAnswers’ to the queries of external services. It's a WIP, but free and open source.

I thought that websites forbidding selection and right-click were a thing of the past, I was wrong.

A CRM platform? An automated billing API? Every possible API?

> The research has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, meaning the claims cannot be independently verified or the methodology scrutinised.

Why? It's still written somewhere.

“paulgraham.com is a parked domain.”

Not the same rules. :)

We should not be able to make new card appear when no other one can move.

Did you read the description of Threema before commenting? Hangout and Facebook don't provide a secure text messaging scheme like this one or Telegram.

Hi Gilles, could you put the files directly into (at least) one branch? And then, why not one branch per language (Ruby/PHP/…)?

It would be easier to see the files directly with Github. And Github can manage releases directly from the git repository.

"No 24h time limit. No pain. Yes, with $18,000 in prizes.."

A bitcoin hackathon with prizes in dollar? Even if the winners are rewarded in bitcoin, it's still weird.

Seems really good! Are you planning to compare it with other CMS (especially Django-CMS)? I would like to see its performances (with or without varnish).

Would you like to add OAuth support or other auth mechanisms like CAS? =) I didn't find documentation for the "WAGTAIL_PASSWORD_MANAGEMENT_ENABLED" option.

Well, the bullet check is easily feasible. "Too much text" and "difficult words" too.

Check https://github.com/johnwhitington/camlpdf, which does a really good job to parse PDF files properly.

We use Gitlab for about 30 people. The last versions are really neat. The UX is perhaps better with Github, but Gitlab is easier to learn and use, especially for small organisations.

I am always reluctant to use "clones" like gitbucket... If the usage is not the same, why making a clone? Indeed, it is always easier to copy a brand but is it worthwhile?

"INTERVIEWER:: Where do you see Microsoft in ten years?

GATES: Our goals are very simple. We’re going to create the software that puts a computer on every desk and in every home. I don’t know if that’ll take ten years–that’s not my expertise, guessing those exact time frames. Microsoft also wants to participate in helping to make sure those machines are good machines, building the system software into them, and then doing a lot of the important applications they’ll use."