JohnHammersley

From the article it sounds like these drawings were commissioned by MI5 (the British Intelligence service) to document and raise awareness of the booby-trapped devices.

"The drawings were made by a young artist called Laurence Fish for MI5's counter-sabotage unit."

More details in the full editorial piece: https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.46/

This looks pretty cool! Is there any chance you could include an example or two on the website? I clicked on the learn more button and was only presented with a field to enter my email address. It would be helpful to see an example of what I might be getting, before signing up.

(and from a service point of view, it would help people avoid being disappointed / annoyed if they didn't get what they were expecting!)

The original link gives the context to this paper that was released on Sept 16: http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.04776

Thanks for both these extra links -- I missed the previous HN discussion (of the paper) due to searching for Van Gogh / Picasso rather than anything else.

Whilst I agree the Washington Post article is rather lacking in technical details, it does provide a pretty nice visual idea of what the paper is about, which I think helps (and this comment thread means people can now find the paper very easily too!).

Thanks, that's great to hear! :) I'm impressed you used your thesis as a testbed for cloud-based software, hope it didn't cause any/too much additional stress! If you generated any datasets during your work, you may also want to check out figshare[1] as a handy data repository.

[1] http://figshare.com/

(Note - we work in the same office as figshare, so this is probably a biased recommendation!)

It's interesting seeing the different approaches to combining the power of a structured formatting language with the ease of use of a (relatively code free) text editor.

I'm one of the founders of Overleaf [1], and we've taken the route of keeping the full power of LaTeX there for anyone that needs it, but providing a 'Rich Text mode' [2] overlay for those who prefer a less code-like experience. If you give it a try, let us know what you think!

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

[2] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81

Congratulations! Just added a contribution from the Overleaf[1] team who've been great admirers (and supporters) of CodeMirror -- it's a great editor and I look forward to seeing where ProseMirror goes! :)

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

That was pretty much my reaction too...the basic tutorial seems a little lacking in actual instructions.

Could anyone who understands it shed some light on what's going on?

This is excellent! I love recreations of illusions such as this -- a friend of mine's PhD student once knitted a klein bottle of all things!!! Pic here: https://www.filepicker.io/api/file/dBRNg4lwQVKJ1r8ziQNi

There are also a lot of cool optical illusions you can recreate in your browser - e.g. https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/tagged/illusions

(I'm one of the founders of Overleaf, so any feedback much appreciated, thanks!)

Good luck! I know how hard a problem this is, as I was part of the team that worked on the driverless taxis now operating at Heathrow airport[1] (and which have safely carried over a million people since launch).

You might also find the company's library of research papers a useful reference [2].

Looking forward to seeing your progress!

[1] http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/

[2] http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/about-us/library/papers/

Firstly, thanks for helping spread the word about Overleaf, that's much appreciated! If you're still demoing with it, feel free to join our Advisors programme [1] (it comes with a free Pro+ account amongst other things!)

Be very interested to hear how you get on with your current paper -- it is one you're working on independently or do you have co-authors? If it's the latter, do you have a workflow for handling the collaboration?

Thanks also for the note about Pollen, will take a look at it in the morning!

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/advisors

That's a good summary, and the ability to easily convert to e.g. html is definitely a plus point for markdown. I always find however that I'd rather either work in html (for any web content), LaTeX (for any research papers or lengthy docs) or plain text (for notes)... I never found markdown quite useful enough in any of those cases (it has been a while since I last gave it a serious test though).

Yes, I can see where markdown is a good middle ground for that type of regular, consistent content. Out of curiosity, did you have to set up templates for the content to help the non-technical users, or was a markdown tutorial enough?

I'm curious as to the percentage of users here that use Markdown regularly? I'm one of the founders of Overleaf, and we've found that our users tend to either want to be able to edit in full LaTeX or want to avoid the need to code even in markdown (hence the reason we built a rich text layer for overleaf[1])

If you do use Markdown regularly, how often does it allow you to do everything you need (i.e. how often do you have to switch to something else)?

Feedback appreciated, thanks.

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81

You might like to check out https://www.overleaf.com as a collaborative LaTeX editor, and we now have an integration with services such as Plot.ly[1] and Mendeley[2] to make it easy to pull in figures and references.

Feedback very welcome -- I'm one of the co-founders and we're continually developing the platform to better serve researchers and student authors.

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/201-reproducible-and-collabora...

[2] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/184-mendeley-integration-is-he...

Thanks -- yes, I believe he's used Overleaf in his workshops for the past couple of years (starting back when we were called writeLaTeX). The Tufte handout and book templates are ones we use again and again when we're asked for examples of such layouts, and they're very popular.

As an interesting tidbit re Overleaf, we recently passed the 3 billion pages compiled mark :) If you stacked up all those pages, you'd have a pile that's (roughly!) the height of Pluto: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/219-youve-created-three-millio...

I agree -- I use that template for writing most of my documents now.

It's also available to try out online on Overleaf if you don't fancy installing LaTeX: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/handout-design-insp...

(Note: I'm one of the co-founders of Overleaf, so any feedback appreciated, thanks!)

The questions in the article are only a taster of what Daniel Kahneman explored in his research -- and it's amazing such simple ideas took so long to be realized!

If you only ever read one of my HN posts, I recommend reading this one (because reading the book quoted in the article - "Thinking, Fast and Slow" - has changed my views on decision making and the human brain).

I've upvoted you because, whilst it may not have been the most useful way of putting it, I agree that luck plays a large part (and I'm a founder myself). As others have pointed out though, there are a lot of things you can do to try to maximize your chances of being 'lucky', and a lot of good advice for founders is essentially this.

For those interested in reading more about the role of luck (amongst other very interesting discussions about how we make decisions), I'd heartily recommend reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman (and "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb too as a nice complement).

On a related note, a really cool thing happened at a conference I went to last year -- there was an artist in the audience who sketched the talks as they were given to produce a single page thought-bubble summary!! They looked amazing, and generated a lot of discussion in the pub afterwards :)

Not sure if they're all online, but the one of me is here: https://www.filepicker.io/api/file/TIBDmf66Q5WPBF3ZBzKY

PS: Thanks re writeLaTeX -- exciting times ahead (we relaunched as Overleaf at the start of the year and things are growing pretty quickly!)

This is a pretty cool thing to decide to do, and even more impressive to be able to pull it off. Here's the link to her site with more details on the "Atomic Size Matters" comic she created: http://www.veronicaberns.com/atomicsizematters/

To add some context, F1000Research is one of the few (only?) journals which operates a post-publication, fully open peer review process; articles are published immediately at the point of submission (after a light editorial check for issues such as missing data sources), and are then subjected to invited, open peer review, where the reviews are published alongside the article.

They've just had a major upgrade and now accept slides and posters as well as articles. Details on the upgrade here: http://blog.f1000research.com/2015/07/09/the-new-f1000resear...

Woo hoo! What amazing news, especially given the difficulties during the landing.

For those who didn't see the original coverage, you can see some brilliant photos of the bounce the lander made during it's landing on the comet here: http://www.space.com/27788-philae-comet-landing-bounce-photo...

Also a hat tip to the earlier missions (such as the Beagle probe that was lost on Mars) which emphasized the importance of retaining radio contact for as long as possible during landing and being able to send and receive commands with the minimum amount of hardware reconfiguration once landed.

What a fantastic start to Sunday!

Hi Fractal - one of the Overleaf founders here. SL is great, and had a very nice editor, but there are a few differences between it and Overleaf:

- Rich text mode on Overleaf makes it a lot easier to collaborate with colleagues who would otherwise be put off by a wall of LaTeX code.

- Automatic compiling on Overleaf - you don't need to manually hit compile, we do it automatically. This makes it easier for authors new to LaTeX as errors can't build up

- Unlimited collaborators - share the project with as many people as you like.

- Direct links to publishers to help streamline the submission process for academic papers.

Feedback always very welcome! Lots of different ways to approach this, and we're continuing to build and improve on the service.

Spotted thanks to this tweet: https://twitter.com/liantze/status/590175356784631808

The key point that "The email client we built wasn't good enough for even us, the founders, to use ourselves." is buried in the middle, but essentially sums up the post -- if you can't / don't build something (quickly) that you use yourself, you're unlikely to be on the right track.

It's also a lot easier to get started with LaTeX than it used to be -- e.g. with cloud-based compilers such as Overleaf (https://www.overleaf.com) which remove the need to get everything installed and working locally before you can try it out.

(Note: I'm one of the co-founders of Overleaf, so any feedback is appreciated, thanks. My co-founder has also put together this free introductory course for anyone that's looking to give LaTeX a try: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/learn/free-online-introductio...)

We've developed a LaTeX-based platform (https://www.overleaf.com) exactly for this type of audience :)