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aarenon Ask HN: Location-independent entrepreneurs, where do you live and why?

You mind emailing me (in profile)? I'm looking for some Bali specific info - just want to work and surf basically :)

aarenon Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

Can you explain how land value tax relates to current UK council tax? Is CT just a really poorly implemented LVT and could LVT be implemented by modifying the existing CT system?

I advocate for LVT in the abstract but get stuck on explaining implementation in a relatable way.

p.s. really appreciate your persistent posting on this :)

aarenon Apple Jumps on the WebRTC Bandwagon

Is this basically the same as what Whonix does (routing through a dedicated gateway VM)?

http://whonix.org

aarenon HN: Please add Reddit style collapsible comments

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...

Sadly it doesn't work on android firefox.

aarenon Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

Sorry, I got excited and imprecise. I suppose I mean "developing on and around".

I'm just trying to counter the idea that the excitement around ethereum is somehow manufactured by 'clever marketing'.

aarenon Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

Are you suggesting that Consensys, Microsoft, R3CEV and Red Hat are only developing on Ethereum because of clever marketing? There isn't some technical merit to the platform that means they are doing this?

Why didn't these companies develop their products on Bitcoin? Are they incapable of due diligence in this space?

https://consensys.net/

http://www.blockapps.net/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/ethereum-blockchain-a...

https://consensys.net/static/blockappsRedhat.pdf

http://r3cev.com/

aarenon What future for BT and the UK's broadband?

Someone linked to B4RN [1] the other day: community owned, non profit, symmetric gigabit internet in the north west of England, for £30 / month.

If more of these networks spring up, then maybe something good will come of BT's tardiness in laying decent infrastructure. Granted, B4RN is strongly enabled by being able to easily lay fibre under farmland, but there are other models that are more appropriate in urban areas - see e.g. the guifi network [2] in Catalonia.

[1]: http://b4rn.org.uk [2]: http://guifi.net

aarenon Tails installer is now in Debian

This is a big improvement over the previous setup, but I feel that it could do with handling the most insecure part of the process: downloading and verifying the tails iso.

It would be great if this installer could leverage the trust I have in my system to painlessly acquire and then validate the tails iso, without having to deal with

I just tried feeding a regular debian iso to the installer and it didn't complain at all. This shouldn't be possible - what if this was a bad tails iso?

aarenon In Ecuador, the Frugal Traveler Tries Luxury

Is it easy to change the local 'dollars' for true US dollars? Is it 1:1 or are they less valuable?

aarenon After 60 Years, B-52s Still Dominate U.S. Fleet

"Fatal Terrain" is good as well. Released in 1997 so slightly more up to date. I read it hoping for fantastical descriptions of flying battleships hanging from a paper thin plot and was not remotely disappointed.

aarenon MH17 Report

The problem is complicated if we consider that the missile is moving at supersonic speeds (~mach 3 + aircraft speed).

I don't know much about supersonic fluids. For anyone interested in following this up, here is a paper on "Reproduction of Virtual Sound Sources Moving at Supersonic Speeds in Wave Field Synthesis":

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/230702229

aarenon MH17 Report

There were actually four microphones - captain, first officer, cockpit and observer (see page 46, Figure 9). Four receivers is sufficient to determine the sound origin at a point in space, with an associated error volume (three receivers only allows you to determine a curve in space).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration

aarenon “I have [bash] history back to ~2003”

Also have a look at fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

aarenon “I have [bash] history back to ~2003”

If you're going to store a lot of history, you might want something nicer than the standard ctrl-r to search it with.

[fzf] is ctrl-r on steroids.

[fzf]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

It's a fuzzy pattern matcher for your shell history (and lots more).

aarenon Ask HN: The Internet is getting lame. What's next?

What's your idea of expensive, just so I can calibrate against my corner of the UK?

aarenon Becoming a contractor programmer in the UK

Can you be more specific about the useful skills? Like a list, out of which you need 2 or 3. Would be good to know what specifically companies want you to be confident about :)

aarenon Becoming a contractor programmer in the UK

Any more specific advice on enforcing payment if you deliver the contract early?

aarenon GitHub and Jupyter IPython Notebooks

I wrote notedown precisely so that I could edit notebooks in my text editor and version control them as plain text.

It would be good to be able to transparently edit a .ipynb in a text editor - I've been meaning to wrap notedown in a vim plugin but haven't had time. This still leaves the version control problem though.

Note that I recently enabled the reverse (editing markdown in the browser as if it was a notebook), enabled by setting the following in ~/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_notebook_config.py (or similar):

    c.NotebookApp.contents_manager_class = 'notedown.NotedownContentsManager'

This is useful for more interactive work, e.g. iterating on plots, whilst still having everything stored in markdown. See [1] for more info.

[1]: https://github.com/aaren/notedown/issues/22

aarenon What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?

With the infrastructure described, I can imagine the turnover increasing as 'paper' length decreases. When there are lower barriers to sharing with other scientists perhaps the scientific method will become a more iterative and communal process: less cathedral, more bazaar.

aarenon A Scholarly Markdown

Yes, BlockQuote can be used as a generic block container. It doesn't have attributes itself but you can put them on a header at the start. For generic inline elements you can use Code.

Markdown syntax for generic containers (Div and Span) hasn't been implemented yet but the discussion is fairly mature now:

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/168

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/pull/1791

aarenon A Scholarly Markdown

First: I'm not sure of the exact origins of things. The way I see it, academic markdown is more of an ecosystem of tools with a lot of overlap. There is no one single markdown workflow right now when you want to do do academic writing. I think this is because no one is sure what the final spec should look like and people are trying things out and seeing what sticks. I feel that there has been some convergence in the last 2/3 years though.

Second: The PR for image attributes is here: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/pull/1806

There isn't a PR for internal referencing yet because the implementation hasn't been worked out yet and it isn't a simple change (should there be a native representation, should it be a filter, which syntax should we use, what about the existing citation syntax...).

aarenon A Scholarly Markdown

This is a fork because making these changes to pandoc itself needs a lot of consideration.

Internal referencing and attributes on figures are two things that are currently being discussed for pandoc. The discussion has been going on for quite a while though - hence people making forks.

Discussion on internal referencing: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/813

Discussion on image attributes: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/261

aarenon A Scholarly Markdown

Pandoc filters let you do a lot of things provided you stick to the defined types. If you want to add new types of element, like this does, then the only practical way is a fork.

(except for really simple cases)

aarenon GitLab 7.8 release

Thanks for the offer. I'm completely pro unix! The problem is more with presenting this in an enterprise palatable way - VMs are a bit of a grey area.

aarenon GitLab 7.8 release

Do you have any plans for a windows installer?

The alternative to Gitlab that I've found on windows are a bit lacking. Bonobo is nice but very basic.

aarenon An Investor Wanted to Give Me $50,000. Here’s Why I Said No

Personally I find his exchanges tedious and draining, but to each their own.

aarenon Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, Not Places

Regarding the circulation problem, you might want to look at the 'ecofan':

http://www.ecofan.co.uk/woodstove-ecofans.html

It's a heatsink with a peltier sandwiched in the middle that drives a fan. Works pretty well for wood burners. Also it's just fun to get electrical energy from your stove :)

aarenon CrunchBang Linux: The end

I dist-upgraded to Jessie from my working Waldorf system (using now). It was a little faffy, but not too bad.

One problem I've got is black internal borders on some of my menus (e.g. network-manager panel menu), but it doesn't affect me much and I really can't be bothered to read the docs to sort it out. Any ideas?

This was the good thing about Crunchbang: a lightweight debian install that looked good and needed hardly any configuration to work well.

aarenon A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn

That £13k is a tax-free stipend. You don't have to pay income tax and some other things (e.g. an all student house pays no council tax). When you work out the equivalent taxed income that would reduce to that stipend, it approaches £20k.

aarenon Sed – An Introduction and Tutorial

This could change your life:

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

It's a fuzzy searcher for Ctrl-r that shows all possible results, updating as you type.