benrbray

Zotero is the open source [1] alternative, to Elsevier's Mendeley.

[1] https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/source_code

You've never been to Atlanta!

Why even bother changing countries then?!?!

Homosexuality is still illegal, isn't it?

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

> In June 2019, at the Smart Nation Summit, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong reiterated that Singapore would keep Section 377A "for some time" saying, "Whatever your sexual orientation is, you're welcome to come and work in Singapore... You know our rules in Singapore. It is the way this society is: We are not like San Francisco, neither are we like some countries in the Middle East. [We are] something in between, it is the way the society is."[13][14]

Singapore is pretty awful for LGBTQ rights, no? OP didn't mention it but it's the reason I would never consider living there despite having heard nice things.

Atlanta is second to maybe only LA in terms of how bad the traffic gets. Neighborhood streets backed up with highway traffic bad. Definitely not the place to look if cars stress you out like they do for me. On the bright side living there disillusioned me about American cities and now I live happily car free in Tokyo :)

What techniques are used to estimate trajectories? Would something like a Gaussian Process perform better?

> Why not ePUB

ePUB is notoriously bad at displaying mathematics. It also takes away the author's control of the page layout. To me there is nothing more satisfying than a well-crafted PDF.

fwiw I just quit my first full-time job out of school in part because remote work has really held back my productivity + career growth. I started in May 2020 and have only met my coworkers a handful of times, and it's depressing. Among the students and early-career tech workers I know, working-from-home is almost universally a negative rather than a positive.

However much Flash was abused on the web, it was an absolute joy to create games and animations with. There aren't any tools I know of today that allow for the same rapid art+animation+code workflows. I've tried using Canvas2D+JS as well as SVG+JS to do some of the same things, and they don't even come close to Flash!

I'm not saying that parents don't matter, just that teachers _do_ matter. Both play an important role in setting expectations. Someone with bad parents and bad teachers is likely to have a rough start in life. Having good teachers can give children with bad parents a fighting chance.

Of course, in the US many people strongly in parental control, to the point that you need permission slips to discuss simple facts about the human body or climate change. Sometimes these cultural challenges make it difficult to be a good teacher.

Surely in your own life you've had teachers that really stood out? Ones that made learning especially fun or effortless? Who are good at showing you how the knowledge can be useful in the real world?

A lot of people seem to have this idea that there's no such thing as a bad teacher (especially when that teacher has a PhD), but to accept that you must also accept that there's no such thing as a good teacher either. All that matters is showing up to class, no matter how the teacher chooses to present the material?

I agree with your point about not blaming teachers for factors beyond their control, but let's not forget that when students spend most of their lives at school, teachers can play a big role in fostering a positive learning culture.

A child raised by American parents who attends a school in Japan (where students are expected to, for example, clean their own classrooms) will have a dramatically different experience than if they attend an American school.

I recently had to choose between two job offers, and language was among the most important (although not the only) factors. I ended up choosing the job that lets me write functional Scala, rather than continue writing Python, which has been a major source of frustration in my current job.

A better analogy might be a carpenter who chooses to build houses in the traditional nail-free Japanese joinery style, vs the American nails-everywhere style.

Most of the advice on that page is about using the correct semantic HTML elements as well as aria annotations, which is what I had in mind. Basically the appearance should stay the same, but I can definitely see how fixing up the HTML could make the page more navigable by keyboard / screen reader / etc..

I'm saying we shouldn't make things substantially worse for 95% of people just to make things marginally better for 5%. Usually "accessibility" on the web means adding 1em padding around everything so that I can only see one comment at time on my 39" monitor.

The parent comment mentioned CSS changes, but I basically think the appearance should stay the same, and any accessibility improvements can probably be accomplished by changing the HTML for better screen reader compatibility, if needed.

HN is one of the best designed websites I use daily. The information density is unmatched on the "modern" web.

> Has anyone here even written to their senator?

Can anyone point to a change or sacrifice a senator has made to their beliefs after receiving a letter? I'm guessing a check would be more persuasive.

You might be interested to learn that in languages like Coq with dependent types, the difference between type-level and value-level languages (almost) disappears! Check out the Software Foundations book [1].

[1] https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/

Something intersting about MathOverflow is that it started as an independent site, with the creators eventually agreeing to make it part of the StackExchange network. I believe part of the agreement allows the owners of MathOverflow to break off from the main site again, in the event of a major disagreement between MO and SE. I'm sure they're glad to have an escape hatch given the recent aquisition!

Has this "Web3 is DRM" argument been written up in more detail somewhere? The idea already seems silly to me as just crypto hype, but I haven't considered that there might be more sinister intentions behind it.

Companies don't seem to treat it like an important document. I can't tell you how many times an interviewer seemed to be reading my resume for the very first time during the interview itself...

Can anyone more familiar with control theory recommend some simple projects / applications / simulations that might help learn more about this field? I've been interested in control theory for a while and I have a rough understanding of the math involved, but I feel like I need to tinker with something to really understand it!

As an example, I recently wanted to watch The West Wing. I pay for Netflix and Hulu already, but the show is only on HBO Max. OK, fine, I guess I'll pay for a month of HBO like I've done before to watch Game of Thrones.

Ok, uh, what's it called now? HBO Go? HBO Now? Oh, HBO Max, ok. I live in Japan now, so I'm region-blocked, great. Time to open the VPN. HBO already seems to know that server #1243 is a VPN, but server #849 works OK for now.

Ok, time to create an account. "Account with that email already exists"? Ok, so let's log in using my old HBO Go credentials. Looks like there's some kind of account migration problem and the account is stuck in the "account verification" phase but I can't get it to send me a new verification email. There's a little pop-up chat window for the support team, let's try it. Three separate support agents and thirty minutes later, I have a working verification email. But my payment information is out of date. OK, let's update it. HTTP 505 error. Wonderful.

Ok, that's enough: Type "West Wing season 1 episode 1" into Google. Thirty seconds later I'm watching in full HD and there's popcorn in the microwave.

Newgrounds created Ruffle [1], which is a Flash Player emulator written in Rust. Now that Flash is disabled by default, they use it to keep some (but not all) of their archive of Flash movies and games running.

[1] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

Do you remember any interesting papers / articles on the topic? Googling brings me back to this comment!

For me, typesetting my handwritten notes was part of the learning process. Usually one textbook is not enough for me, I always reference multiple sources (textbook, lecture notes, blog posts, homework problems) when learning so it's helpful to put a condensed version of everything in one place. Textbooks usually have a lot of fluff. My personal notes are also really helpful as reference material later -- three months from now I probably won't remember anything that I read today.

Tries are also perfect for solving games of Boggle! I have a demo here: https://benrbray.com/projects/unboggler

> Didn’t you still have to stamp the actual lease contract ?

Not a big deal, it plays the same role as signatures do in the US. Only very recently did we stop having to sign credit card receipts here!

Agreed, I did the same! I do still get fatigued wearing them, but it takes a bit longer. I love it for city walks / cycling where it's important to be aware of my surroundings.