tfm

Doesn't seem to matter whether the author already knew that she had a knack for talking to strangers without appearing crazy, or held with the "general assumption" and was genuinely surprised when the experiment turned out well. The important thing is that it worked!

Now, perhaps it will not work so well for every person. Perhaps in the general case people will instead recoil in horror at being approached nicely for small interesting favours. Perhaps a more universal lesson to take away from this is that success is more likely if you play to your strengths, and push every advantage at your disposal. The author is a Cambridge Law graduate, so one might safely presume reasonably skilled at speaking - I'm not exactly sure how surprised she was that she could engage strangers in professional conversation at a coffee shop - but the experiment is available for others to replicate! I'm not sure what parameters would have to be changed for the interaction to take on a "dramatically different character" though, maybe don't get drunk beforehand.

It certainly depends a lot on the type of publication (and the nature of the article).

The treatment of articles upon which publishers "choose not to proceed" is very important knowledge going in. Perusing the whopayswriters JSON feed* there is a wide variety of behaviour described, not all of it making everyone look good.

* In the absence of full-text search, left as an exercise to the reader

It is a cancellation fee for freelancers - if the publication sees your work and decides not to run it, you get the kill fee and you're free to shop the story to other publications. The fee is specified in the contract, commonly 25% but rarely higher.

The vague intention of the kill fee is as insurance against an article being a bad fit, but generally the contract wording is intentionally vague. You can imagine any number of abuses by unscrupulous publishers who have the option to solicit far more material than they intend to publish.

An analogous situation might be a software house outsourcing a task for a flat fee, then dickering around with payment and eventually announcing they've decided your software doesn't pass their new test suite and you can accept a 75% pay cut or gtfo. Bear in mind that day rates for writers aren't what they used to be, and generally can't do a great deal of investigative journalism in your pyjamas.

Having been on several projects that required such lists, I'm glad that such a repo exists, but be aware that it is just the tip of the iceberg. Stakeholders emerge from the woodwork: such and such on the delivery team had a terrible experience before so we should include these words, HR and marketing have company-specific lists to merge in, some of the producers have unsettlingly precise and revelatory requirements ...

Agreed. I love me all the Unicodes, all the time! For typing, for display, for whatever internal app logic, variable names, the names of children etc.

The IRI RFC does however specify that for transmission/interchange the IRIs need to be percent-encoded to form valid URIs. That's pretty straightforward! A good user agent will fully transcode whatever characters I type in the address bar, generating a valid IRI. A bad user agent will complain and say that whatever it was I typed was very nice but not a valid interweb, and I have a bad day. A broken user agent may generate some broken encoding (or just pass on whatever I typed in UTF-8 or CP-1252), and some web admins may have a bad day, if they weren't already.

But the location bar is not the only place that URLs come from (less and less every day). When a web application (e.g. 301 redirect) or a resource (e.g. external document reference) uses an RFC-3987 noncompliant identifier, just how far should the user-agent bend over backwards to fetch the resource? Some browsers seem to do a lot, but it's not clearly documented just how much (see elsewhere in the comments), and among the article's laments was the observation that when any browser accepts dodgy identifiers, it places a burden on everyone else to accept the same.

Seems that WHATWG hopes to formally codify just how dodgy you can get away with without the identifier being "too dodgy", but I get the impression that this will be an expansive definition ("hey, if they did it, you can do it! we believe in you"). This is an understandable approach, as they are trying to document the state of the web, but it does put extra burden onto anyone dealing methodically with URLs henceforth, rather than being strict and drawing some clear boundaries up for people constructing URLs. I'm expecting to see a lot of "SHOULD" and not a lot of "MUST NOT" :-/

RDF on the not-so-cheap? Real-time profiling of the internal Factory code by keeping track of every attribute and running a bunch of exciting INSERT hooks?

I have seen this pattern before, it comes when somebody is sick of having to adjust their database schema every time somebody comes up with a new user attribute that they absolutely definitely need to keep audited. Now you can add whatever "columns" you like, boss!

It is good to have clarity on how WHATWG is working. Thankyou! Sounds like an HTML5 style treatment of the problem.

I'm not clear though why the effective starting point is the superset of all variants currently implemented by one of the involved parties. Given that the extant standards are quite strict, couldn't an argument be made that the "burden of proof" would be on why these needed to be extended, on a case by case basis?

Regardless of the particular agreements reached, an up-to-date standard will certainly benefit everyone; it seems like it would be an excellent outcome if the standard came with a reference implementation too :-)

That's some pretty useful documentation there. I hope that it at least forms part of a submission to the WHATWG folks.

When the robustness principle meets the tragedy of the commons, good people get driven to the brink of madness.

There are surely arguments for allowing any old garbage in URLs/URIs/IRIs - hey, it's easy and fun! - but, gee, it's not like bunging an identifier through a URI escape function is going to triple the code base.

Compare that with the surface area for potential bugs in the parsing code which somehow didn't account for several megabytes of whitespace embedded in a URL or multiple code pages in a single string or whatever zalgoesque horror is showing up on the security bulletins this week. It's a lot easier to proof code that only needs to deal with a strict subset of 7-bit clean ASCII and can politely decline embedded emojis.

When one web client starts being overly zealous in what it accepts, that puts an implicit onus on everybody else to start accepting that too ("all browsers do"!). Where would you draw the line? Well, we've got a couple of RFCs lying around, how about we go with those.

This stuff doesn't have to be hard. Surely the act of issuing an HTTP redirect isn't the Last Great Unsolved Problem of web engineering! I say rejoice in the beauty of URIs in canonical form. Be miserly in what you accept for a change.

Certainly would be a very odd control group!

Journal article just specifies 80 children, of which 48 were boys, so that would be an arithmetic problem at the WSJ. Lucky they don't deal with numbers on a regular basis :-/ Corrections email address: wsjcontact@wsj.com

What's in a name? That which we call a boat etc etc. "Silly" isn't necessarily a bad thing, although the term does seem to be used pejoratively.

As for recent college graduates, they might well take a look at the swift mending hands of bureaucracy in this situation, and draw some pretty accurate conclusions about the stiff deeply unsilly hierarchy under which they'd be working.

Another beautiful misdirect from the science correspondents :-) One might reasonably argue that the onus would be on the headline writers there to lend the appropriate gravitas.

On the other hand ... there'd still be more publicity for the research programme. How much coverage was there for the prosaically named Ocean Researcher V when it sank, resulting in death of two researchers?

This is the internet, people will always be pissed off.

We'll see how long it takes for news sources to stop reporting the journeys of the "RRS David Attenborough nee Boaty McBoatface".

I was disappointed that there is no live traffic view available around the Gigafactory [0], but filled with joy to see that its access road is named Electric Avenue.

Previous reports seem to indicate that the workers may be at the factory for 20 hours a day, so perhaps they're all sleeping next to Elon in burlap sacks to cut down on congestion?

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@39.5375576,-119.4397724,14.46z/...

... not to mention, each of them might feel some small measure of empathy for the other!

What if one did this regularly? Would battle-hardened cloners become insensitive to "retirement" of their doppelgangers, or as the last survivor of the series of slayings would they start to feel hunted?

Really feels at least a few centuries too early to even gauge whether it is possible to substantially capture (let alone reproduce) the state of a brain. Sure would be disappointing if it turned out you could get 90% of the functionality with a ten-state DFA featuring frowning and pooping, but it would make cryonics a whole lot easier. "Just leave me enough brainstem to get home."

I saw the link to 1729 and the rest of the links to the Mathematica wormhole and noted (but resisted) the opportunity to go exploring. As it was it they were largely inline. That's some pretty subtle calls-to-action, marketing folks can't be happy with that. Whither the shaded buttons? Whither the popovers?

Wolfram's efforts to relate how Ramanujan's maths differ from the mainstream were certainly worth the price of admission. He spent a lot more time fleshing out several of the other historical figures than his own background; possibly he could have mentioned more people who are currently working in this exploratory mathematics, perhaps that's another post. Maybe we can take this for what it is, and precisely what one has come to expect from Wolfram – nerdy native advertising, in the form of a well-researched long-form essay by a dude with subject-matter expertise. If he starts skipping the inline links we'll know that he's secretly divested shares.

Well, you're defining "us" too broadly. If you redefine it as students vs National Guard then it's not hypocritical at all, just ghastly.

It is a difficult line to toe. Obviously if their primary objective is to raise awareness of the (continuing) existence of the boat, BMcBF is a winner, and there are numerous cash-in opportunities such as those you suggest. If done right it might not even look cynical!

If on the other hand giving it a silly name "dilutes their brand" (to use an HN favourite) then they're going to do the stuffy thing. Not entirely sure why folks would be surprised at a Conservative minister taking a conservative approach...

Really seems that SCIENCE does a lot better in the public eye at the moment when it goes populist rather than cloistered, but here we are...

It doesn't really seem in this case that the budget overrun is the most controversial bit. The sting in the tail is that it resulted in the duplication of existing bus routes with an infrequent service and a comparable travel time. As an MVP it is terrible - what would the Show HN comments be like? "did you even identify your target market?"

The more disappointing part is that it tends to poison the well for ambitious public transport projects in future. That Leith extension will come some time after the Last Trumpet.

But, you know, just as long as RBS got their lovely public funded tram linking Gogar Deathstar to town then it was all worth it.

Maybe think of it by analogy. Suppose my compression format (dibs, patent pending) is an uncompressed RGB pixel list, stored in a ZIP archive. Let's call that SuperCompress Level 0.

I can improve the compression a little by rounding the pixel intensities in the pixmap, e.g. clearing all low bits. Call that SuperCompress Level 1. This operation is idempotent: you can't throw away the same data multiple times, so there's no generational loss. More importantly, the resulting data is completely compatible with SuperCompress Level 0, because the "lossy encoding" (rounding our numbers) is decoupled from the "lossless compression" (ZIPping!). This is effectively what FLIF and TruePNG/near_lossless-WebP are doing.

NOTE though that even our archetypal lossy JPEG image _can_ be re-encoded without generational loss: if you use the same quantisation tables and the same pixel alignment, and you haven't fiddled with the pixel intensities, then subsequent encodings don't throw away anything you haven't discarded already. If however you save it with a different quality each time then you'll find yourself with jarring Cubist-style artefacts. Proponents of lossless image formats are well-versed in this technique ;-)

Generational loss emerges from destructive changes that are not really related to the image format. If the only changes you're doing are cropping images on 8x8 pixel boundaries, then JPEG compression at a fixed quality is effectively "generationally lossless". Gamma/colour corrections applied to an image are at least a little bit lossy in any format, because there are rounding errors inherent in that process. Compositing image regions is also hugely destructive, but (assuming suitable alignment and encoder options) there will be generational loss around the boundaries of the regions while the interiors remain unchanged.

Realistically, most Egregious JPEG Artefacts result from resizing and/or cropping the image, then re-saving repeatedly. That's 90% of the internet, and probably another 9.9% if we throw in "adding a sassy caption in Impact Bold". This is unfortunate because it really plays to JPEG's weaknesses. If the "lossy preprocessing step" implemented in FLIF (or the other lossless formats) is robust against that particular abuse then it could be immensely useful.

"Putting an astronomical telescope in space was a natural solution, and it followed directly—and, according to some, very directly—from the spy satellite program."

Can anyone expand upon this? I know the NRO has recently donated some of its old gear to NASA, but is there much cross-pollination between the space-operating agencies?

And yet anonymity on the interwebs tends to have the same crappening effect on Real Humans. How would a "Turing test compatible" version of the real name policy work?

OT but apt to this community - That's what I thought, but after a lifetime of 'correcting' people, I looked up the definition of sarcasm. Turns out that the sarcastic-sounding truths I'd been deploying for decades were indeed by-the-book sarcasm rather than 'I can't believe it's not sarcasm'.

Key quote from brilliant word-talking-guy Henry Fowler: "Sarcasm does not necessarily involve irony [but it often does] ... The essence of sarcasm is the intention of giving pain by (ironical or other) bitter words."

So, we circle back to Node.js by way of pain and bitterness. Sounds about right.

A few hundred years of brilliant minds throwing themselves at it didn't find anything simpler than Wiles' approach, and now that the first proof has been found it seems fairly unlikely that any serious science will get expended specifically towards finding another proof of the Theorem.

Lots of fresh crackpot non-proofs available, though, if you're into those! There are plenty of simply-stated problems in number theory that do not yield to straightforward proof, but Fermat hit marketing gold by saying that he had such a proof already. Who wouldn't want to think that a few years of the common core gives you at least the mathematical skills of a 17th century fancylad?

A common theory about Fermat's claimed "proof" is that he mistakenly assumed that the technique he used to prove the cases for n=3 and n=4 (he called it "infinite descent", basically proof by induction + contradiction) would generalise to higher n. You might broadly think of it like saying "I have a technique for finding prime numbers! You take any integer then double it and add one". Well, you get lucky for a few cases but the machinery isn't there at the back end. Long and short of it is that until some magnificent new areas of the science open up, Wiles' proof is probably the simplest we're likely to get; indeed it doesn't get much simpler than just citing it [Wiles 1995].

BTW there's a pretty great blog at http://fermatslasttheorem.blogspot.co.uk/ which tries to present Wiles' theorem in bite-size chunks, if you're interested in exploring whether you'd regard it as truly marvellous.

> A quality, trustworthy third-party network

I'm sure that most networks start off with such lofty ideals, maybe they even believe them ... :-o

EDIT: To expand a little on the previous thought: you were shocked that the BBC website was serving up dodgy ads, presuming maybe that they'd have their own curated advertising portfolio. Closest comparison I can think of is perhaps the Economist website, also London-based, and no small prestige branding that they make sure to protect by only showing ads for Lexuses and Rolices (Rolexen?). The major differences of course are that Economist is somewhat more up-market, and the ads are seen locally in the UK.

I can't readily find any figures on how much cash BBCW makes off website ads, but I'd have to assume that it's burger money -- a few quid here and there for negligible effort, and after all who cares if the brand is tarnished abroad?! If on the other hand BBCW went into the ad curation business, and even if it happened to be profitable, there's every chance that voters or MPs would get stroppy about it, and BBC gets a hard time going into the next licence fee negotiations. Ultimately, BBC's brand outside the UK isn't something that the UK public necessarily worries about.

Aren't all world-facing websites "a public service"? BBC within UK has a special remit because of the funding structure (thanks to the increasingly-inaccurately named "TV" licensing fees), but BBC [Worldwide] is just another content provider in the big old crazy world.

It doesn't seem surprising that BBCW use an external advertising network: it would be a pretty huge investment to operate their own advertising markets throughout the world ... and surely if they did, they'd then on-sell those services!

Seems that the notable part of this attack is that several high-profile websites were affected, so BBC (and NYT, and AOL, etc) suffered some damage to their brand, so they'll have to work on that. The article notes that "malware was delivered through multiple ad networks", which speaks to failures by those service providers. Reckon there will be some very heated conversations and perhaps fee renegotiations with the networks happening over the next few weeks ;-)

The Last Week Tonight videos on Youtube seem to get embargoed outwith the US, but their Facebook videos don't (no login required). https://www.facebook.com/LastWeekTonight/videos/858905877571...

The "length of the pendulum" (for the purposes of calculating its period) is specifically the distance between the the pivot and the pendulum's centre of mass. Adding coins to the pendulum moves the centre of mass ever so slightly!

It's certainly difficult to imagine projects that operate on a timescale beyond a single human lifetime, but it got civilisation this far!

Good question about the precision; we only hear little snippets about hitting virtual windows in space within 100km or so. New Horizons is running a MIPS-1 R3000 processor[0], that has double-precision floating point available but presumably fixed-point arithmetic could be more suitable here. But I don't know that there would be so much accumulated error, there were a few course corrections between Earth and Pluto. Maybe the precision is not so much of an issue?

As for the fly-by, well. Speed is a problem. At the point of closest approach to Pluto it was going at 13.78 km/s, and it's about the mass of a grand piano[1] so that's about 45TJ of kinetic energy. Or some large number anyway. Let's just carry on with Newtonian stuff and assume the numbers get worse if you do it properly. At current speed its orbital radius[2] would be about ... 4600 metres. Three miles!

That's somewhere deep within the icy core, I'm guessing.

In order to orbit at the distance of the photos we're getting now, it would need to slow right down to 264m/s, shedding basically all of that kinetic energy. Back of the envelope numbers suggest that would require about the equivalent of a 90 megaton explosion! Of course, if we strapped the Tsar Bomba[3] onto New Horizons, there would be more mass, so we'd need more stopping power ... and so on.

Other reasons for doing a flyby, I suspect, is that we get to see more stuff this way. There are a few moons, and an uncharted Kuiper Belt. Seems a shame to come all this way and only see the one thing. Not to mention the allure of the tantalising glimpse ... always leave them wanting more! This mission started with Pluto being nothing but a blurry dot occupying a dozen pixels. Imagine what the next mission can do, based on what we're already learning! Iterate and improve.

[0] http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/mips-goes-to-pluto [1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/137/ [2] http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/circles/Lesson-4/Mathe... [3] http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html