Alexqw85

> Same reason why they stared iodine to salt… because people were having mental development issues.

This is not directly related to the topic of Fluoride, but Iodine was actually initially introduced to reduce goiters. The mental benefits were a wonderful, unexpected side-effect. Studies have put the effects anywhere between 8-15 IQ bump for populations that were Iodine deficient. Pretty jaw dropping when you think about it.

The status of Dendrite and its position vs Synapse is covered a bit in the Holiday Update: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update...

The relevant section:

> The interesting plot twist is that Dendrite development has ended up increasingly focusing on embedded matrix server use cases - particularly to power Peer-to-Peer Matrix, where clients require a server to be embedded within them. So while Synapse has ended up increasingly focusing on large-scale deployments, Dendrite has ended up pursuing smaller instances (which is ironic, given originally it was meant to be the other way round!).

This reminds me of the general idea behind Tripwire[1] for macOS. I last looked into it back in 2005 (we went with other approaches), so it may have changed since then, but it monitors for changes, and allow you to revert them or deploy them to other computer (as in a lab, etc).

[1] https://github.com/Tripwire/tripwire-open-source

HP used to make amazing monochrome laser printers. I can't really speak to other brands, but I maintained dozens of LaserJet 4000, 4050, and 4100 printers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_4000_series

Those things are tanks. Perform a maintenance kit on one of those, and it's good for another 150k pages no problem. The main thing that needs attention is the rubber feet that pick up the paper get dry. Some rubber rejuvenator on a q-tip goes a long way.

I have a 4050 for home, and I have no reason to doubt its future longevity. :-)

The firmware, though, is ancient (telnet, and a web interface that requires IE 5 IIRC). Now if there was open source firmware for these things...

Sadly, my experience with FLEXlm has been far from fascinating. Matlab uses it, and Matlab has some weird license types (that we use) that don't map well to FLEXlm, so they approximate it in odd ways.

I build (internal only) Debian packages for Matlab and FLEXlm, and admin the license server. I've seen far more of FLEXlm than I care to.

Mathworks made the mistake once of asking for my feedback about their product, from a sysadmin's perspective. They received about three earfuls from me, about half of which was dedicated to my disdain for FLEXlm.

FLEXlm seems simple on the surface, but has poor and outdated documentation (even once you find and read through the 300-400 page tome that's floating around) and is a pain to debug when under fire.

We have it running well enough now, but the road to get there should frankly embarrass those who ship (and/or rely on) the software today. Frustratingly, Mathworks' response to my feedback largely boiled down to "it's 3rd party software, so we can't do anything about it." As if FLEXlm were a force of nature, and there were no viable alternate models for physics. Not a good look.

I use zfsnap.[1] It's been forever since I've worked on it (hence why it's now "archived" on GitHub), but it's stable for my use and I use it on all ZFS systems I manage.

[1] https://github.com/zfsnap/zfsnap

Though from an entirely different era than the songs covered in the article, I feel I must share some of my favorites here:

* I'm Gonna be an Engineer - Pete Seeger

  https://youtu.be/cgzl1Sai4Y0?t=25

* What did you learn in school today? - Pete Seeger

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VucczIg98Gw

* Buy a Gun for Your Son - Tom Paxton

  https://youtu.be/WphNO24h9nA?t=51

I would like to second this recommendation. I have found "Beginning Portable Shell Scripting" to be invaluable --- and far more comprehensive than I expected given the "Beginning" in the title.

I highly recommend it (and the POSIX docs) to anyone who is is interested in portable shell programming.

---Alex

The lab I work in publishes, and has continues to extend, the studyforrest dataset for quite a few years now.

http://studyforrest.org

Most of the consumers so far have been neuroscience researchers and statisticians, but we do hope (and think) that there's value for a wide variety of interests.

There's a bunch of different data, but the highlights are fMRI scans of people watching and/or listening to the movie Forrest Gump, eye tracking, and detailed annotations of the movie. We are also about to begin acquiring simultaneous EEG and fMRI.

http://studyforrest.org/data.html

Accessing the data is easy, and, as great admirers of Joey Hess, we also have it available in a git annex repo. :-)

http://studyforrest.org/access.html

---Alex

[EDIT] Given that this thread is about open source datasets, it's probably worth mentioning that the license is PDDL.

https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/

Please note that number is in USD.

I personally have no problem staying under $100k; I live in Germany and work at a university. But imagine if you lived in Switzerland or Norway. Somewhere with a high cost of living and with a currency that is very strong vs the USD. Then it doesn't take much to go over that 100k.

And even though I don't have to pay US federal taxes (being under that $100k), I still have have the file state taxes, federal taxes, and an FBAR. Every single year. The time and effort is an annoyance, but what bothers me most is the principal. I don't live in the US; I don't use its services; and still, every year, I have to allocate a weekend to provide them with every single detail of my financial life.

---Alex

I agree with you. One culture's horrifying misuse of a symbol should not censor it for all and forever.

My roommate for the first two years of college was raised as a Jain[1], and a swastika with four dots is an important symbol for them. He liked to sketch, anything and everything, but also this swastika.

As his art was all over our walls, the expressions people had when they entered our dorm room for the first time were priceless. Sometimes it took some real explaining to convince them that I'm not a Nazi, and it was my Indian roommate who was drawing them and not me. ;-)

Beautiful artwork though.

---Alex

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

I assume he means Party Lines as in the phone system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)

---Alex

I agree, Game Pass is a /great/ service.

And, their streaming technology is pretty standard (granted, woven through an odd maze of servers) and stable. Because of that, I and a few others were able to write an addon that lets subscribers access it from within Kodi. The lack of interface lock-in is nice.

With a few caveats, GamePass has done it the right way.

It's ironic that here in Germany I get better access to football content than I ever did in the US.

---Alex

Neither are new books, but this year I both read and subsequently gifted

* 1491 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...

* Stranger in a Strange Land (the "Original, Uncut version") https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Strange-Land-Robert-Heinlein...

1491 is about the societies in the Americas prior to European contact. And if anyone knows of any books on the topic that have been written since then (and thus are even more up-to-date with the current state of the field), I'm very, very interested.

Stranger in a Strange Land is just... excellent. I really appreciate Heinlein and I like his world view. Though I've never read the traditional "cut" version, I've talked with people who have read both and I'm sold on the unabridged version. As an aside, if you enjoy Heinlein, then I also recommend reading "For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs." It was Heinlein's first book, but was never published (until recently, of course). It's not polished, but it is very interesting to see how he had already formed in the 1930s a lot of the ideas that would dominate his writing for the rest of his career. A good and enjoyable read.

---Alex

> and, uh, that i3-like compositor, I forgot its name.

The i3-like compositor is called sway: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/

As an i3 user, I'm pretty happy to see it so far along in its development.

---Alex

Edit: fixed link

The quote/joke comes from the intro of Garrison Keillor's radio show "Lake Wobegon", about life in a fictional city in Minnesota. So, hopefully that makes it a little less depressing. :-)

---Alex

Tree Style Tabs is the primary reason why I stick with Firefox. Without it, I wouldn't even know where to begin managing the relevant sites/info I encounter when reading up on diverging lines-of-thought.

For me, it is /the/ absolute killer feature for browsers.

---Alex

No sources on this nor am I a developer on any of this, so take with the appropriate truck-load of salt. But, from what I remember from when the OOXML debacle was news, is that the OOXML that Microsoft published in the spec is not the OOXML they use for their format. For obvious, (old?) Microsoft interoperability hindrance reasons.

---Alex

Champagne? Or did you go to UIUC as well? ;-)

---Alex

Make works well for me...

  TMPDIR=$(BASEDIR)/tmp

  THEME=$(BASEDIR)/theme
  THEME_CSS=$(THEME)/css
  THEME_FONT=$(THEME)/fonts
  THEME_JS=$(THEME)/js

  VER_BOOTSTRAP=3.3.6
  VER_FONTAWESOME=4.5.0
  VER_JQUERY=2.2.1

  updatedeps: $(TMPDIR) bootstrap fontawesome jquery

  bootstrap:
	curl -L -o $(TMPDIR)/bs.zip https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/releases/download/v$(VER_BOOTSTRAP)/bootstrap-$(VER_BOOTSTRAP)-dist.zip
	unzip -j $(TMPDIR)/bs.zip bootstrap-*/js/bootstrap.min.js -d $(THEME_JS)
	unzip -j $(TMPDIR)/bs.zip bootstrap-*/css/bootstrap.min.css -d $(THEME_CSS)

  fontawesome:
	curl -L -o $(TMPDIR)/fa.zip https://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/assets/font-awesome-$(VER_FONTAWESOME).zip
	unzip -j $(TMPDIR)/fa.zip font-awesome-*/css/*.min.css -d $(THEME_CSS)
	unzip -j $(TMPDIR)/fa.zip font-awesome-*/fonts/*webfont* -d $(THEME_FONT)

  jquery:
	curl -L -o $(THEME_JS)/jquery.min.js http://code.jquery.com/jquery-$(VER_JQUERY).min.js

Thanks for the link.

After a brief skim, the articles feel more like generic science and technology news rather than a curation of the ideas and news we all have to keep up with in this industry.

---Alex

Excellent! And it's even for HN. :-D

I'm going to re-quote the parent for you.

> Routing traffic just isn't as trivial as you think it is

---Alex

Ahh, thanks for pointing that out; I didn't notice it was an old post. Usually those have the date (2008) at the end of the title.

I thought the FCC /does/ regulate the loudness of TV commercials, for a few years now.

https://www.fcc.gov/guides/program-background-noise-and-loud...