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brox

171 karma · joined March 21, 2008

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brox··on The Campaign to Delegitimize Wikipedia
Molly White, a prolific Wikipedia editor, has written a good overview of how information source reliability is handled in practice: https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war.... There's a process for how decisions about source legitimacy and reliability are made, and these "decisions aren’t made lightly and are frequently revisited: there have been over fifty discussions about the Daily Mail’s reliability, for example, with both sides being vehemently argued".
brox··on My takeaways from 12 months of therapy
Measurement of subjective wellbeing has a long history in healthcare and can be very useful for both treatment and research; see e.g. pain scales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_scale
brox··on The sham legacy of Richard Feynman [video]
It's long, but do give it a chance. The main premise is how the legend of Feynman (as in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!") is often at odds with Feynman the person. It is neither a character assassination nor a redemption story but somewhere in between--with a few plot twists. Also, Dr. Collier is an excellent science communicator.
brox··on Heroku EU Is Down
1.5 hours of complete downtime for our apps now.

We're getting "App boot timeout" errors for every request and "One or more of these arguments were missing: uid, gid, gateway, somaxconn, event_fd, out_fd" for scheduled tasks. The incident report has been up for almost four hours and it's not getting better: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2590

brox··on Banks hit with millions in fines for using Signal and WhatsApp
Case in point: The ongoing Covid-19 inquiry request for access to government WhatsApp messages: https://www.ft.com/content/208263bf-b6bb-4ea6-8e6b-ee2e522ac...
brox··on The History of Coffee (2015)
Later popes did indeed. Popes Leo XIII and Pius X were drinkers of the Vin Mariani coca wine, the former even awarding its creator Angelo Mariani a Vatican gold medal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani

brox··on The case for continuous documentation
If using Django there are tools like django-docs (https://django-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and the recently released django-sphinx-view (https://noumenal.es/django-sphinx-view/).
brox··on Writing tools I learned from The Economist
She was interviewed on February 4th 2021 as part of their digital events series ("An audience with Ann Wroe, obituaries editor"). Worth a listen: https://economist-subsevents.zoom.us/rec/play/5b6CntzRCPHSJz...
brox··on 50 Years of Text Games – A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon
You can buy it on itch.io as well: https://www.anchorhead-game.com/purchase/
brox··on 50 Years of Text Games – A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon
For those familiar with the original 1998 version, note that a remastered and illustrated edition was released in 2018--worth a replay and a good way of supporting the author! https://store.steampowered.com/app/726870/Anchorhead/
brox··on Project Coldfeet
You may be thinking of Ice Station Zebra (1968). The Wikipedia page mentions Project COLDFEET as one of the inspirations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Station_Zebra
brox··on BASIC Computer Games
I remember young me spending hours on a VIC-20 version of animal.bas ("Computer guesses animals and learns new ones from you"). Given enough time and training input the computer could answer any question put to it! It helped open my eyes to the magic of computation and still gives me a bit of a tingle when I think about it.
brox··on Broadcasting from Deep Space, a Mysterious Series of Radio Signals
Perhaps the life forms with long-term success have learned that it is not prudent to broadcast your location; the smaller the chance of other civilisations knowing about your existence the better.
brox··on Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
For the kind of diagram in your example I have been using Cacoo for some time now:

https://cacoo.com

It does not take a lot of practice to get decent results and they also have some nice networking/AWS icon templates. I think they still have a free account option with limited sheets.

brox··on Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
Thanks for the suggestions, folks!
brox··on Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
Would like to hear general information security recommendations as well.
brox··on Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?
I find Ben Eater's 8-bit computer from scratch series really wonderful, mainly because of his skills as an educator and the effort he puts into the material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyznrdDSSGM&list=PLowKtXNTBy...

Check out his latest videos on low-level data transmission techniques as well.

brox··on How the Speed of Light Was First Measured
Analogy, metaphor or just simple evocative imagery are good tools for making subject matter stick, though: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/lecture...
brox··on Django 1.9 alpha 1 released
Also, any good examples of Django REST with React out there?
brox··on A Short, Simple Introduction to Information Theory
Shannon's original paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", is still a good read: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...