Hacker News Reader

rasmuseion Ask HN: Good private email host with IMAP?

+1 for Fastmail. Very fast, very reliable since I started using it in 2016. Absolutely the best webmail client I have used. UI not too unlike Gmail. The UI is fully keyboard-controllable for almost all tasks. Great search. Great calendar. Good amount of settings & security control for power users. Android app works well.

rasmuseion Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

I work as a researcher and I try to publish full source code for all my publications. On the point of increasing surface for nitpicking, I agree in principle that's a risk, but in practice I have not experienced any such problems in my field. I am in a field of applied natural science where most researchers write terrible code, if any, and so I suppose there are not much expectations or even concepts of coding style.

There is a nice Perspective piece in Science from 2011 [1] touching on the question of cleaning up the code. It suggests basically the same thing as several of the comments in this thread: if you don't have time or motivation to clean up the code, don't.

"even incremental steps would be a vast improvement over the current situation. To this end, I propose the following steps (in order of increasing impact and cost) that individuals and the scientific community can take. First, anyone doing any computing in their research should publish their code. It does not have to be clean or beautiful (13), it just needs to be available. Even without the corresponding data, code can be very informative and can be used to check for problems as well as quickly translate ideas. ... The next step would be to publish a cleaned-up version of the code along with the data sets in a durable non-proprietary format."

[1] Peng (2011) Science 334 1126-1127 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1213847

rasmuseion Flappy Bird in 228 bytes

Ha, well, thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. But I am 32 and hopeless when it comes to following popular culture. I was probably just focusing my attention on something else. I have a solid track record of not noticing stuff. So the nuance added to xkcd 1053 by this story is that the average value of ten thousand per day is just an average :)

(And another nuance is that I am not in the US and so also not part of the ten thousand per day average.)

rasmuseion Flappy Bird in 228 bytes

If anyone, like me, did not know what Flappy Bird is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird

You control the "bird" (the dot). Click to ascend and fly through the approaching openings.

rasmuseion Office Open XML file formats (2016)

Short motivation: I was thinking for a short moment to myself, "how hard could it be to support at least some limited reading and editing of .docx files?"

Now I know that I will probably never know: the "Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference" is >5000 pages!

rasmuseion Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms

Some comments have already touched on this, but it is important to realize just how much electricity we are talking about. The tl;dr is that replacing US wheat production alone would use five times the current total US electricity consumption. And that's for wheat, occupying about 10% of US cropland.

See p. 12 of the Supporting Information and you'll find the following: 2026647 kg wheat grown using 798417 MWh electricity means an electricity consumption of 0.4 MWh/kg wheat. In the US, the annual wheat harvest is 150-200 kg/capita/yr, which in this hypothetical system would use more than 60 MWh electricity/capita/yr.

For comparison, the US annually uses around 13 MWh electricity/capita.

That is, this hypothetical wheat production in the US would use about five times the _total_ present day electricity use.

Soybeans and maize together occupy more than three times the wheat area in the US, so that (very roughly speaking) adds another annual electricity consumption of ~200 MWh/capita. With just these three major crops, the US would have to increase its total electricity consumption about 20-fold.

rasmuseion OpenRefine – free, open source, powerful tool for working with messy data

Wow, that is a nice little tool. Just installed it and tested on some random files in my current data analysis project.

By the way, I installed it using pipx https://github.com/pipxproject/pipx by running `pipx install visidata`. To also read HDF and Excel files, I added the necessary packages by running `pipx inject visidata h5py openpyxl`.

rasmuseion Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

Yes, you seem to be missing the light supply. Plants need a lot of light to grow. In a multi-storey greenhouse, the incoming solar radiation per unit floor area is smaller than in a normal (one-storey) greenhouse. Thus the need for artificial lighting and associated costs, both for hardware and electric power.

rasmuseion Sweden distributes 'be prepared for war' leaflet to all 4.8m homes

Any other examples, or other support that it is "commmon"? More common than in other countries? I would be happy to learn more.

rasmuseion Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers

Not sure that would work, since pdfs are usually marked or prepended with some metadata about download time and the library upon download. At least that's the case with my uni library.

rasmuseion Ask HN: What are you missing in existing email clients?

Thanks for the detailed reply.

I sort of understand the design decision in Outlook to make the search folders a separate (and flat?) tree. What behavior would you expect from operations like copy, search if you put a search folder inside another (physical) folder? Anyway, I'm sure there are sensible ways to do what you're asking for, but it opens up questions about what a "folder" is and should be. Very interesting.

Notification settings agreed! I always turned all of the notifications off when I had Outlook.

Portrait mode, OK. Many email clients do give some few options for various horizontal/vertical splits. Are the options in Outlook enough in that respect?

rasmuseion Ask HN: What are you missing in existing email clients?

Would you consider a desktop client if it gave you that? I also want simplicity, but synced to my hard drive.

rasmuseion When Does Work Actually Get Done?

Well put. Could not agree more.

In fact, I think any quantitative measure of tangible results would be flawed, at least when it comes to open-ended and creative work (research, exploratory data analysis, software design, ...). In my work as a PhD student I often have a full day, damn, even a full week without any tangible result. But when the results eventually do arrive I usually realize that those seemingly unproductive hours actually were valuable, perhaps even necessary.

rasmuseion Game Theory: Open Access textbook

I'm currently a TA in a basic game theory for MSc students at a technical university. For the basic theoretical concepts we use as a course book Leyton-Brown & Shoham (2008) Essentials of Game Theory: A Concise, Multidisciplinary Introduction. This book is great because it is short and to the point, precise without diving deep into everything. Introduces most important concepts in less than 100 pages.

rasmuseion Show HN: fman – file manager for programmers

> Linux - I am frankly not familiar with a single Linux user, developer or not, who ever bought anything except for games.

I beg to differ. Grew up with Windows, but nowadays full-time Linux user. I paid some $40 for Sublime Text and it was worth every cent. Also donated to various services and projects, but maybe that does not count...

And now I also just paid $13 for fman, not because I'm sure about it, but because it's cheap, looks promising, and I sometimes miss Total Commander rather badly.

rasmuseion New ammonia production process: generates electricity instead of consuming

I agree 100%. Thanks for the clarification!

rasmuseion New ammonia production process: generates electricity instead of consuming

Yes, it can be a net energy producer given a source of hydrogen, but hydrogen is typically not available for free. See my other comment.

rasmuseion New ammonia production process: generates electricity instead of consuming

Replying to a number of previous comments on energy balances.

The reaction N2 + 3 H2 -> 2 NH3 is exothermic, giving off energy [1]. N2 is abundant and free (80% of the atmosphere), but H2 is not. The most common way [2] of producing H2 is from hydrocarbons (oil/gas products). In principle H2 can be produced from something else (e.g. water, through electrolysis), but that is very energy intensive [1], making the overall reaction N2 + 3 H2O -> 2 NH3 + 3/2 O2 a net energy consumer.

Point being, yes, it might be possible to save energy compared to the Haber-Bosch process, but the net production of ammonia from free/abundant materials will not ever be "for free" energy-wise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_enthalpy_of_formation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

rasmuseion Sweden proposes ban on ride-sharing services that make profits

Not sure if the following has already been mentioned in other comments, so apologies if I'm posting redundant information.

The "ride-sharing services" that make profits are already illegal in Sweden according to court decision, since it essentially means "taxi company without the annoying taxes". And consequently UberPOP has been suspended in Sweden along with several other EU countries (as also noted in the original post).

So the new proposal mostly seems like a way to clarify legislation: If you do something systematically to make a profit, we call that business and you pay taxes and follow all other relevant legislation (worker's rights etc). Makes very much sense to me.

rasmuseion Show HN: Are you trackable? An irrevocable persistent browser cookie

Yeah, that's pretty disturbing. But I seem to get two different fingerprints. Refreshing the page 10 or so times, I usually get one, and then it switches to the other for another ~10 page reloads, and then back again.

FF49 on Ubuntu 16.04.

rasmuseion Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

Thanks! Stylish style installed and seems to work. But it's still bewildering why Fastmail does that. Anyway, I must say it's impressive that they make an email service where this is my biggest complaint :)

rasmuseion Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

+1 on almost everything you wrote. I also moved from Gmail to Fastmail in almost exactly the same way some months ago. I agree completely to the plusses and minuses you mention.

I would like to add one minus though. Any good old smiley like ":)" in emails gets replaced by a yellow smiley face icon. I hate to see yellow smiley faces where someone wrote colon end parenthesis. It's all done client-side though, so noone else has to see it. Have been in contact with FM tech support and they seem to be uninterested in adding a checkbox to turn this nuisance off. Otherwise an excellent, excellent service.

rasmuseion Soylent: Proudly Made with GMOs

The article does make a few good points, but I also think it uses a couple of unforgivable rhetorical devices. Most obvious are the out-of-context mentions of various "huge numbers", e.g. as follows:

"By reducing the need to till farmland, GR soy and corn have prevented 41 billion pounds of carbon dioxide from being released in the atmosphere between 1996 and 2013."

This amount of CO2 savings sounds great without comparison, but it amounts to about 0.003% of the total GHG emissions in the same period. (Assuming emissions of ~40 Gt CO2e/year 1993-2013 [1].)

[1] http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/figure-s...

Edit: typo

rasmuseion Soylent: Proudly Made with GMOs

Your vegan friend has a good point. Production of animal-based foods typically use 2-10 times more feed (and consequently more land etc) than what would be needed to feed humans directly.

The article cites the often-cited FAO claim [1] that 70% more food production is needed by year 2050. But researchers are now also increasingly agreeing that dietary choices should be considered -- FAO's "70% increase" claim builds on their projections of future human diets.

For a recent example of this alternative view, see Tilman and Clark (2014) [2]. In summary: Current western diets are harmful for the planet and for human health, so let's also consider changing our diets.

[1] http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/35571/

[2] www.nature.com/articles/nature13959 behind paywall, but also on SciHub http://sci-hub.cc/10.1038/nature13959

rasmuseion Google Calendar is down

I find this quite interesting. Have been using Google calendar for about 10 years now, and never experienced downtime before.