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Dude wtf?

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, enlightened minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss other people.

What you discuss is a choice.

The idea that everything presented here comes as builtins, or a call to a builtin repository, is actually fantastic. You’re forgiven for being jaded. But the attack on Wolfram for merely publishing this, including “with Wolfram” in the title, supposedly below your personal standards, is kind of whacked.


Nobody forced Wolfram to put "Computational Astronomy" in the title, instead of something more accurate like "12 astronomy related widgets we've implemented", not sure why you get so offended by how far short they fall of the chosen title.

Also, I am not overly surprised that the origin of your quote looks to be a British aristocrat speaking about the conversational capabilities of dinner guests: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/18/great-minds/


IIRC Wolfram had a blog post about how everything is developing a data/computational angle - he called it Computational X a few years ago now. Fitting they would call this Computational Astronomy.


Omg. In Nassim Taleb words, you merciless imbecile. Wolfram calling computational X means nothing. The term computational existed decades ago and within the realm of computational science people tended to joke about computation X y and z. Just because wolfram has a media publisher that merciless imbeciles subscribe who are ignorant towards word uses, doesn’t mean he is the inventor of cellular Automata, complexity theory and computational science.


Actually I thought it was weird that the View of Our Solar System one used only hard-coded constants instead of Wolfram's information about planets.


The disquisition would improve after an iteration to apply the following rule: one paragraph, one idea.


I am very worried about Evernote, and this is another clear sign that Evernote just doesn't "get" it.

50-notes is insufficient for any serious trial of Evernote, and clearly insufficient if you're considering switching any non-trivial note pile to Evernote.


> I am very worried about Evernote, and this is another clear sign that Evernote just doesn't "get" it.

My interpretation is that they believe the product can't compete for new customers. They're trying to suck as much money out of (a very large number of) paying legacy customers as they can before they shut the service down. They don't care about free users, since they don't expect new customers anyway. They implemented big price hikes a while ago.


Yes, this reminds me that I need to find a way to export my old Evernote docs so I don't lose them completely.


You can export them in bulk from the website. It is quite painless.


How long until they make that a non-free feature I wonder.


How? All Im seeing is notebook by notebook export.


I don't exactly remember because it was awhile ago when I exported all my notes and I no longer have an account to check. I remember I had to google how to do it, but once I found out how to do it, it was very easy. There was just a button or link somewhere (maybe under account settings?) that allowed me to download everything as a zip file. Oh, and I remember I had to do it on the desktop website and not on a mobile device.


the iOS app can export them one by one to files -- I just went through what I had in there from 8 years back when it was the tool I used to keep things together through a move, and there were like 2 things that I actually cared about.


This kid is alright. He’s going to do great. Keep doing what you’re doing kid.


Aristotle outlined two kinds of friendships:

1. Accidental friendships

2. Friendships of the highest order

He separated Accidental friendships into two types:

* friendship of utility

* friendships of pleasure

So three kinds of friends, according to Aristotle.


It only took us 2300 years to add another kind that combines utility and pleasure, but isn't accidental: friends with benefits.


Ha, lovely joke, but indeed friends with benefits are clearly in the "pleasure" file. Ancient Greeks seem to have been expert at friends with benefits.


Yeah, yeah. You got me. But I was kinda going for an unspoken point. Which man is sicker: One who needs to classify friendships as either pleasure or utility? Or one who admits a certain utility to pleasure, and a certain pleasure to utility?

And saying it was accidental in either case is quite a sophisticated little excuse...


Aristotle would have been using "accidental" as opposed to "essential". Both used slightly differently to today's common usage. Essential being of the essence of a thing, i.e. it could not be that thing without it. Accidental being non-essential, i.e. it can be itself without that thing`[0].

It's not clear how a friendship can be essential though. Of what is the friendship essential? Or is it more like a friendship that fits the platonic form of a friendship.

edit: I do realise that your comment was a joke, and doesn't deserve to be "uhm actuallied", but I've personally always found the essential vs accidental usage to be very useful and interesting :)

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental/


Hah... that's fascinating (I by no means mind having a joke turn into a real dialogue, and this is good stuff). So, it's interesting to apply this ancient pre-Abrahamic-moralizing, Platonic division between extrinsic/intrinsic, deduction/induction to modern friendships. All of us westerners still have 19th C. romantic biases that make it hard to admit if a romance serves a purpose, that might block us from being honest with ourselves. Then again, we're not so different. Essential is that love who is so entangled with your life that you make every decision together. Aristotle might've well thought his relationship with a 12 year old slave boy defined the essence in "essential". So, no one's perfect, but it's still possible to guess the meaning.

We might do well to begin sorting our relationships again by those which possess intrinsic meaning and the others which don't.


Friends that combine pleasure and utility are so few in a lifetime we established cultural norm to mark them with rings and loudly announce the pairing to the entirety of the town one resides, or smth.


I'd say marriage is a doggedly hopeful way to make someone please you, be useful, and act like they're friendly, under color of law, but it rarely captures the actual thing you imagine it's enshrining.


But are friends with benefits friends?


Sure. They just have a friendship where at least one of them takes the other for granted.


Are your regular friends really friends...


Only if they click like on every single one of my three-times-a-day-minimum pictures of food.


funny little story. I changed my phone number a few years back. But a friend of mine didn't get the memo. He's a really foodie guy who loves eating breakfast in off the map diners, and tacos from obscure food trucks. He sends like 3-6 photos per day of food he's eating.

Anyway, I hadn't heard from him in a couple months, but we ended up in Vegas at the same time with some mutual friends. And I was like, hey, I haven't heard from you in months. He was like, "I thought it was really rude of you to tell me to stop sending you my breakfast photos".

We put it together eventually that he had been sending his breakfast photos for TWO MONTHS to some new guy with my old cellphone number, before that guy was finally like "shut the fuck up and stop sending me pictures of your food".

Funny side story about that guy (let's call him Bo). My brother is germaphobic and only eats tortilla chips up to where his fingers touched them, then makes a pile of tiny finger-touched corners of tortilla chips on a little napkin. Bo sits down at the bar and unconsciously just starts munching these tiny little corners for awhile, then goes, "where did you get these mini chips?" and watches in horror as my brother discards another one.

I'm not sure how this relates to the original conversation about friends, but I'm sure it does somehow.


Whether in the proper spirit of HN or not, I very much appreciated both stories. Made me glad I posted my attempted humorous comment. Thank you :)

> watches in horror as my brother discards another one.

Love it.

Edited to add after further thought, bringing it back into relevance with the topic:

To steal a Hunter S. Thompson quote, the "too weird to live, too rare to die" friend: someone that just seems to attract unusual experiences and has great value merely for the volume of weird life stories they're happy to share and also somehow continue to collect.

Inevitably overlaps with other categories, but also absolutely require a category of their own.

I believe that I fit into this category for some of my more "vanilla" acquaintances (and even some family members).


Posting food pictures to your Facebook/snapchat/whatever is one thing, but texting them to people individually multiple times per day is bizarre.


The "highest order" in this case meaning of virtue. So three kinds of "friendship" (philia): of pleasure, of utility, of virtue (moral goodness). When we think of "real friendship" we're thinking of the third kind.


I always wonder what really happened with TrueCrypt. What’s the inside story, there?

I’m not interested in anybody’s guess. What happened? WTF actually happened?


Paul Leroux was sentenced to 25 years in June 2020, appellate court confirmed the sentence in 2022.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/20...


Oh I'd forgotten about this part:

> Le Roux was arrested on 26 September 2012 for conspiracy to import narcotics into the United States, and agreed to cooperate with authorities in exchange for a lesser sentence and immunity to any crimes he might admit to later. He subsequently admitted to arranging or participating in seven murders, carried out as part of an extensive illegal business empire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux


Didn't he consistently deny being involved in TrueCrypt? E4M is closely related, but is there any evidence showing that Paul == TrueCrypt? Just curious if there was.


There's no proof


That is wild. How did he have time to maintain TrueCrypt while doing all of that crime?


Paul was what people call a 10x programmer. He was highly prolific.

The book Mastermind goes into this a bit.

So do some old web posts straight from Paul himself, if you know where and if they are still up.


Has anyone looked up the details of all of this? The DEA has been notorious for arresting people overseas and indicting them for just participating(i.e. being in the same room) in conversations about drug trafficking even if those conversations were between DEA agents.

Just a quick glimpse at the Wikipedia page actually talks about 5 drugs that seem to me like over the counter medicine. What's kinda interesting to me skimming this and looking at the references is that the assassins and a lot of the operations were Israelis and the whole thing was run from Tel Aviv, but there's zero reference to any of those people. They are just called the Israeli business partners.


I noticed that US fed agencies work like that - use someone for their own games and make it looks like success job for own careers.

Some cops tried it in my country as well. These cops recieved a middle finger from the court.

Edit: The courts called it 'provocation by police' and everyone was freed.


I’m on mobile but there’s more info on the Israelis in the Mastermind book. Some of them still have public LinkedIn profiles.


He denies involvement with TrueCrypt. Is there any actual proof?


> The district court's decision that immediate video sentencing was in defendant's best interest was reasonable because defendant was asking for a time-served sentence …

Time served was 25 years!?!


Leroux has been in custody since 2012. If he was sentenced to 25 years in 2020... he would only have 17 years to serve. it's 2023 now, so he has 14 years left.


For anyone who wonders and can tolerate some guessing, here is an interesting starting point:

https://magazine.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side/


The the article may have something interesting to say, but it seems to spend paragraphs upon paragraphs on the amateur sleuthing that the article authour did, rather than come to the point quickly.


In other words what many of us would call an interesting article :-)


The article writer focusing on themselves rather than on their subject makes it less interesting for me.


I had no idea, that explains a lot. Thanks.


Absolutely wild. Thank you for contributing this!


I’ve always heard speculation that I believe of some sort of NSA involvement. When it was taken down back in the day (yes it was pretty much a takedown, the entire website got thrashed..) there was a lot of people on Reddit that were speculating that.


The way it was announced was suspicious. Purging the website rather than just posting an "unmaintained" notice is weird for any FOSS project, but recommending people just use Bitlocker sounded like a clear "canary". Like the authors were being coerced and decided to burn their reputation on purpose rather than comply


The "Not Secure Anymore" message likely refers to the weak password based key derivation function and verification steps. I suspect the NSA and other advanced computing groups had means to brute force it and it took the rest of us years to figure out the parameters weren't strong enough.


The alternate theory was that the NSA forced the project to shutdown or become backdoored because they couldn't break it, and that was deemed unacceptable, resulting in the author deciding to call it quits (lavabit style) rather than compromise the application. The question then becomes "why is VeraCrypt allowed to exist"


I'm not sure how you're insisting on more than "anybody's guess" when that's all the information that is out there


Hi! I maintain that list and its variants.

The list is for people who don't want to be tracked by third parties. That's who we serve, and that's why we do what we do.

Based on this...

https://radar.com/pricing

... note the "tracked users" feature, unless I'm missing something, this isn't going to change.


I just read the whole thread, and nobody has mentioned the culture of .NET.

In .NET culture, few developers share, fork, or communally develop code, and you sit around waiting for great Microsoft mother to deliver features. There is no ecosystem; there is one provider, and provider is beholden to a couple of guys and, beyond them, investment fund shareholders.


I’ve been working on c# quite a bit lately, and I don’t think that’s true as much these days. The biggest things remain Microsoft-granted — asp.net, efcore, etc — but I’ve had little issues finding Nugent libraries for random issues like progress bars, weird formats, various excel libraries, etc all community-maintained & provided; my expectations on finding libraries is similar to python.

The biggest issue I’ve had is that some of these less popular libraries (both by Microsoft and not) have some truly tasteless APIs, I think mostly stemming from older versions of C#, and for some reason the lowest quality stack overflow answers are much lower for C# than in python — there appears to be much more cruft and outdated information in blogs, stack overflow in C#-land than python. Really in general I feel like python/rust has a higher floor for taste than C#, but at ceiling it’s competitive.

I’m pretty sure though that startup language choice has nothing to do with practical considerations — it’s largely a popularity contest based on hype cycles, and C# is well past its hype-prime.


As you mention yourself, how many use .NET for web stuff without ASP.NET, or for databases without EFCore? Sure there are plenty of third-party "single-task libraries", but all the big architecture-impacting decisions tend to come from the ivory tower.

This kind of reply reeks of when Phil Haack tried to convince people that (the old) .NET Framework was "open-source friendly" because NuGet existed.


The reason is pretty simple. It's because those 1st party frameworks are awesome. There is very little reason to build something else when you can contribute to them instead. ASP.NET is crushing other web frameworks in performance on techempower benchmarks, it's up there with Rust frameworks. And EF is probably the best full fledged ORM in existence (when compared to something like Java Hibernate).


NHibernate is quite popular alternative to EF and I've seen it used on many projects, especially big apps. Some smaller apps also choose Dapper (by StackExchange) and avoid EF.

Regarding ASP.NET, you're right. There are some alternatives, but not used very often from my experience.


I think it certainly used to be the case, but I don't see this any more. Having said that dotnet is pretty "batteries included" so you can go a long way without too much third party stuff


There are 350K unique packages on Nuget about the same as PyPi…


This is (no longer?) true, as others have mentioned. Just a few examples of great third-party packages that I use for many projects:

* MoreLinq

* Newtonsoft.JSON

* CommandLineParser

* log4net

* UnitsNet

* OsmSharp

* NodaTime

* GMap.Net

* ImageSharp


I'd add:

* Hangfire

* Quartz.NET

* NHibernate

* AutoMapper

* StackExchange.Redis

* the Castle project

* xUnit

* NUnit

* Serilog

* SimpleInjector

These are all very popular long maintained open source libraries I've seen used in many projects.


Another to add

* MassTransit

* AutoFac

* MediatR

* Elsa

* BenchmarkDotNet


A quick glance at the .net core repos shows your information is incorrect/out of date, which I think is one of the points op makes. .net features are also being developed by regular community members.


How many regular developer fork Java to work on the JRE?


Libraries, not the core runtime.


I feel this is retrograde in several respects. Most notably due to wasted vertical space, there is now less information displayed than there was.

This might be fine if you are a very casual Github user with thin followings. But if you have interests in hundreds of projects, this is a disaster.


I am convinced that a good/great quality directional microphone with a pop-filter is a godsend for WFH. Here's why:

* Directionality matters because extraneous sounds in a home can be very distracting for listeners. For example, say the dishwasher is running. Or you answered a call before turning down the radio. Or a neighbor is mowing. Or, in a highrise, your balcony door is open.

* In conversation your semi-verbal cues like a tsk, a grunt, or an audible sigh can carry surprising weight. It's nice to know these can get through and convey how you feel without having to actually say it.

I consider my good microphone, mounted on an adjustable boom stand, complete with a pop-filter, along with some commonsense audio conveyance awareness, is my secret superpower.


I would recommend a dynamic microphone. Static microphones are more sensitive and ideal in a studio environment, which your home most likely isn't. I really like my SM58 (which doesn't need an extra pop filter), but there are many other options.

One thing to note is that dynamic microphones need to be right front of your mouth to be effective, that's the trade-off for being able to reject background noise. Which means that if you are doing video, it will be visible on camera.


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