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Don't do that! If you're always using the same preamble, you should turn it into a .sty file. Then the preamble of new documents is just

  \usepackage{myessay}

I did that, then I needed to tweak things so I added options, then I needed to use the package somewhere that needed to be self-contained, so I started copy-pasting ;). I've done similar things with makefiles, tox configs, linter settings (all of which started from an initial version I wrote from scratch).

I suspect the real reason this effect exists is because there's copy-pasting is the best way to solve the problem, due to a varying mix of: there being no way of managing the dependencies, needing to avoid (unmanaged) dependencies (i.e. vendoring is the same, only we have a tool managing it), the file (or its contents) needing to exist there specifically (e.g. the various CI locations) and no real agreement on what template/templating tool to use (and a template is just as likely to include useless junk). Copy-pasting is viewed as a one-time cost, and the thing copy-pasted isn't expected to change all that much.


Definitely true for linting. Nothing unlike a linter solves the problems we want the linter to solve.

Apologies for pedantry: in ðat case you should have used Þ U+00DE LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN, as it begins a sentence.


This is what I come to HN for


Fantastic addition, no appologies neccesary.


Similar situation here. My company uses Skype for all in-house video calls, in large part because none of our clients uses it. So far, I haven't had any problems with it. The same cannot be said for Teams.


Linphone works good for internal use and is free to other linphone users.

The drawback is that unless you can in a newer version, you must choose between using your free linphone video messenger account OR your external sip account that can do landlines.

Having mentioned both in this thread: my small business is using grandstream phones that receive calls on twilio [because it’s the only one that will ring up to 10 extensions on a single login], and then competitively make outbound on all the others I mentioned based on dialing patterns.

And then we use linphone for internal video, since we’re a Linux shop and teams is out. [it’s wonderful but just exasperating that I can’t configure a second account and use it for everything.]

Linphone otoh will call a proper SIP address for free, eg ourtelephonenumber@twilio or oursipusername@sip.telnyx.com so I can conference in Cisco tandbergs, or I can conference in someone on one of the grandstreams that way. [when linphone is configured as a linphone rather than a SIP phone]


At Tianfu Airport in Chengdu, there are large screens with cameras attached that recognize your face and tell you which gate to go to. Convenient but scary, like many things in China.


As sibling comments seem to have missed the point: laws mandating helmets reduce the general rates of cycling, as people without helmets don't cycle at all. Cycling is so good for your health that the risks associated with not cycling are actually greater than those that go along with cycling without a helmet.


It's true that Chinese words don't inflect, but not all the grammatical categories you list are missing. There are aspect markers like 了 and 正在, and nouns are definite or indefinite even if they're not marked as such by articles: 有 can only have an indefinite object, for example.


It's worth noting that the benefits of Nix shell you mention can be enjoyed from the comfort of another distro with the Nix package manager.


Anyone interested in a statistical approach to the history of the industrial revolution should read The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 by Eric Hobsbawm. It's the first in an excellently written series on the history of the 18th century, written for the interested layperson.


> What did they do in 950AD?

An example from around then or a bit before, arising from the spread of Buddhism in China.

The name of Vairocana Buddha, whose name in Sanskrit is वैरोचन and means 'solar', is given in Chinese in two forms:

1. 大日如来 Dàrì Rúlái

This form is a loan translation, where the meaning of the Sanskrit is translated bit by bit into Chinese (日 means 'sun').

2. 毘盧遮那佛 Pílúzhēnà Fó

This form approximates the sound of the Sanskrit word using Chinese characters. It's typical of Chinese phonetic translations, which still today largely just use characters, and thus often don't sound much like the word in the original language.


To add to this, Chinese (and Japanese) Buddhist scholars' emphasis on retaining the original pronunciation of chants led them to hang on to the phonetically written Siddham script in which their masters had learned the scriptural texts in universities in India.


A classic example of this is Hindi and Urdu -- the two languages are largely mutually intelligible when spoken, which is the main criterion for being the same language, but are written with different scripts and of course used in separate and adversarial states.


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