skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This guy is a linguist? And his best argument is that characters take long to write using the example of a word whose only real use is the answer to the trivia question, "what is the Chinese character containing the most strokes?"

Also I would say a lot of Americans couldn't spell English words correctly to save their lives, does that mean English is a problem? (I would say in general, yes. It's a very hard language to learn)

So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best choice in this case. /s

Edit: Also the author fails to recognize that even if a Chinese person doesn't recognize the word exactly, the radical and underlying pictograms in the word describe what that word means and sometimes the tone/pronunciation of the word. It is not just a bunch of random strokes on a paper.
Homelessness shelters will generally be up against some pretty tight constraints. Their service is non-profit, their staffing is either voluntary or tight and their organization structure will be pushed by fluctuating demand.

The constraints on a company participating in a program are quite disproportionate, they're looking to fill a seasonal gap and while looking towards a social problem to fill this gap is honourable (and mutually beneficial), they also need to be aware of the duress that mutually beneficial labour can create.

This article only attempts to highlight the constraints. Amazon should have better social policy to be deal with the vulnerabilities of the assets they hire in this situation. I'm sure it's a learning experience for the YWCA, but the onus is still on Amazon to be able to better negotiate stable living conditions for the people it employed through such a program. These are people who have the potential to get out of bad situation but are still vulnerable (financially / socially / mentally), and this vulnerability should be realistically accounted for as the real liability that it is to the company employing.

No company needs to embark on such a program, they could fill labour shortages through traditional means, but when they do, it should be with some mutual agreement to work with the organisation and employees to ensure a quality outcome. Anything less is socially negligent.

It's heartening that Amazon wanted to participate, but I hope they can take on the criticism and help build a better program.
I've come across this:
http://developers.lyst.com/2014/02/22/color-detection/

Seems very good but I'm still researching. Hope it might help you.
https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/01/17/notdane.html
Homogeneous if you divide society into "black people" vs. "everybody else" (or possibly "black people" vs. "white oppressors and their friends/wannabes/bootlickers/slaves of assorted ethnicity, including black traitors").
Actual Asian culture and other real diversities are completely out of the picture.
Recently on HN on vietnamese writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755 and how the population of Vietman grew rapidly literate with the romanisation of the written language.

Another thing comes to mind: movable type printing could not take off without the small set of characters of an alphabet.
The efforts to simplify chinese characters come from the realization that it held back the country's literacy.
I sympathise with his assessment but pinyin is really not suitable as a replacement. There are about 10-30 homophones for each pinyin "word". You can make the same argument for speech but there are other cues such as temporal spacing to help a listener parse that; none exist for pinyin.
Apple’s First iOS App Development Center in Europe Will Be Located in Naples
They are not sold "subsidised", they are sold in instalments that make your mobile bill higher.

Sure, a $700 device every 24 months is affordable to almost everyone in Western Europe and is not for "high income only", but my interpretation of the point in your parent post is that the people who prefer an iPhone at double the price (or double the monthly instalment as it were) are people who either:

* are rich enough not to care about $300 if there is even a little status/brand cachet/convenience - this then translates to not caring about nickles and dimes on app store purchases either

* are desperate for being perceived as the group above - basically the same people who spend two month's salary on Prada/LV/Chanel handbags
Clojure developers are the happiest developers (2014)
I don't use an iPhone so have to ask, can users not select the search engine they want to use? Oneplus tried to change the default search on their phones to Bing and the first thing I did was switch back to Google.
I see what you're up to.
You are welcome :). Glad you like it.

I assume you mean Let's Encrypt's newly announced DNS validation approach to issuance? I think that would only add unnecessary complexity here.

There are other setups where that will be nice to have, but I don't think this is one of them.
> But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less.

No. The exact opposite, in fact. Micro-publishing services like Twitter & Tumbler have enabled millions of casual users to publish and distribute their own content with a few keystrokes and a couple clicks.
Thanks for the pointer. I was really freaking out about the crazy bill for checking the wrong box.
We haven't "made life better" since we learned how to make fire, seems odd to think we'd start now. Making shit and making life better are two distinct things. Economic production and wealth creation are just fun games.
The perspective in Sun was not unanimous. Frankly, I'll take Jonathan Schwartz' blog (CEO) over Gosling's.
Improving your software pricing
Yes, the default engines in Mobile Safari are Google, Bing, Yahoo and Duck Duck Go.
Do you have a link to that report? I'd be curious to see if that's just the US or worldwide.
I like the domain !

Is this a Show HN ?

I wonder how many people will actually pay for being able to edit (probably realizing so after they visit again in a few months). They can just as well create a new one ? Only if its very elaborate the editing might be useful ?

You could offer a login with LinkedIn or Facebook to pre-fill the fields and maybe offer some preset layout settings. Makes it more dynamic and that way you learn more about your clients.
I doubt Google had any plans to sell big iron.
How to improve usability in software. Lots of tips
I am a fresh graduate and I am working for the digital marketing department. Any suggestions on tracking the clicks on Facebook? It would be better if the tool can integrate different social platforms.
Unable to send non-encrypted SMS to previous TextSecure user
No, Chinese characters do not stop "moveable type taking off". Moveable type printing was in fact invented in China, nearly 1000 years ago, and widely used.
It does actually matter because you're paying for the clicks. I, for one, sure as hell don't want to be paying for bullshit clicks even if I still make a profit.
I guess ignoring single linebreaks prevents people from wrapping lines manually (happens surprisingly often on some forums), resulting in an annoying reading experience.
Thank you, that was very informative and very helpful! I will definitely start learning Rust!
Yes and no. Realistically you often have other constraints. E.g. for a lot of code I wrote at my last^2 job there would be no value in scaling below a single micro EC2 instance (I ran each service on its own instance and got value out of doing so), and almost all languages can scale down that far.
That is why I mentioned almost.

I am pretty conformable with Lisp, which isn't a scripting language at all, offers both a very good REPL experience and has the option of compiling to native code, both at REPL and AOT.

Also BASICs not only had an interpreter, but they also had AOT compilers. Visual Basic had a REPL, it was called Interactive Window.

Scripting languages don't have AOT compilers to native code nor Lisp is a scripting language, so I don't get the point of the comment I was replying to.
Former CEO of Mozilla is launching a browser that blocks ads by default
> Play store and all the Google apps is very definitely not free.

You keep repeating this, yet all the public knowledge on this subject (leaked docs) suggests that Google apps are free as in beer. Not only are they free, but OEMs are willing to jump hoops (contract with Google) get the $0 Google apps. Do you have any sources that say Google sells it's apps to OEMs?
We wanted to use a platform that could implement things like PCI, HIPAA & similar compliance issue we may run into. To be honest, as our startup is getting bigger, we just wanted to start going with a "big boy" solution. Don't have an IT team yet, but after talking to a few potential IT folks, it seemed like AWS was the gold standard.
Meet People Like Amir Najam on MeetMe
So it is that time of the year again for me to quote Gosling:

"We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun."

Source: http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/my_attitude_on_oracle...

But believe on whatever Google sells.
"Kara" (2016), an unofficial Star Wars film
That "biang" character is not a good example since it's not commonly used and was possibly made up by a noodle shop (it doesn't appear in dictionaries). The most common Chinese characters are made of less than 9 or 10 strokes.
something like: http://freecode.com/projects/mactorii should work
I would agree that, especially Javascript based tracking, numbers differ. What looks suspicious here is a factor of 10 though (19 to 190), which is hard to believe coming from people pressing back/mobile/slow loading etc.
I guess it is all in the delivery
Tell the people who down voted me about 15 points just in this thread. They look like attackers paid by the Greenies to down vote anyone who casts doubt on their quasi-religion and their carbon-taxes and big subsidies, e.g., about $100,000 of US Federal money for each Tesla car.

I gave a reference to the excellent BBC video with details of the total solution to the whole climate change subject and got attacked for doing that. Attacked for giving a reference to the solution. Tell the attackers, or the Mods, or PG, or Sam. Let the Mods find the attackers and kick them off HN.

These attacks are not the first: Once before I lost about 50 points from the Greenie attackers.

There is no debate, no refutation, no dispute, no discussion, no references, no facts, and no thanks -- just attacks. The attackers are the ones who shouldn't do that here.

I want to push this, see what HN is really about -- rational, scientific and technical communications or or paid off, propagandist, gangland, dirty politics.

Come on, Sam, clean this up.
Could you be any more conceited and self-satisfied?

All you do is say that the poster is uneducated, but have made zero attempt in educating him, other readers or advancing any argument against what was posted.

so tell me, if i was in a desert and somebody is really thirsty, why is it unethical for me to sell him some water?
Smoking: The Hard Truth and Why You Should Quit NOW
This seems kind of specious.

Have been living/working in China for nearly 2 years and studied the language in that time.

While individual characters can have many strokes (usually, like, 10 at the most), they're more like words or half-words.

While it can be tricky for foreigners to gain confidence with characters and radicals, due to the way they work, you'll realize it is surprisingly easy to remember new words (or even guess the meaning of words when you see them). Much easier than English in that regard. Once you have a certain baseline level of competence (and ability to "chunk" things appropriately), the learning curve quickly softens out.
>So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best choice in this case. /s

Did you even read the article? The author wrote a critique of English and listed problems non-natives have with it and its potential unsuitability as a lingua franca. Then they received a question regarding Chinese and this is their follow-up and answer to what it is that makes Chinese potentially unsuitable as a lingua franca.

If what you got from the article is "they're too lazy to learn Chinese and think English has no faults" then you didn't really even try to comprehend the article.
this is natural in a country where overall salaries are higher (somehow cashiers in stores also have higher salaries, rent is higher etc.). dining out is especially expensive, but as with all, we can choose how to spend our paychecks
I've heard a different number: 75 ¢ per device, which goes to "partners".
Alphabet within arm’s reach of overtaking Apple as world’s most valuable company
He is in the process of writing a book at the moment.

https://mega.nz/#!ip0WXAZR!ynjFWvnvojT0bmG7maTszjFybuG_Yr1De...
I experienced this fraud as well, and knowing their policy about default reaching... this is a real shame.
We ended up doing less and less facebook ads.
He has a pretty low opinion of English too:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/11/23/the-unsui...
The Interplanetary File System Explained
> says it should just be converted to English (pinyin)

Hold up - you've made a slightly false equivalence there: that the Latin alphabet == English. English is frustrating for a few reasons - some of the issues I see first hand every day are

* many irregular verb conjugations

* inconsistent\confusing\unintuitive grammar

* irregular spelling\pronunciation.

However Pinyin is just a different representation of the sounds involved in Chinese using the latin alphabet - _not_ a translation into some English-like form. Furthermore it appears to be very regular.

I'm not sure where you're from or what your language experience is, but one article I personally found pretty enlightening on this subject was at http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
. It's written by an American PHd student of Chinese language, it's a thoroughly entertaining read but the standout quote from me is around halfway down when he starts talking about Chinese people he'd met struggling to write a simple character. I'm going to copy-paste a big-ish chunk because it perfectly represents what the author of the linked post is trying to say:

"I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??"
Well the DNS queries aren't routed through the proxy.
Please read my post. I could put together a PC in about 3-4 hours max. But getting all the software I need to patch, compile and configure to work properly on Linux would take the rest of the period.

Your 64 year old senile-ish father probably uses one or two applications. I use over 50 different programs.

Also, I don't care about hardware at all. Last thing I remember is that there were Slot 1 and Slot A CPUs. I would need to research stuff before even figuring out which components are compatible. Perhaps it's all user-friendly now, but back in the day I recall always missing some cable or adapter to get stuff to work (like USB-PS2 converters for mouse or VGA-HDMI converters for monitors, etc.).

I care about building software. Hardware stuff is not something I need or want to deal with.

It would be like MLB player going to a baseball bat factory to make his own bat. He just wants a good bat. He doesn't care what wood is it made of, or what material is used for coating. He wants to pay for top-notch bat and concentrate on hitting the balls.
Netflix CEO Explains Why a “Gut” Feeling Is Still Better Than Big Data
In the context of this discussion, 'self-publish' means you control your content and its distribution. In that sense, Twitter and Tumbler are not self-publishing, since they own the software and can do pretty much whatever they like with your content. Also, you can't just pick up your Tweets and move them all to Facebook while retaining the same URL, whereas you can do this moving from self-hosted WordPress to self-hosted Jekyll.

That said, I don't think it's become harder to self-publish, but it hasn't matched the progress made by services like Twitter.
I don't think that it's dead and self publishing I'd argue is easier and cheaper than ever. My blog has all the power of s3 for scaling with free SSL from Cloudflare and I pay peanuts for it. Current bill is $0.03 some months it gets closer to $1.

I've written about it here https://hugotunius.se/aws/cloudflare/web/2016/01/10/the-one-...
Podcast with Nathan Marz: Storm, Specter and Flying
It used to be GoDaddy, but Amazon bought and now owns/operates the Starfield Root CA that cross signed the Amazon CA.
I'm a moderator. The problem is that by adding so much noise, like this, to your comments, you're lowering the signal/noise ratio of the site. Please don't do that. If you would condense your comments down to just their core information, they'd be good contributions.
I thought God mentioned something about humans protecting animals?
Then fall of man happened and something changed..
>There are about 10-30 homophones for each pinyin "word".

Yep, example

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yīn#Mandarin
If anyone has any questions about our process I'll happily answer them here.
Μάθετε+όλα+τα+κόλπα+του+WordPress+με+αυτό+το+cheat+sheet+-+SEO+|+WEB+DESIGN
Solo dev working from home here - my main lifehack is that I don't have a car. That means when I need to do shopping, I have to walk to the shops & carry it back, enforcing a minimal level of exercise each week. Since I can't carry as much as a car could, I have to walk to the shops more often. (When I do need a car, I use Uber or Uber Black.)

I allow myself to eat fast food / McDonalds whenever I want - but if I want it, I have to walk the 3km / 2 miles each way to get there. That gets me walking & out of the house. I also take my laptop and work from cafes often, or work outside in a park to get sunshine.

Joining a gym is a great idea, and when you have enough cash saved get a personal trainer. You might need to go through a few trainers to find one that you click with. Right now I'm a member of a 24-hour gym & workout at night when I have the gym all to myself, great alternative if you're shy or feel socially anxious at times.

I'm hesitant to recommend hacks, but I do have some URLs permanently blocked on my router and have used Mac apps like Concentrate [1] and Vitamin-R [2] to help me focus on work. Try RescueTime [3] if you need to identify which sites you should block. I love my Herman Miller Aeron [4] chair (helped with back problems), a Bosu [5] is amazing for doing pushups / crunches / plank at home, I use the hotspot on my Nexus 5 so I can work at cafes & parks, and I wear my Bose QC25s at the gym with a Spotify running playlist to get about 10 - 20% extra speed out of myself. (But you don't need toys & hacks, self-discipline & self-motivation is more important.)

[1] http://getconcentrating.com

[2] http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/

[3] https://www.rescuetime.com

[4] http://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/performance-wor...

[5] http://www.bosu.com
I think you need much more than 6-8 cameras, at least 60 - 80 cameras, so you can get a decent image for each spherical angle of a head. The challenge is to efficiently compress 60 almost identical video records.
Everyone should be mindful about getting all the nutrients they need.
Having said that, vegans miss 3 vitamins, regular meat-eaters miss 8.
How to Live with a Depressed Person?
Strange, I was curious what kind of images are there, did a search for "Taiwan", and the result is literally 8 pictures with "Shutterstock" watermark and that's all. Is that supposed to be CC0? Even if it was yes, would that be useful at all to have watermarked images like that?
other visitors consider your hateful, ignorant and uninformed post not worthy a comment, but I'll bite - you are wrong, sir, and probably know it.

Plus that funky part about generous US - the world these days would be a much better place if US would just mind their matters for a while. Switzerland couldn't care less about US either, americans are not preferred expats here now (good luck opening a bank account here due to US government foreign policies for expats).

As for tolerance, Switzerland has by far the highest amount of foreigners from whole Europe, and yet it's much safer than any other european country, all religions mixed (ie very strong buddhist community) etc. World could learn a thing or two from this place ;)
The internet of things definition for starters
Wow. I am an intermediate speaker of Mandarin, and I think this article is pretty unfair.

It's true that there are many tens of thousands of characters, but relatively few are actually used. To me it's very similar to there being a million someodd words in English. And nobody writes that biang character. It's notorious for being huge and weird. I could easily find some comparable ridiculous English word that we don't actually use.

I spend a few hours a day practicing writing characters, and yes, it is difficult and time-consuming. But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.

No, they can't just write pinyin instead of characters. Well, they could, but it would be profoundly annoying. It'd be like looking at a TV much too close, or looking at assembler instead of Ruby.

Yes, it was a terrible mistake to "simplify" the characters. It did not simplify the process of learning the characters in any meaningful sense, and split the user base. But I find it very hard to understand why anyone would say it is necessary to know both simplified and traditional characters. In my experience, it's just not true.

At the end of the day, we more or less choose to keep these anchors around our necks because they're fun and interesting playgrounds. I don't really need Mandarin for anything, but I still learn it, just because it's interesting, and because when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me, too. If that's stalling "development", I'm OK with that.
IBM Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Block Chain