skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am afraid I am not qualify to say whether the Chinese Character is, or not a brake on development of its language.

But I do have a story to share, just one story, nothing more.

When I was a kid studying in UK, during an Art Session we had to cut a black card and overlay on top of white paper to create some form of Art. I have absolutely no idea what to do! Compared to some of my classmate who start creating and cutting some beautiful images, I was starring in the air and didn't know what to do. I try cut a few things but they all look so dull, ugly and meaningless in my mind.

After 30 mins of not going anywhere, my teacher came around and pat on my back, he said, "Beauty is in the eye of beholder. It doesn't really have to mean anything, it could just be some random cutting, some shape or even some words like your name. It doesn't matter. Try your best"

At that moment i really needed some encouragement, So i thought, since everyone were doing something good and fancy, why dont I cut out a Chinese word? He did said some words. Since i am the only Chinese in the class, surely no one would be doing it and no one would understand it anyway.

So in the remaining 15 min or so I drafted out the Chinese letter "愛", ( meaning love ), it is complex enough and easy to explain.

In the end when everyone were presenting their work to our teacher, I still remember the look on his face when he saw mine, he was, awkwardly staring at it for 30 seconds, without making a single noise. The silence was quite intense I was thinking I make some crap...

"What is this?" He asked.
"A Chinese Letter"
"What does it mean?"
"Love"
"This is beautiful! This is actually a letter?"
"Yes"

I thought all these were just some encouragement so i dont look too bad. When we left the classroom, I turn around and my teacher was still standing there staring at my form "art".
Later on that Week my teacher asked me privately to make him a few more of these Chinese Characters, I wrote out a few so he could choose, he was truly fascinated at the act form of these Characters.

I couldn't grasp the idea then. Because I never saw them as act, merely as what the article suggest as a painful tool to write. It was only as i grow older and older, did i start to appreciate this beautiful form of Chinese glyph.

I hope you all too, would some day appreciate the beauty of these characters.
While TensorFlow may be not yet as mature as Theano or Torch, I love their tutorial: https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/master/tutorials/. It's clean, concrete, and more general than introduction to their API. (Before I couldn't find anything comparable in Theano or Torch.)

In any case, I regret waiting so long for learning deep learning. (I thought that I needed to have many years of CUDA/C++ knowledge (I have none); but in fact, what I need to to know the chain rule, convolutions etc - things I've learnt long time ago.)
Panasonic PBX SMDR storage capacity
We Want to Control. We Want to Be Remote
Call Accounting Software and Top Extensions by Duration for Outgoing
Tell HN: TheSixtyOne is online again
T61 is free music streaming web app where indie artists upload their songs and listeners discover them (and features of the website) with cool "quests"
http://www.thesixtyone.com
And now its watch is ended.
Lots of Mandarin words have multiple context-sensitive pronunciations too.

And yeah, all the problems with Mandarin are very much present in Japanese as well.
Am I reading that right, you want to read 15 books in 3 weeks?
We are talking about written languages, not spoken.

Moreover I find your last sentence to contradict the previous. I don't know what you are trying to say, but you are talking about a different domain.
Ask HN: How to become good enough in UX to sell your apps?
I am constantly developing little web applications and became very good in a basic Full Stack environment with JavaScript and some database. Good enough to serve to a few hundred customers, fix bugs etc. I am a full time JavaScript developer, and what I am lacking are the skills for a good enough design to present my apps to a broader audience or investors. Also, UX/Design plays a huge role in if customers pay for a service or not (in my opinion).

There are many books and courses out there, and I am kind of lost.

So, does anybody have tips of how to get started to polish web applications to a good enough design to go public?
> Perhaps yew was also way too hard to come by / expensive for the Scottish?

One of the first point the paper makes is that the domestic supply of english yew was of poor quality and way outstripped by the demand, and the country imported yew from throughout continental Europe. So while yew availability may have been an explanation for Scottland, it definitely wasn't for France.

> Still, producing a longbow compatible population (of strong, loyal) men might have had other costs then political ones. Precision wise, a longbow is not a real tournament weapon

The longbow is a tournament weapon if you set up longbow-only tournaments and legally forbid other sport tournaments.
The title should be changed to reflect this
Combining Markov Random Fields and Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Synth
Startup Advisers and why you need them
> I'm not sure if this is covered, but the longbow requires huge amounts of practice from a young age to be effective.

It is covered, the paper lists a number of measure the English crown took to force people to train with the longbow in their spare time.

> the French simply couldn't find enough trained men?

The French could have taken the same measures of mandating longbow ownership and strongly "encouraging" longbow training (by setting up tournaments and forbidding other types of leisure)
a) It's British, which might explain some of the language and humour (with a "u").

b) I keep forgetting about 'El Reg', but whenever I return there, I enjoy my visit. It has a strong, unique tone which I find a breath of fresh air amongst all the dull, neutral news reporting out there.
English has a similar problem with ridiculous spellings. But I don't know many people that think this isn't a problem, there is just no way to coordinate everyone to agree to change.

> 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.

I don't know if this tradeoff is really necessary. How much extra space would it really take to write out chinese, if it had it's own phonetic script with a few dozen characters? Maybe it would need more characters than English, but certainly not thousands.

Second, there is a big difference between a complicated spoken language, and a complicated written language. Human beings are actually quite good at learning complicated languages when we are young. We just naturally absorb them. There is no worry about languages being too complicated for it's own speakers to learn.

But writing systems are learned later in life, and therefore take more effort and can lead to illiteracy. We don't absorb writing naturally like spoken language.

>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.

I really can't believe you said that. Development means pulling poor people out of poverty and vastly improving the quality of life for the average person. Increasing literacy is also very important for that goal.
Sounds like I have some more research to do - thanks for the detailed response.

Btw, you were right, I meant scrapy-cluster and not scrapyd-cluster: https://github.com/istresearch/scrapy-cluster. There is a requirement on Zookeeper/Kafka, which is the main showstopper for me.
I understand that. Item 2 on the list was container-based micro housing units, though, which are going to have to be built/installed somewhere. If you can get the permits and land to install micro housing units, you can most certainly get permits to install shower and was facilities. In fact you are required to do so. You cannot housing housing without plumbing.
> b) I keep forgetting about 'El Reg', but whenever I return there, I enjoy my visit. It has a strong, unique tone which I find a breath of fresh air amongst all the dull, neutral news reporting out there.

They're basically the tabloid press of the tech news industry. But their writing style is fun, I'll grant them that.
Posting successful SSH logins to Slack
"Some have had disks replaced, the odd battery renewed, ..."

Reminds me of the old gag: "I've had that broom for 14 years. It's only had 2 new heads and 3 new handles."

At least the server in the original story stayed original.
Adding Alana to the list of CC0-only stock photos.

[1] http://alana.io/

[2] http://alana.io/about-us/
Show HN: Janeway – A more mouse-driven, curses-based Node.js console
Firstly it is slow...
Secondly I have typed "wolf" and I got: 3 foxes, 1 lion, 2 monkeys, 1 snow house and 2 wolfs that do not look like wolfs !?
> So I quit and traveled. It does seem like traveling is the "default" thing to do to cure one's ennui. What I can say is that being in a new locale doesn't magically give you newfound motivation/inspiration etc, and depending on your personality it can be quite isolating.

This. I never understood how being thousands of kilometers from anyone you know or care about is supposed to be good for you.
Column was published before the web was invented (in the 1980s), so I have no idea.
I really wish this sort of thing were still usable on our modern web. This will be hijacked by spammers and it will become impossible to see legitimate mentions through the sea of spam, but it sure is a nice interface for building up a network of backlinks.

Just like Google Analytics has become useless for low traffic sites. My blog gets hundreds of page views, all from referral spam. I don't even bother trying to see if at least some real people are looking at it.
I thought this was going to be about the AH-64D Apache Longbow.
The various French barons probably saw more advantage in maintaining their ability to repress their own people than deeper alliance with them to defeat others. Being King of France sounds nifty, but there wasn't actually much that King could do against the more powerful or remote barons. One of those barons might have had more power over the others by training archers, but the real power would be with the _archers_, and the baron would access that power by their acknowledgement of his authority. This makes it difficult for the baron to tax the bejesus out of the serfs and take their daughters. All of which was the really fun part of being a baron, and never mind about being King.

When your political status depends on your ability to beat the crap out the people around you, and that ability depends on you having expensive armor that they don't have, you have no interest in teaching them to kill you at 150 yards with a piece of wood.
I am a Howard University Alum of the Computer Science Department. My experience at Howard was an eye opening experience. I went to Howard because I got track scholarship and I wanted to get the "Different World" TV Show experience. As a first generation Nigerian American, there was a lot of diversity in the sense that I got to meet black people from all over the world. I even got to get the chance to learn about my history. Also, when I graduated a lot of my classmates went on to work at Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, or other Fortune 500 companies. Google IPO'ed a year earlier and wasn't really on campus. Google and Facebook would get students a couple of years after I graduated. I know a couple of those students that are doing well because they got in early at Facebook. There is a decent amount of Howard Alumni at some of the tech companies. Anyways, what Dr. Burge is doing is great. His focus is to get more students to work on projects and get more tech companies on campus. More people in DC and the US are helping as well.
In some ways this looks more and more like sesame credit in China.

We could say that this is another reason to get off Facebook, but realistically we'll just get used to it and continue using the service.
I see

"GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1"

about eight times a day on my lowest traffic sites. And I don't even have WP installed. (Or PHP.)

WP is a distributed botnet farm. I know people who have given up reseller hosting businesses because keeping customer WP installs clean was becoming a 24/7 job for them.

Unfortunately Hugo, Jekyll, etc are a poor substitute for WP, because they're much too difficult for non-coders to use. They're also a poor substitute economically - the WP template & plug-in market is huge.

It must surely be possible to build a blog engine that's secure, easy to use, and easy to customise?
Expression templates
it would've been nice a photo of the uptime or something like that... i believe him tho.
Sorry, but not all foreigners are able to pronounce English words. For me, English written and English spoken are two different languages. Dyslexia is common in English world. For example, dyslexia is not possible at all in my native language (Ukrainian) because we have explicit rule about 1:1 mapping between spoken and written language, which, in turn, makes English language extremely hard to learn when adult.
Golf and football were actually forbidden in Scotland for a time in the 15th century to try and encourage archery practice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_in_Scotland#Etymology
Dan Kaminsky had a good talk[1] regarding this on 26c3, where he essentially argued that the only reason we have TLS at all is because companies selling stuff over the Internet wants to make it seem secure for the customer. State actors or large companies interested in data mining are not that interested in committing credit card fraud, so every one just accepts the PKI status quo more or less.

Or that was what I took away from what he said. I havn't seen the complete talk since he held it.

[1] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3658.en....
If you're out of work that's perfectly doable. I sometimes read books in a day or two even while having a full-time job. (Back-of-the-envelope calculation: at 1-2 minutes a page, a 300-page book takes 5-10 hours).
To add to this, it wasn't too long ago that the technical and financial cost of setting up and running a server were too prohibitive for the casual user.

Nowadays, I can set up a public-facing server with a few clicks for $5 a month. We have it too easy.
> So due diligence is happening after they decided to invest, right?

Yes, usually this happens after the terms sheet is signed (and for smaller investments after a letter of intent is signed or a handshake deal is agreed upon). Up to that point it is read as true that everything the founder says will check out.

The due-diligence process is there for two reasons: to fulfill the 'duty to research' for a VC to cover their backs in case a deal goes bad after investment and LPs wonder how the hell they got suckered in like that as well as to simply protect the funds.

For angels the situation is worse here because they don't have the funds or the organization to do this properly.

> What about before?

Typically a VC has a number of analyists that assess the companies that pitch them to see how solid the various commercial claims are. The accent there is usually on the numbers and the commercial side of things, which is reflected in the education of the associates (typically: finance, accounting and/or a bit of legal and commercial).

Angels tend to do this part by themselves.

Angels and VCs do roughly the same thing, only angels do it earlier on (when the risk is higher, companies are cheaper and the deals are much smaller so they can still participate), the biggest difference is dictated by the size of the deals, it limits the amount of money you can spend in order to determine if you spend it wisely.

To make an extreme example: a full legal/commercial/technical/financial dd would cost approximately 100K or so. The bulk of that will be eaten up by the legal portion, the remainder is roughly equally split between the other parts.

If you're looking to plunk down 100K as an angel if you actually did a full DD you'd be out 200K if the deal goes through or 100K if it doesn't, so then there is no point in doing DD at all. Hence my advice to do an abbreviated one scaled down to a portion of the size of the investment, but to definitely look at all these aspects of the company, if possible through the eyes of an outsider.

The other important thing to remember is that doing DD puts a strain on the company you invest in, and if every angel would do a full DD on a company before investing then the company would grind to a halt during their seed round.

Yet another note: for seed investments there usually isn't a whole lot to verify anyway, the company is still tiny, probably has no turnover (so financial dd becomes: look at the model), has very little technology (so tech becomes: look at the proof of concept) and so on. So everything becomes a lot simpler anyway, it wouldn't be possible to do a full process DD on a start-up that has only just become real enough to look for seed funding.
We have various news feeds displayed on TV here at work, The Register is one of them. It's always fun to see some of their headlines/copy pop up, the style of writing is really great (especially when they bash the Government's IT projects with colourful language).
The authoritative DNS server for pvv.ntnu.no is still a MicroVAX II from the late 1980s. It runs an (up-to-date, I think) NetBSD. Logging in by SSH takes several minutes, even with SSH v1.
Fairly informal, occasionally jokey writing is a hallmark of the British press. For us, it’s a bit of a culture shock to read the mainstream US press which takes everything very seriously.
Sometimes I wonder if people come up with the name first and write something to match.
I always wondered how people got to these uptimes. I have to reboot my linux box at least once ever other week to install updates.
Something like www.amazon.com/dp/0521835402/ would take me weeks to read properly, but most of the books on my list are popular science or introductory textbooks. They just aren't that dense.

I'm also reading just to get an overview at the moment. I'm not following up references or carefully criticizing experiments. I just want to get an idea of what the main areas of research are and what I might enjoy studying in depth.
> This is particularly true for mobile, where it's very easy to mistakenly tap on an ad while attempting to scroll/swipe.

Even if this is the case, I think it would be hugely unethical of Facebook to sell accidental clicks as deliberate engagement.
This was thought of by the Greeks, it's called 'Theseus paradox'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
Boilerplate is a problem but doesn't make a language harder to understand. Language-level shortcuts to reduce boilerplate generally make the language harder to understand, IME (I'm thinking of e.g. Perl's $_).

I actually agree that implicit conversions are to be minimized. But you do need a way of doing the equivalent of the magnet pattern - which in Kotlin is either a different language-level feature, or simply impossible. I'm hopeful that a simpler underlying abstraction can be found - but Kotlin feels to me like it's just piling on a bunch of special cases without making any effort to be consistent or unified.
> It's British, which might explain some of the language and humour

It's better explained by simply describing the site as a tabloid. Tabloids aside, British news reporting isn't typically that informal.

> I keep forgetting about 'El Reg', but whenever I return there, I enjoy my visit. It has a strong, unique tone which I find a breath of fresh air amongst all the dull, neutral news reporting out there.

Personally I find the site appalling. It's up there with the The Daily Mail for rewriting other people's articles. Granted this is basically how 99% of reporting happens these days, but these kinds of tabloids often miss the entire crux of the original piece they're plagiarizing due to their editorialisation. For example, their articles on OpenSSL parallels the Daily Mail's absurd anti-immigration propaganda. And often, again like the Daily Mail, El Reg will completely miss-report a story just for the sake of having a clickbait headline.

Frankly, I'd rather have dull neutral news reporting over biased misinformation.
> Wealth inequality mostly due to bad things is not inconsistent with Graham's position.

But it is. If you read what he wrote, he basically gives equal weight to A and B as causes. A being good things and B being bad things.
Why science is failing to alter the future
There's a useful summary on the wikipedia page for 'Linkback' [1] describing how Webmention differs from other similar schemes.

Things like Pingback and Trackback seemed to be all the rage for a few months, back in the day. They then seemed to cease being talked about - either discussion has bypassed me, or they just carry on being used, seamlessly, or they've failed. It would be great to see something like this really take off, though, especially since many bloggers started turning off comments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback
It's an interesting paper but "politically stable" isn't the right term.

A population able to defeat the infantry technology of the time requires a different social and legal position than one that doesn't have that ability. That is, the government needs more cooperation and consent of the governed. That government is stronger than other governments, because it can kill their armies. But it is more dependent on that population and so cannot abuse it in the same manner as those other, "weaker" governments.
Apologies, I did mean east asian. I'm not sure why, but in Australia, NZ, and the US (possibly Canada too) 'asian' is almost always taken to mean east asian. It always takes me a moment to realise that (e.g.) British people commonly use the term to refer to people from the subcontinent.
Reminds me of this thread from a few years ago here on HN when a clothing company accused Facebook of similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4312731 .. "Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site." and other stories from HN users.
266 Killer Blog Post Ideas – No More Writer’s Block
I'm curious to know if he's the smellier one.
> less predictable runtime behaviour

with all my love for haskell, this is an understatement...
Not sure there was much option at that time - to get to be a King, or keep your position, quite often required being a direct hands-on stupendous badass.
It does start really basic, with a single logistic classifier. I think you'd have to be pretty motivated to learn how neural networks work from this course, but it seems possible. If you don't know any machine learning at all, then you probably wouldn't be able to.
You can do both, there is no need to decide between MAC and firejail.
(It may not work for some small quirks but they should be fixable, at least in theory)
> tail /var/log/nginx/access_log | grep 'your_landing_site' | grep 'facebook' | wc -l

How about run something like this for an actual concrete number of visitors, rather than relying on JS tracking? That's much more concrete evidence.
It's not me who said that it created demand. The grandparent suggested it.

I just said that it have been used successfully as a way of buffering prices, without the need of burning anything, in comparison to this "creative destruction" that he sees as necessary.
Its a parody of the British tabloids and their ridiculous headlines. As such I find it's headlines hilarious sometimes.
That's what Rust has byte slices for: `b"abcdef"`