skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The primary problem with people who don't know Japanese or Chinese arguing against kanji/hanji is that they use very loose comparisons that they think are 1:1.

For example, when you write "inconceivable," you're not regurgitating every single letter in a line from memory. You probably remember the prefix "in," "conceive," and you know "able." You probably also know the common patterns "cei" or "eive" or "con," so the word "inconceivable" really isn't as complex as the initial length makes it look, as long as you know the blocks.

Kanji/hanzi are the same way -- they look complex and inscrutable to the uneducated eye, but they're all made of common building blocks that make it easier to remember them. After all, human memory works roughly the same way all the world around; people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless.

The vocabulary utilizing kanji/hanzi works the same way.

Someone could look at "inconceivable" and say "well shit, that doesn't make sense! It's long, you'd have to memorize so many letters, and the letters themselves have so many bits! Plus it has 'in' in it, which makes no sense because 'in' commonly means 'inside of something', and 'con' usually means 'to swindle someone'! This alphabet thing is completely useless."

It's absurd, reductionist, and a bit offensive.
CD Baby & Tunecore have traditionally - maybe not recently - charged artists a premium for access. When I looked into CD Baby they wanted $20/yr to host each release, LP or EP, etc. To me I knew I'd never recoup that, so I felt it was kind of similar to the old industry model of making the opportunity seem too good to be true.
I'm not sure if you are asking about Python, or Ruby.

Anyway, both languages use value-based hashing for dictionaries. I am not a Rubyist, but I guess you are just expected to not mutate the keys? Ruby's dictionary implementation also has a rehash method to deal with this case [1], if for some reason you are purposely mutating the keys I suppose...

[1] http://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/2.0.0/Hash.html#method-i-rehash
+1
Google almost seems deliberately adamant in not wanting to do anything with postures.
Seemingly every couple of days, someone on Twitter whom I follow will exclaim "Oh noes, Terraform did something bad".

Seems like a 'principle of least surprise' violation.

Is that something others have observed?
Can the average grandma use "torrent sites" (and figure out how to show the content on a TV) ? Can the average grandma use netflix ?
Another (admittedly trivial) experiment with speed and storage: Iterating through a 10,000 element list was about 2% slower than iterating through a 10,000 element tuple, and the list was 16 bytes bigger than the tuple:

#!/usr/bin/python

from sys import getsizeof
from random import sample
from time import time

l = sample(xrange(10000), 10000)
t = tuple(l)

print "The tuple's size is " + str(getsizeof(t)) + " and the list's size is " + str(getsizeof(l))

s = time()
z = 0
for x in l:
z += x

print "Iterating through a 10,000 element list took " + str(time() - s) + " seconds."

s = time()
z = 0
for x in t:
z += x

print "Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took " + str(time() - s) + " seconds."

doug@supermicro:~$ ./x
The tuple's size is 80056 and the list's size is 80072
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.00589299201965 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.00538778305054 seconds.

doug@supermicro:~$ ./x
The tuple's size is 80056 and the list's size is 80072
Iterating through a 10,000 element list took 0.00553607940674 seconds.
Iterating through a 10,000 element tuple took 0.00536203384399 seconds.
Sure, right after you make yourself a light breakfast
Thanks for this, it's a great primer.
If I may engage in a little self-promotion, my tool reflex

github.com/cespare/reflex

is similar, but more general-purpose. (It's written in Go, but it's not for Go.)
Fat does have much higher density of energy than Li-ion cell and it does not explode, but nobody seems to have figured out how to burn fat in closed space so that no exhausts are produced (there is always at least CO_2).
When it tries to hash the tuple, it finds the list inside of it, realizes the tuple is mutable, and throws an error.
Yep, that's the missing character glyph - known colloquially as "tofu".
well all the people I've asked in real life have never heard it and struggled.
> The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time.

I don't think anyone does it kanji-by-kanji. In reality, it's really autocomplete as it exists with English keyboards. You type the first few bits in hiragana or romaji, then autosuggest comes up with commonly-used words and you select the one you want.

In addition, hiragana input on mobile devices is FAR faster than romaji input, so I'm not sure how you lose time.
> in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time.

There's often (always?) a reaction when new forms of communication are introduced to language. Usually the older generation railing against the "degradation" or "misuse" of the language the way they learned it. For example txt and emojis currently in English.

Similarly with e.g. Chinese and modern IMEs. Because there are frequently many characters that match phonetically, to save time, typically younger people just pick the first one that's suggested. Mostly due to internet and phone/tablet use.
I see, it is indeed showing a missing character symbol on your computer. The actual character is much more square than that, in addition to the strokes I mentioned. (http://i.imgur.com/s6bW7u0.png)
I could write a second one if I somehow knew there would be enough (1000?) people who would read it. I'll put up signup form here: http://eepurl.com/ccistz
“Impressive deal term for Otto employees in the Uber acquisition”
Very interested to know as well.
I'm pretty sure the reason governments don't go after each other in wars is similar to why guns aren't used to win games of chess.
I really, really want to like Terraform. I tried it on a medium project by starting with and modifying the Segment stack. I ran into constant problems with it not being able to deal with errors and not being able to modify the stack in a way that would work. I ran into several situations where I would have to change names and labels just so it could work around itself while I was trying to iterate on the stack and bring it to a workable state.

To give you an idea of how many problems I had I currently have 4 different tfstate files from 4 days of testing. I had to go into AWS and manually delete resources because it couldn't recover from the errors it created.

One example: I was using the ECS option and changed the container source for a service. Seems easy enough and something that should work. Terraform wedged itself after applying the change so badly that I had to blow away the entire setup to get it reset to where it could even run `plan` without erroring.

Otto looked nice but it had fundamental, basic issues and it seems like nobody was actually working on it. I +1'd a bug with the PHP implementation where it didn't give you the option to change the web root and never got an update. This is something that every single decent PHP framework out there REQUIRES and wasn't supported. Otto PHP seemed like it was designed simply to work with Wordpress.
The original character for eclipse was "蝕". We use 食 now in Japan because of some simplification. (But the symbolism of moon eating sun is there, as you see 蝕 has 食 in it.)
Putting the parts together, 吃 would mean the begging mouth. The native Japanese word for eat, kuu, was at least at one time written 喰う which I think we would all agree makes a lot of sense. Both languages underwent different simplifications, I suspect in Chinese it became 吃 and Japanese 食, so in both languages the original logic has been lost.

I'm a westerner who learned Japanese as an adult. I feel its quite unfortunate how much of the meaning was lost with the Chinese simplification. I can mostly make out Taiwanese/Republic of China newspapers, but can see nothing in the simplified characters.

Edit:
Yay, I'm wrong, see below. Thank you internet.
Because they can deliver the content that users pay for though one platform. no need to deploy a major software update, full regression test, just for some political reason.
I work for a mid-sized media company and we use Vagrant & Packer to build all our infra. AWS CF Templates have been a big pain and we are evaluating Terraform as an alternative
I've never run into that myself. I do always inspect the plan before applying, but fortunately Terraform makes that easy.

Personally, I prefer it to alternatives like Boto/Troposphere because it's fully declarative and not coupled to a single cloud.
Yes, and this is why we had to invent a new job position and hire a huge workforce of "devops". A cost that tends to far outweigh the license costs associated with most commercial software because those people have to have the skills of a full blown software engineer, to preform what should be a sysadmin job.

I think if 15 years ago during the opensource vs close source wars you had mentioned that opensource projects would eventually decide that they wouldn't make any attempt at documenting the product, no one would create actual installers, and continuous development methodologies would leave 99% of opensource projects in a state of 0 testing before releases, it would have been a lot harder sell.

Part of this goes back to the early linux RPM/DEB decisions to refuse to follow in the footsteps of more traditional software installers and provide an interactive UI for configuration (see bottom about HPUX). Resulting in chef/puppet/etc. This has removed the onus on projects to dedicate resources to that portion of the project. I've worked at a few companies shipping commercial software and there were always either a team responsible for building an installer, or a part of the development cycle dedicated to it. There were also frequently technical writers (a job position that seems to be mostly gone). Now, with opensource/git its done when the code gets pushed to github. Forget any documentation more complex than a few docbook/etc comments scattered around the code base and a wiki so fragmented that going from one page to another switches the version of the code in question.

Its a pretty sad/depressing state, and sometimes I wonder how anything works anymore. Thank god for RH, which actually has testing labs, people to fix bugs, and strong opensource ethics about making sure the upstream/other distro's benefit from their work. But, then they go and behave like poo flinging CADT https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html in other projects.

* See HPUX for a good example of how to do it on unix, without some of the problems windows installers frequently have. The packages have a standardized form description language that are picked up in a preinstall process, so the user can be prompted for install locations/configuration/etc before any of the packages are installed. The user runs though the entire dependent set of package forms before the install actually begins. Alternatively an ignite script (like kickstart/autoyast/etc only with most of the functionality of chef/puppet/etc) can be generated for automated deployments.
Already available if you wanna spin up your own GCE: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/set-up-postgres

Or! Through the Launcher for about $5/month to start https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la...

I can imagine with time we see it make an appearance as a managed service, like the other databases, as well.
Then source it...
Very nice to read your perspective, especially as you describe yourself as self-funded (aka part-time). Making money from sound recordings is like a lottery - to me, unless it's being approached by an ad agency offering industry rates for a campaign, a recording is simply like a business card. I enjoy sharing my music creations and would rather they "be out in the wild" than try to pile up penny fractions that won't even buy me a tank of gas. I'm happy you like your path! Keep on doing what you do when you can.
I am not willing to give specific examples of things on HN. That would involve talking about people here and that leads to all kinds of drama. I do blog about it sometimes. I try to do so in more general terms, to the best of my ability. On at least one occasion that I gave a specific example on my blog, it did turn into minor drama on HN.

I did try doing the genderless persona thing when I first arrived. That doesn't work for me. I also think the suggestion amounts to admitting that there is no hope that women will ever get a fair shake, so just give up. Men are not told to hide their gender. Needing to hide my gender is also a de facto barrier to equal treatment. Do I need to change my legal name and try to disguise my gender if I meet someone in person for business reasons? A genderless online persona only works online. I can't reasonably present as genderless in person or even online if someone pays me for anything.

I also am too well known at this point. I have multiple blogs. If I wish to go incognito, I would have to abandon all prior works and start from scratch on entirely unrelated projects. Furthermore, the details of my life are fairly unique. It would be enormously challenging to hide who I am. Anyone who recognizes me would pretty readily recognize me under a new handle.

I have thought about it, quite a lot in fact. I believe that is a non-starter. Furthermore, I see progress on gender parity on HN. So, I think that's the way to bet: On further promoting gender parity here.
I love bandcamp. Partly because they just give you the music as a single zip full of audio files. No shitty downloader utility or anything.

I tried to buy a digital album on Amazon once. They offered digital downloads of MP3 files, so I figured it couldn't be so bad. It was. I bought the Interstellar soundtrack. It was 20 to 30 tracks in it. I went to download it ... Amazon told me I could use some Amazon MP3 downloader to download the album, but it wasn't available for my platform. Instead, I get brought to some music browser of the tracks I've bought. There's checkboxes next to each of the tracks, a download button, and no "select all" button, so I check each track and click download. Amazon then tells me that downloading multiple tracks at once is only supported if I use their Amazon MP3 downloader (still not available for my platform). I have to check one track at a time, and then click download. I then have to uncheck that track, then check the next track, then click download again. In what universe is that a good experience? Who the hell envisioned that as even a good backup method for obtaining whole albums? I'm lucky I only bought one album.

I just gave up and acquired the soundtrack through other means which didn't involve ridiculous rote checkbox dickery or proprietary downloader plugin nonsense. I'm pretty sure I finished before I would have finished downloading each individual track from Amazon.
Am I the only one who wishes Mutt loaded mbox files faster?

A couple of years ago I wrote an mbox parser that was several times faster than Mutt's. It really showed because at the time my server was running on a Soekris net6501, my mailbox was a few hundred megabytes, and my habit is to invoke and exit mutt repeatedly rather than using a dedicated terminal window. Since then I've been running my server on a Xeon E3, and it's less bothersome.

I investigated patching Mutt to use the parser, but it seemed a little too much trouble for the effort given how many one-liners have accreted in the existing implementation. Using an index would make things more responsive, too, but the faster parser could provide competitive responsiveness into the gigabyte territory while keeping things simple, in both code and on the filesystem.

Is this a common enough gripe that it might be accepted and appreciated? My parser used Ragel but I could implement it again in plain C so it didn't have a build-time dependency.
Same here. I got a paperwhite for Christmas 4-5 years ago. No problems. Still works well. And I use it every day.

The battery doesn't last as long as it used to, but it's still good for days.

I do keep the backlight as low as possible...
They do. Every once and a while you'll get a nice thank you, especially if you leave a note with your purchase
> It's similar to ORM. Often, if you don't use one, you end up building one, a very poor one.

Or you don't, instead you take the time to explore the concepts behind RDBMSes and learn good schema design, how to write good SQL, and so forth. And in the process end up with a high performance database and platform.
I agree... I always eat before exercising.

I would, however, caution on a carb-heavy meal pre-workout. Studies have shown:

1) Consuming carbs pre-workout reduces the fat burned during workout.

2) Consuming protein pre-workout helps preserve muscle protein during exercise.

3) Consuming carbs pre-workout restrains growth hormone release.

4) Carbs elevate serotonin which increases exercise-related fatigue.

5) Higher fat meal will allow more free fatty acids for muscles, and will increase intramuscular triglyceride levels.

All this stuff is from the best book out there: Natural Hormonal Enhancement by Rob Faigin.
The History of the Ellipsis, from Medieval Subpuncting to Irrational Numbers
There are non verbal cues or different nuances in inflection that help disambiguate. There's also situational context.

Furthermore, people use simpler language when speaking then when writing.

In Chinese, which has even more homophones, it is quite difficult to tease out the meaning of a passage written phonetically (in hanyu pinyin). When speaking and there is a word out of context (such as a name), it is necessary to explicitly disambiguate by putting the word in a common phrase or describing the characters constituent parts. For instance, I would introduce my self as "Zhe as in 'philosophy', Hao which is 'sun' on top of 'sky'".
Feels wrong to have a thread about the Hacker's Manifesto without including this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNtcWpY4YLY
Have you considered starting your own stack from the ground up?

I definitely find it a lot easier to manage and reason about if I mostly avoid third-party Terraform modules. Out of probably a dozen different Terraform projects, I've never run into a situation which I needed to manually resolve. This includes both projects which I started myself and cases where I'm helping to improve/manage client deployments.

> I was using the ECS option and changed the container source for a service.

What do you mean by this? I've used ECS with Terraform extensively and never had a problem with updating the container/image which a service referenced.

That being said, I never used Otto. It definitely seems like they tried to bite off more than they could chew and I wasn't really interested in such high-level solutions.
If only there was some way for versions of yourself at different times to coordinate. Oh, right...
蝕 was still used with this writing in Berserk, though.
I dunno, I think it's a refreshing reminder to take a step back from the "be hyper-productive, always learning, don't waste a second" mindset that pervades HN pretty heavily sometime.

I honestly stepped into the article expecting to read something like "Wake up early. Work on your side project. Go the gym."

I think it's perfect for HN.
Removed the "do not"

As far as the alphabet itself goes, I do not think that Latin is that bad. All symbols have a canonical sound associated with them. The problem is that our usage of the alphabet is horribly inconsistent. This is partially due to the fact that English has sounds that cannot be expressed using the "pure" alphabet. Arguably Japanese has this same problem in their system, with the ゃ、ょ、ゅ modifiers. But at least they distinguish those from や、よ、ゆ by size, and are disciplined about their usage, so we can consider the set of compounds to be their own characters and not have a mess.

Of course you still have the ず/づ issue, and the pronunciation of は and を as わ and お in their most common usage. But, even in modern Japanese, these oddities are not universal.

Out of curiousity, are you aware of any numeral system that beats Arabic? By pre-Arabic European standards, Arabic numerals are a masterpiece of symmetry.
See first 25 entries or so in the permuted CL symbol index:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/CLHS/Front/X_Per...

Scheme does use ?, and you can in CL if you really want. But CL reserves ? as a programmable reader macro [1]. It is often used, for example, to designate a stand-in domain variable designation in, say an embedded Prolog.

Another reason that CL avoids the "?" convention is that it's "unpronounceable" [2]. CL is the only language spec I've seen that discusses pronunciation; they actually gave thought to how programmers might converse about their code unambiguously [3]. Another manifestation of this is CL's sort-of case-insensitivity [4].

--

[1] The other reserved characters are !, [ ], and { }

[2] Although at least one wag suggested pronouncing it as "eh?", like a good Canadian.

[3] CLtL2 provides quite a bit of this. My fav is a brief excursion into how some hackers pronounce "macrolet" to rhyme with Chevrolet. :)

[4] This is not actually the case, but appears to be true to new Lispers, until they understand that by default, the reader converts everything to upcase.
I am getting a customized T-Shirt with that message.
If you replace kanji with katakana and keep hiragana for particles and conjugation, you can call it a day.

Easy to learn, no more trying to guess if it's on/kunyomi, immune to mispronunciation from using a foreign alphabet, the list goes on.
FWIW, you can now just download a .zip of MP3s from Amazon.
Oh good grief. If the US invaded Canada the war would be over before the Canadians had a chance to notice there was a war.
We are evaluating Vault, which has a reputation for being a quality product (I believe).

Terraform is also popular.
> I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese

Writing Japanese entirely in Latin characters would be no different from writing it entirely in hiragana. Have you ever tried reading that way?
Another problem is that if the character appears in isolation, it's hard to tell whether you are looking at 口　(mouth) or 囗 (the "box radical" kanji, or "kunigamae").

Ha, for me, they look quite different in the font used for editing, but not so much in the rendered comment other than a small difference in size.
It could be that no one will be fired. Our spending is in line with the sheer scale of the US as a country.

One thing to consider - Eleanor Roosevelt was extremely successful in making the military an agent for social change. This, coupled with the way things worked with the Cold War draft made the military a significant social program, one with tanks and bombers.

Where Americans hold fast to Rugged Individualism in the larger economy, within the ranks of the military, we get significant lift in training, support and quality of life issues for our troops.
No, the exact opposite happened, narrowing the spread is super favorable to mutual funds
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-f...
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-f...
That's great to hear! They're off my avoid list then. Still not as great as Bandcamp's options but sounds usable.
Probably some stupid made up shit to scare kids into using "proper" chinese (for certain definitions of proper as defined by political agendas).

I do find 文言文 to be quite elegant and terse though.
> I'm not sure if you are asking about Python, or Ruby.

Ruby, since you said it allows mutable keys in dictionaries.

> Anyway, both languages use value-based hashing for dictionaries.

Neither Python nor Ruby has compound values. Object identities are primitive values.

> but I guess you are just expected to not mutate the keys?

I guess C programmers are expected not to use memory after they free it.