skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
God, strongly agree. My worse-than-a-coinflip skill at getting French gender correct on nouns that aren't very familiar too me is one of the big things keeping me from returning to it. Deeply discouraging. Thanks to easy rules, I can get Spanish nouns right every time unless I run into one of the exceptions (seemingly all French nouns are an exception to whichever of the dozen or so "rules" they're failing to follow).

I also find spoken Spanish sentences much easier to parse.

For the record, I've put way, way more effort into French than I ever have into Spanish, including enough immersive higher-ed coursework that at one point I was dreaming in it pretty often.

[EDIT] I should add that my greatest annoyance with it is how hard it makes it to practice noun vocab in isolation, which is also kind of vital if you ever want to get past the problem. You can't just consistently practice the more general indefinite form because it's too often abbreviated ("l'au") so then when you go to make some damn adjective agree with it you're lost because you never actually learned the gender. Using the definite article fixes that problem but feels wrong, and never made the gender stick for me anyway. So you basically end up having to practice modifying them with adjectives to get good at nailing the gender every time. That's a fun friggin' Anki deck to put together. eyeroll
Google Employee here

It's closest analog is Azure Container Instances or Google App Engine Flex.
Not to sound negative – this is a cool paper – but isn't this in the grey zone of being actual research? It feels like a fairly trivial application of things already known since way back to work in simulation.
Do you mean generative adversarial networks?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_netwo...
Reading Korean is surprisingly easy: http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/
I have plenty of boring ideas in regulatory compliance that I have seen for the last 12 years.

But I have to disagree in some sense. If it is really boring, you will not have any passion or motivation to see it through.
I think the implication of the OP is that all resumes are presumed to be composed entirely of lies, unless proven otherwise.

To be frank, if an interviewer began asking me questions with that assumption, I would not be offended and would be able to back up any part of my resume with deep answers (or else I wouldn't put it on there), but I would think less of the company and think less of the interviewer.

If no benefit of the doubt is offered to me, I will most likely reciprocate and would assume the company doesn't trust employees to do their job. I'd probably be correct too.
Interesting. But the study only looks at hospitalization. Is it possible that women are more likely to go to the hospital than men?
people, we could be doing better with more process and better communication. Instead of automating things, we are hiring people to do manual work.
Uber's crisis deepens with record quarterly loss
I agree, it's not very replayable. There is basically one strategy to win - go for the most expensive cards. They have the best action efficiency. You can get something like 5 points for 8 chips this way, or would you rather get 4 for a card that costs 14 ? Good luck accumulating those discounts. Not that it's not possible and you can't luck out with nobles, but it takes too much time.
"We expected X, Y happened, and we learned Z" would work for me.
i suspect because learning hebrew means learning spoken israeli hebrew which is a language that was standardized and revived 150 years ago and has only been spoken since then by less than 10 million people so it did not have time to accumulate weird exceptions like arabic. learning hebrew to be able to understand medieval or biblical literature probably is a good bit harder than learning modern hebrew.
if you could optimize the traffic lights in cities, you could save a ton on gas. All the stopping and going due to hard coded timers wastes a ton and creates more pollution.
Machine learning Corsera
I am learning ML course from Coursera by Andrew Ng, but there is one problem. I cannot accomplish programming assignments from week 4, although I think I am grabbing the idea in video lectures. What am I supposed to do now? I am frozen right when I have to write something in Octave. I am new to programming and learnt basics of Matlab but still I am not able to write something from scratch. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Good to know. I haven't decided if I'd prefer going vanilla Ubuntu. I'm going to give Pop some more time yet. I can see benefits; I'm just not sure they're for me.
I prefer to use newsletters to reduce the amount of time I am on websites.

That being said, I still enjoy http://hckrnews.com/ to see what was top on HN.

I also frequent the forum on indiehackers.com to ask questions and share advice on side projects
Microsoft Edge goes dark (kind of)
exercise, hiking, long walks, eat healthy.
Maybe?

Depends how and when it is measured. If the 2017 figures cut off at the start of September (which isn't crazy if it gathered quarterly) then it is on track to be the most ever. If it cuts off at the end of November, then it's a real drop.
People can be _really_ awful though. Drunk, threats of violence, prolonged berating.

Definitely not worth the ride. The fact that you can get kicked out at any time tends to moderate your behavior.

To be clear, I'm talking about drunk and belligerent. If you're just drunk and vomiting, first there's a cleaning penalty. Second, people are generally most sympathetic as it does not make you a bad person.

Some people are just assholes. Heck, if they like abusing people after a bad day at work, they might even take the long way around so they can feel better after more sustained abuse.
> I don't dabble with video games very much because I find it to be mostly a solitary experience and they tend to have addictive game mechanics.

“Addictive game mechanics” are more typical of (superficially, at least) casual, often F2P, games whose monetization model is pay-to-win in-game purchases. That's a fairly recent phenomenon in videogames, and while it's a huge slice of the market now, there's a lot of other games out there.
Yeah that's exactly what I'm worried about. The nature of the beast makes it tricky to define a safe default.
Really? I've never heard anyone mention this and I've followed Go for years.
This is the kind of mythical chauvinism that some Japanese people like to espouse, but it’s by no means true. Fluency is entirely possible as people like Seidensticker, Keene, and many others have proved.
Alternatively for Android, you could enable KDE Connect[1] and copy the text to the clipboard (which will then be copied to the Android clipboard, and vice-versa). Or easily put it in a file and transfer it over to your device.

[1] - https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect
Well regardless of what we think of those startups, massive amounts of money are being poured into them. How much value are they really creating though?
Yes. I tried learning German for one year while taking breaks and I agree with this. Every single verb has a gender associated with it and to make matters worse, there are exceptions to every single rule!

But since German and English are both derived from the same parent language, we can find some similarity.

I am from India and ironically, I find learning Japanese easier than learning German/Spanish.
Well, VCs don't just stop funding stuff for no reason. I'm sure this is an effect and not the cause. I suppose, VC must be getting less returns on Seed rounds and everyone's starting to see that most of the new opportunities are gone. It's now all about established businesses that already have a user base. We've already seen this play out with the gaming bubble when it peeked in 2012.
Why would you need a camera? Just program the computer to know which compartment has yellow. Does a vending machine need a camera to know that B4 is a Coke?
As unpopular as it would be to say - Stop trying. Excel is a phenomenal accomplishment, and while everyone may talk about a better spread sheet, the market really doesn't want it or need it. Its basically craigslist.

The only people who think it can be or needs to be done better are primarily not the users.

Excel is the human condition, messy, varied, capable of doing many things and most of the features aren't used, and results are often horrifying. But it works.

That said, I want regex based search in excel, or better data cleaning tools.
Supposedly (I don't know for sure) English inherited mostly Germanic grammar/structure-words, and French verbs & nouns.

Seems to be vaguely upheld by Wiki although I can't find my original source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
French is easier for me, but I've spent my life adjoining French Canada and studying history from a decidely anglo-french angle.
"Don't be snarky."
More than some of that is the ongoing contraction in publishing as a whole. That's been going on for ~20 years, but knowledge transfer has been incomplete. Even in good times, successful publishers don't often throw off the multiples VCs prefer.

A flight to quality would be great.
Lots of little mnemonics, like man creates el problema, the woman la solution.
Congrats guys. How do you compare in performance against a time series database like Druid?
I've never done a group interview, so I'm speculating, but the concept sounds nice, so long as there is also sufficient 1-on-1 time.

> I would hate preparing for a normal interviewing experience and be thrown into something completely nonstandard like this.

Would it a problem if you told candidates they're doing group interviews? Might be a flaw in this particular variant, not the concept itself.

> Why would they be swapping tips and numbers if they're in competition with each other?

From the top level comment:

"You [...] explain that they are not in competition with each other because you're hoping to make multiple hires."
"All they have to guide them is the structure of their brains, not the quantity of data they have been exposed."

A typical toddler (say 12 months' old) has spent 4000-5000 hours with open eyes. Even if you assume a low frame rate (10fps), resolution (1080p), and a 1000:1 compression ratio, that's still 1TB of training data.
Python data classes
> Hear that, Intel?

You are still buying Intel, so not sure how they will care...
One option may be to assign you work at a higher level and have the product manager define stories/epics with corresponding acceptance criteria to be met at the end of the sprint. That would remove a lot of the sub-task explosion and provide you some freedom to decide how to write the code in order to satisfy the acceptance criteria.

Kanban is a bit more flexible than Scrum, as devs aren't locked into a specific set of tasks for each sprint but the micro-management with cards still exists.

In my experience, teams are more productive when they spend time on design discussions (and not card creation.) I consider standups completely useless.
Replace "algo book" with "person asking you the question", and I see relatively little difference.
One of my biggest concerns about Excel is it integrates poorly with databases.

A notorious thing that happens in my org is an expert user will extract a bunch of data from the source DB tables and dump the data into an excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will pass into the hands of an analyst who will make some tweaks maybe paste in some data maybe manually adjust a few cells here and there and so on and so forth. The spreadsheet will pass into hands of someone else and they will make their own 'adjustments' and so on down the line until finally I will get a phone call along the line of.

"The numbers I have look different to the numbers this other department has in their spreadsheet which is the 'real' value".

Eventually I'll track down the source database and lo-and-behold neither spreadsheet accurately reflects the original database number.

The more hands a spreadsheet passes through the greater the chance of original data being modified into something irreconcilable.

I've played around in the past with linking spreadsheets to DB directly and populating cells via SQL but it fell afoul of requiring various DB/2, oracle, OLEDB etc drivers to be installed on every PC you wanted to open the excel file on and each of those computers required having data source correctly configured via control panel - nightmare for places like my workplace because Windows PC's are all locked down so you'd need to submit a service ticket for every PC you wanted to be able to open spreadsheet on.

This was some years ago but I don't believe anything has changed with way database connection configuration works in Windows client world.

I much prefer the way Dedicated BI tools like COGNOS / SAS etc work. In that situation the user authenticates to the BI software (running on a central server) - the server has all of the DB connections configured and the server executes the DB query on behalf of users.

Our org is currently evaluating a newish Microsoft product called "Power BI" which uses something called an enterprise gateway more info here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-gateway-on... I don't know all the details but seems promising solution for our org's data sharing issues at least.
I am curious. How do we say that a language is hard/easy to learn
An interesting read. However, when running a search engine we discovered there is a second order relationship between page traffic and advertising, that is click fraud.

There is a 'yuuuuuge' click fraud problem on the Internet where a shady advertising reseller and a botnet collude to put ads on things and do what ever action is needed to get them to pay out (click (CPC) or view (CPI), never execute a transaction (CPA)). It is also disproportionately spread over 'low volume' inventory. As a result if you're page or video is on the bubble (which means its not really that popular or what not) if it gets demonetized you may notice a loss of 'views' because the bots have nothing to click any more. Not saying this is the issue here, just saying it is an issue.

That said, early on in the AdSense for Content program it was pretty clear that if you were not ranking on Google's index and then added AbC ads to your page suddenly boom! you had a much better rank. I don't know if that is still the case but it was a scheme we saw people using to try to get their pages to rank higher. The temptation is always there if your both the supplier of the recommendation and you're able to benefit from recommending some things and not other things. All things being equal you go with the ones the might make you money.
Lords of Scotland is a criminally underrated card game that's fun for beginners and masters as well. Actually I haven't seen anyone master it yet. Like many best games (yes, it means 7 Wonders isn't one) it has simple rules and few components which lead to complicated outcomes. I'm frequently asked to pull it out of my bag. It has both tactical and strategic aspects (you don't draw new cards at the start of new round).

The only potential flaw is high player interaction and potential to hurt feelings, but then again it's what many players love about it. Technically it is a bidding game, but most cards you play affect other players, sometimes directly destroying theirs. Kingmaker syndrome is there, but I view it as an interesting puzzle how to win when all other players are out to get me. Except for last rounds, no one is beyond chance of winning.

----------

RoboRally is a very fun game about robots racing in a factory. Each player is dealt 9 program cards (move 2, move 1, turn left, turn right, U-turn, backpedal...) and has to put them in 5 registers. All players do this simultaneously, and a 30-second hourglass is turned over when second-last player finishes. Once done, all players reveal their 1st register and perform the action, then 2nd register, and so on. Robots bump and displace each other, fire lasers at the end of each register phase, move onto conveyor belts, avoid pits, rotating floor, pushers and even collect upgrades. It's a hectic game where making an error results in visually amusing consequences. It's very light on rules, instead it demands more from spatial imagination.
>Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji.

Students are taught around 2136 kanji in school, and there are a couple hundred more that aren't taught in school yet pretty much every adult knows and uses regularly. e.g., 嘘, the character for "a lie".

The fact kanji average over 2 readings each vs Chinese's average 1 reading each also makes Japanese quite difficult. When factoring in usage in names and extremely common kanji like 生, you can have well over a dozen possible readings which you can only learn through long exposure and living in the country. There are so many times where I think, "Oh, I've never seen that word but I can guess the pronunciation since I know the kanji", only to be shut down and told it's some weird exception.
Interestingly enough I've found through my own company that it's not so much whether or not you're solo but rather the price of your software that determines if you can economically offer phone support or not.

I wrote about it here: http://www.followsteph.com/2006/10/10/is-technical-phone-sup...

I then followed it up with an article discussing whether or not companies should charge for support based on my findings in the previous article: http://www.followsteph.com/2010/10/19/should-software-compan...

The short version, under the $1000 price point it's very hard to economically offer free phone support as part of your product. If you're product is subscription based then the same metric applies using the total lifetime value of your customer. Under that price it's very hard to do, whether your a solo developer or a company without charging for support.
When we do it then it is fine, if others do it then OMG competitors!! /s
the likelihood an american foreign service employee would ever need to use a celtic language is not very high. similar probably holds for basque which i hear is not the easiest to learn either.
That requires that you know what you're doing, though. Non-technical people are probably more inclined to think along the lines of "huh, odd, but everything looks fine, so it's probably my fault it looks like that"
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I found it! Samsung SGR-A1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azQzwI9-GHU

Skip to 0:40 for human tracking demo
This is absolutely amazing.
“Prove you are who you say you are by sending us your bank password. Oh, and we’ll keep it on file indefinitely.”
How about that old joke:
"Pete and Repeat sat in a boat. Pete fell out, who's left?"
Whether or not it works for the interview, it definitely works at annoying 7-year-olds.
A very important question.
I think the opposite. The stock market is where it is because money has no where else to go.

If there were good opportunities in early stage startups money would be all over them. The opportunities just aren't there.
Qt is vastly more complex than the boost libraries due to the meta-object compiler and qmake build process. Furthermore the signals and slots are passed using lock free mechanisms and you will find they hold their own in benchmarks.
The biggest advantage is the thread safety Qt affords. Not sure why you equate templates with expert programmer because often times template systems offer unacceptable build times on large programs. (The boost template object serialization library for example)
Qt lends itself to writing more correct and simpler to digest code which any expert programmer will tell you is far more important than fast code
A startup growing 5% week on week is worth 1100% more in a year. Of course, it's a lot less liquid and likely to lose everything. Huge risk, huge returns.
I recently needed to pick up all my childhood legos from my parents’ home and am now seeking a storage solution that... isn’t plastic. Anybody know of anything?
Oh man, that's nice. Thanks for sharing that :-) I've got most of my legos in a far fallen distant cousin of those, namely Home Depot's HDX 15-compartment organizer: https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-15-Compartment-Interlocking-...

Which are nowhere near as nice, but they're $5 each instead of $50, and I don't have Adam Savage Bux.

I've got a number of them, and I'm looking for a way to make (or buy for not much money) a shelf to hold them like those shelves of Adam's.
American speaking here who spent 2+ years in China.

3) Use fanyi.baidu.com (Baidu's equivalent of Google translate) and translate.bing.com -- both work really well in my honest opinion, even for entire sentences.

Additionally, use Pleco. It's the world's biggest Chinese-English dictionary and it's all offline with a plethora of example sentences. You will love it.

In tourist spots, be extremely suspicious in anyone approaching you AND speaking english. They 99 % try to rip you off. Most Chinese are lovable and inviting and hospitable indeed, but they will NEVER 1) approach YOU and NEVER 2) speak English.

5) Download the Beijing and Shanghai Metro app, such that 1) You always know where you are (GPS) and 2) know which line to take if you have no internet
I would view Softbank as more of a holding company than a VC investor. They do make some speculative investments but it seems more of their investments are in industry specific established companies.
As an Arabic speaker, I would say it's because of regional Arabic variants.

For example, a Moroccan Arabic user would have trouble conversing with a Tunisian Arabic user, even though both countries are in North Africa. On the other hand, a Saudi Arabic user likely wouldn't even be able to tell Moroccan Arabic from Tunisian Arabic[1], let alone understand a Moroccan or Tunisian Arabic speaker!

The further east/west you go, the more differences arise (pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar), and the harder it becomes for Arabic users to understand one another. But it can get even more hairy: in some cases, Arabic users from the same country can face trouble understanding one another in day-to-day speech.

Given that the goal of an FSO is to understand as much of a language as possible (I assume?), learning Arabic becomes a much more difficult task. If the goal was just to learn MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), which is the formal and written form of Arabic, then I think it would fall under the same category as Hebrew. But MSA can only take you so far and won't really help you integrate with the local population.

[1] Middle Eastern TV channels (e.g., Al Jazeera) typically include on-screen captions in MSA if the speaker is using an "unintelligible" dialect such as Moroccan Arabic.
Let’s be realistic - something that’s happened a (relative) handful of times over the past 12 months does not explain a dramatic 3+ year trend...
The genesis of the bill of rights has more to do with how the British ran government in the colonies, and dealt with dissenting opinion than with just the concerns of the anti-federalists. Specifically in re the 3rd amendment.
>The terminating condition should be x == y

That assumes an odd number of elements (true in this case but not in general); I would recommend terminating when x >= y.