skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Peter Hessler wrote a wonderful New Yorker story about Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, mixing history and language history, politics, and his personal history in Egypt. It goes into much more detail.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-arabi...

Some random quotes:

> Over time, Arabs came to associate any encouragement of vernacular writing with colonialism. By the nineteen-fifties, allegiance to fusha was critical to pan-Arabism, because the language created a bond across the Arab world.

> At public universities, math, medicine, and some hard sciences are taught in English. Centuries ago, Europeans needed Arabic to learn medicine, but nowadays even Egyptian medical students don’t use Arabic texts. “What happens is that you reserve Arabic for traditional knowledge,” Doss said. “And it becomes more conservative.”

> After the Chinese, textbook Egyptians seemed remarkably uninspired by development. There were no production quotas, no economic plans, no infrastructure projects. The word “factory” did not appear in the book. People said things like “Ya hag, I’m an engineer and after five years of university, I’m working as a waiter in a restaurant.”

> The language is wonderful for Wanderwort. Arabic imported “shah” from the Persians, and then the phrase al-shah mat—the king died—was introduced to English as “checkmate.”

> Translation into fusha can clean up a politician’s words. For example, in April, 2016, President Sisi discussed political reform with representatives of different sectors of society. Speaking Egyptian, he stumbled: “The ideal shape that you are calling for, that idealism is in books, but we cannot take everything you think about with paper and pen and then ask the state for it, no, it won’t happen . . . but we are on a pathway in which we’re succeeding each day more than the day before.” In Al-Ahram, the quote appeared in fusha as: “Idealism exists in books, but we’re walking the pathway of success, and we will succeed day by day.”

> During the last century, publishers sometimes rejected books that used Egyptian, and even novels about everyday life, like Naguib Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy,” featured fusha dialogue that no Egyptian would ever speak. Egyptian Arabic still lacks a standardized orthography, but its use has become more common during the past fifteen years, in part because of the Internet and texting. Nowadays, a writer like Rakha can publish in Egyptian, but to some degree it’s too late, because people rarely read Arabic books of any sort. For Rakha’s third novel, he’s writing in English, primarily because he wants to attract readers.
One "cleaning" task that I think is often overlooked is basic organization of small clutter and such. It takes up tons of spaces, is often poorly organized, and finding things you lost is a huge headache.

I'd love to see some sort of out of the way storage system with an in-home Kiva style robot that lets you select what you want in an app, and it goes and fetches it. When you want to put something away, the robot shows up, collects your item, and stores it.

To be truly useful, you'd probably need a somewhat decent sized storage area, and the robot may need to be decent sized depending on the weight and size of objects to be handled.
Bokeh 1.0 Released
Fr units (fraction, measure of flexibility) shall be allowed on width,height,margin,padding and borders.

Instead of using flexbox I should just be able to write:

label { width:1fr; }
input { width:2fr; }

to distribute the widths in 1:2 ratio.

Easy, obvious and has very good mental model - flexes are just springs where fr unit expresses their strength.
Robots are not very good at manipulating things, especially things that are flexible or things with a variety of shapes. So one of the biggest problems that ingredients don't come in standardized containers. So either one has to sell every ingredient in a special cartridge or the human has to load ingredients into the machine. Now since some ingredients are perishable this makes loading the machine weekly and producing cartridges difficult. If a human has to manually load the machine then the human is still doing quite a bit of labor. Now making simple baked meals such as casserole are harder than they look for robots. So we can probably mix ingredients together, we might be able to slice vegetables, but getting an mixture of ingredients into a baking pan might be difficult. Even simpler is stir fry, and there are already robots that do this[0] In addition, it is also worth pointing out that devices that manipulate granular materials(flour, rice, salt, etc) are not very reliable[1]

[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-students-invented-a-robo...
[1]https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R3216.html
First I thought thats not straightforward to make a DB update because you know, not everything is loaded into our brains working memory like which package to use, exact syntax etc etc. But then I read that you guys gave 4 hours + Google and I am shocked. BTW are you hiring :)
Chinese also had the same "issue": it is more of a family of languages rather than a language. But the Chinese government has been pushing pretty hard for Mandarin over the past 100 years, such that it has now become the Chinese language. It has cost them a lot of linguistic diversity, but they probably think it pays off in the long run.
I am not judging bonsai lovers but when I thought about trying it myself I got a little of that cruel vibe around it so I didn't go further. It's not so much about forcing your will on it but the thought of intentionally stunting something's development. Again, no big deal but I decided it wasn't for me.
Sure; it wouldn’t be perfect safety but would work for a large swath of Unix tools.
Having trialled the new offering thanks to a banner in my Wordpress dashboard, I went right back to the old editor. Trouble with the new one is the UX is hostile - everything needs an extra dozen clicks for the most simple things.

I want to publish a post about as fast as writing a text or word doc. The current wordpress editor is unexciting but has a fairly decent workflow. Faffing about with everything on a pulldown or modal is not progress.

A fair summary of my views of Gutenberg:

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/wordpress-gutenberg.html
Css is fine. Not perfect but fine. It's an approachable way to style documents that look ok on different devices. It's best when used sparingly.

When I see people complain about css, they usually fall into a few camps. First theres the person who wants everything to look the same everywhere. They want web design to work like a print document. Sorry but thats now how it works.

And then theres people who are writing web apps, not documents. I feel sorry for those folks. Cuz css does suck for that, and there's no easy solution.

But for documents, css is fine. Although it wouldnt be as important if you all marked up your documents correctly in the first place.
As seen in Jeff Dean's twitter feed [1] ;). But seriously, this was a lot of fun. We'll have the code up very soon - just need to clean up a few things.

[1] https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1054951415339192321
Yes, this is all right on. And it's being solved in modern component libraries that combine JS, HTML, and CSS into modular building blocks for UI's.

The key difference IMO in how to think about CSS nowadays is to move away from the paradigm of CSS as a global system, and instead, use it locally scoped to components. I like to think of CSS classes as a kind of local state. Most often, in layout components and whatnot, its static. Otherwise, in more dynamic situations, rather than messing with css properties directly (or passing vars via css-in-js), the component's js manages the "state" of the classes being applied by adding/removing.

When you start to think in this composable component framework, styles are just another component. And js is used to manage changes in state, which it is much more apt to do.
3.5 weeks feels awfully short to go from beta to production on a change so big. Isn't Gutenberg going to be the new default, no opt-out? Kind of makes me nervous.
I'm relatively technical and I have no practical idea of what (for example) 400 mAh means for a phone. It's not that I don't get the technical definition, it's that without any context 400 mAh is just a number. Even if I were to look it up, how do I know that my understanding won't be off in a couple of years if power consumption requirements for phones change?

On the other hand, if you tell me that my phone's battery can handle around 7 hours of streaming music, or 12 on standby, I know exactly how what that means for my practical usage habits.

I imagine the average phone user's attitude is somewhat similar to mine.
That could be, but nexus didn't have that. The internet check started with Pixels due to the verizon deal. So the main reason for it seems to be to check if the phone is in the verizon database since all the phones ship with the same ROM.
Have tried it? It's really buggy. The head of UX quit because of the amount of bugs.

Not only technical bugs, the UI is poorly designed.
Does a PDF complaining about fixed-width content qualify as irony?
I'm not so versant about the state of permission / capability systems on Linux.

But if there is a way for you to drop the capability to modify the filesystem before running the first pipeline, you should definitely do it by default (and provide a switch to override it if somebody knows what they are doing.)
I winder if the Spuerchargers will at some point become an outdated liability once (if) other manufacturers decide on a standard. Being a first mover often can become a problem.
The evolution of Apple design between 1977 and 2008
Agreed, and hoping that scss or less influences future versions of css!
"Nobody knows how?"

This is how: Tim Cook sits in his office, calls in Apple's best and finest and smartest and says "Fix it - I don't care what it costs. Shut that hole."

He then gets out his company chequebook and writes a cheque for $"whatever it takes".

That's how.
Commented a couple times here, but we've been making a concerted effort to inform past clients of the coming of Gutenberg.

It seems that outside of the dev community and people actively involved in WordPress news, there's very little familiarity with the fact that Gutenberg is coming.

We've launched a productized service[1] that helps people take an audit of their site, get familiar with using Gutenberg and give them resources to make the transition.

We've mostly found that's it's been going smoothly, but there are plenty of cases where sites have different customizations that will need to be worked around or refactored.

The Gutenberg team is working hard on making sure legacy things are handled properly, but there's a lot out there and it definitely needs to be taken on a case by case basis.

[1]https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg
I was responding to a very short post by coding123. My point is that the free movement of people within Europe may have been a necessary condition for brexit, but it was not a sufficient condition. The free movement of Europeans did not lead directly to brexit. It was only after a massive influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East that we had brexit

I do not disagree with your claim about near peer countries.
I looked into using btrfs as a replacement for RAID and LVM, but between the need to use new tools (can't use df, lsblk, etc) and the lack of proper fault detection [0], I decided to stick with a more standard solution.

[0] https://superuser.com/questions/789303/how-to-monitor-btrfs-...
"The head of UX quit" - source?
https://www.ding.net/bonsaikitten/index.html <-- A piece of internet famous history...

-----

Bonsai is a practice in manifesting intent in a patient and peaceful manner - which results in a beautification of the universe.

It is not cruel.
The Arab golden age was very important.

I am also unclear what you mean by "especially". Are you saying that there was actually more scientific output in Arabic before 1400 years ago?
Ah, OK. Where I work (Bay Area tech company) it would be basically impossible to question (however politely) dogma such as

"The pipeline isn't the problem; the work environment is the problem". <== This refers to the hiring pipeline and difficulties of hiring programmers from under-represented backgrounds

"Seeking to hire candidates from under-represented backgrounds does not mean that the standards for evaluation are being lowered even slightly for anyone."
As someone who studied elementary Arabic as a child temporarily living in an Arab country, the only bits that are left with me is the script.
25 something years later, I can still read elementary Arabic words I see on the internet or in TV, but I have forgotten most of the vocabulary and grammar.
Almost all of science and philosophy was done in Arabic during the middle ages so "1.4k years" is an overestimate. Without the Arab and Muslim scholarship much of Greek/Roman wisdom would be lost.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Cl...
The interests of humanity and the interests of the organizations that have the capital to fund science projects are not frequently aligned.
In the trolly problem, a runaway trolley is moving toward five tied-up people on the tracks. There's a switch which redirects the trolley toward a single person, who is also tied up on the track.

In the deep learning world, your system classifies the five people as a large kangaroo, while the single person is classified as a STOP AHEAD roadsign.

What is the most ethical choice for the system to make?
It would remove the live execution bits which are kinda neet. I think the cli has a lot of life left in it and ideas like this are worth exploring. Perhaps compromises are necessary but I would love a tool that pretends to execute something shows the results and gives
the option of committing those changes. Think of a find | xargs grep | rm
That then shows the output but prompts the user for commit.
You can still opt-out by installing the Classic Editor plugin[1]. That will disable Gutenberg and let you keep the current experience.

[1]https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/
flexbox, grid, table,etc. shall be values of some 'flow' or 'layout' property as they define layout model of element's content.

'display' values shall just define requirement of the element to its container: display:inline, display:inline-block require flow:text container and display:block require flow:vertical, flow:horizontal wrapper.

So it shall not be display:inline-table, display:inline-flexbox and the like.
How to Setup PHP Code Sniffer in PHPStorm
You could do what is more or less an industry standard when it comes to this and warn the user that there's not enough room to allow an undo when deleting said file(s) and prompt if they want to delete it permanently instead.

It's not rocket surgery.
A better C++ assertion library which also prints a debug message
Who uses that?
That’s what all my posts are about
It MUST be a way to reproduce <center> HTML by CSS means solely. No way so far.
Islamic/arabic world could not keep up with the science, unfortunately.
1.4K years is certainly an overestimate. 150 years maybe a better timeframe since the Industrial revolution started going in full swing.

But your same logic applies to any non major Western European language too.
But past 150 years -> don't think any major scientific discovery was done in the Japanese/Korean/Chinese language. All of them was first written down and communicated and published first in the English language.
Uber for Roombas
I think Gutenberg solves the wrong problem for Wordpress. I don't think that many people were crying out for a fancier way to store giant messy blobs in MySQL.

Why does someone select Wordpress in 2018? Why even host a website at all? Because they want to build something custom. But because Wordpress core continues to be basically a simple blog engine, anything fancy has to get implemented as custom code and/or super powerful themes and plugins that are almost like mini CMSs unto themselves. This is where a lot of the security problems in Wordpress sites often come from, BTW.

IMO Wordpress could do a lot more for itself long term by improving the flexibility and power of its core, rather than its WYSIWYG.
I think just realize everyone learns to code in different ways and environments. Some people self teach and others learn in academia. You should respect that they learnt to code at all. I'd say just be honest in your reviews and help them improve. Don't be a dick about it, but honest and fair critique is something most people will appreciate.
6. display:none and position:fixed need to die in a raging inferno, or at least get moved to a seperate property that can be *{be-full-of-shit:no-dammit!important;}'d away in userContent.css or equivalent.

(See also pointer-events:auto!important;.)

7. Anything nontrivial involving tables/tds seems to be impossible to do properly and pointlessly obnoxious to do at all. Eg:

<td>
<tdtag>foo</tdtag><!--put this edge-aligned in any corner-->
Put this in the center as if tdtag wasn't here.
</td>
This question for me is more about the ethics of trimming plants than about bonsai specifically. Was the original question implying a more general metaphor (not specific to plants) like the one you went into? I think trimming a plant with respect for the plant's health is in line with what plants are adapted to experience, and won't cause suffering or loss of life quality.
obligatory http://tacocopter.com/
Apple Watch was meant to usurp Fitbit's market and has succeeded.

While Apple may have dreamed of killing the luxury market its clear they had designs on the fitness market, doubled down on the series 2 and kept marching forward.
I've decided to go this way for now, at least for CRUD APIs:

Frontend
|
| GraphQL
|
V
Backend
|
| gRPC
|
V
Microservice

The situation with gRPC in the browser right now isn't ideal. Moreover, the client-side story -- interaction with React/Redux, client-side catching and prefetching, relationships and so on -- is nearly non-existent.

GraphQL is better suited to how JS web apps work. In particular, GraphQL is designed to work with arbitrarily nested graphs of objects at dynamic levels of detail, in a way that makes caching, prefetching and so on fairly simple. And it speaks JSON fluently. gRPC's payloads are fixed, and if you want levels of detail ("fetch posts with creator"; "fetch posts without creator") you have to invent your own scheme for expressing this.

gRPC also isn't particularly developer-friendly when it comes to implementing the client or the server. As with any language-agnostic RPC layer, the interfaces tend to be quite sharp-edged: For example, it's relatively awkward to write services that deal with heterogenous collections of objects ("oneof" fields are limited), and arbitrary structured — as opposed to schema-based that can be expressed with the Proto IDL — data (while there's the "well-known" type Value that can effectively express JSON data, it's easier just to wrap JSON in a proto string).

GraphQL is much smoother to implement the client. Less so for the server, but it's all about graphs of objects, so it has the benefit that every server is essentially implemented the same way (the "verbs" are the same).

GraphQL's introspection story is also better. gRPC has facilities for probing an API without having the schema at hand, but GraphQL arguably has better tools here for now.
Sounds like a bay area problem.

Where I'm at (LA), I've never heard of anyone saying that. Not the biggest sample size, but around here it seems like the general attitude is “so the best you can” not “it’s your responsibility to fix all wrongs, no matter the cost”
Both "Zero" and "Cipher" come from the same Arabic word "ṣifr" and whenever I remember that, I tell whoever's near me.
> the shorts just spam social media.

And HN. Good lord, some of our threads here were hard to read.
It's quite an interesting and ambitious concept, but I really hope they fix the avatar designs. I talked to some people around the room and the general agreement is that it's stuck in a sort of "uncanny valley" where users look like eerie ghosts with only half of a torso and no legs.
> if you tune well for one of them, the other one will suffer.

This is one of the things that bothers me the most about OpenCL. It attempts to offer this uniform abstraction over a generic compute accelerator, which can be CPU vector extensions, GPUs, or FPGAs, but these things are different enough that you have to develop for a specific type if you want reasonable performance. So you get none of the benefits of a accelerator specific abstraction while still writing accelerator specific code.

There is a real cost to a generic abstraction, and distinct languages/platforms would in my mind be better than different "dialects" of the same language/platform that pretend to be compatible but really aren't.

I like that CUDA is very clearly designed to run only on GPUs - it provides a clarity that OpenCL lacks.
there weren’t any. the official w3c answer was basically “why on earth would you want to layout a webpage?! stop doing that!”

Ideology trumped practicality and we’re stuck with the consequences.

or another way of putting it is they viewed web browsers as something more like a feed reader/news reader. that the browser and user should have control of how the information is presented, not the individual websites, which should stick to plain vanilla semantic markup with no fancy stuff. CSS was only created to stop people mucking up documents with <font> <center> <marquee> and <blink> which have no semantic value.

for a time mozilla had xul, but that was never an option for website layout.
> Since the super charger network currently exists, it is a competitive advantage for sure, but it also could become a liability having to honor free supercharging for some cars and then not really providing value over a travel center.

That's assuming they don't become travel centers themselves.

That's actually another advantage. If they build travel centers around their superchargers, anyone with free supercharging (which is a large fraction of the current installed base) would prefer theirs over ones they have to pay for. But then they get all the people milling around buying coffee, burgers, phone chargers, sunscreen, etc.

For that matter they could go into business with the truckstop companies. Supply the charging hardware and expertise to install/operate/maintain them at the truckstops in exchange for a share of the overall take.
What about other OS? If you're concerned about privacy installing W10 would be an extrange choice.
Yup cipher comes from sifr which is arabic for zero.
Yeah and that puts enormous pressure on what we put there.

That flexbox, half-baked and overcooked at the same time. And display:grid at the same time but using completely different concept of flexibility (fr units in grid) and some strange property in flexbox.

What, the hell, this means:

div {
width:400px;
flex:2;
}

? Just a humiliation of CSS box model.
Ask HN: Best questions to ask founder of startup before joining?
I have the opportunity to talk with the founder of a fairly large and successful startup (200+ employees) that I am considering an offer from, and I'm wondering what some of the best high signal questions I can ask are. The one thing I know that I want to talk about for sure is market positioning - i.e. why he thinks they are the best choice in what appears to be a somewhat crowded market.
Beautiful! Also, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for the link!
I believe Air France still does 4 digit pins :(
Denmark Plans a Fence to Stop a Pig Disease. Will It Work?
This must change.