skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our marketing line is that Forge is a “magic textbook for language learners.” Essentially, we’re trying to give you everything you need to learn a new language from beginner to advanced, in one place.

I’ve studied a number of languages over the last few years, most recently trying to learn Chinese while working in China. I wasn’t happy with the existing landscape of apps and resources, and I found myself having to hack together a curriculum consisting of apps, textbooks, YouTube videos, wikis, and friends. Basically, I was wondering why this system didn’t already exist.

I was looking for something that connected in-depth lessons to good review tools, while also providing a path from beginner to advanced. So that’s what I’m working on building. Right now, we just have Spanish on the app as a pilot program, trying to make sure our key features are working well for people before expanding out to other languages.

Any feedback or thoughts you have would be super helpful. Right now, I’m finding that people sign up and do a bunch of lessons right off the bat, but don’t come back consistently over time. Just added notifications and brought the streak tracking more to the forefront, but any ideas you have on keeping folks engaged over time would be particularly helpful.

Direct links to download:
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/forge-language/id1441184476
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.forge.forge
It's very interesting that "non-respectable" Trey Parker and Matt Stone responded in the morally correct way and the NBA decides to kiss the feet of despots.

Pretty disgusting really. It really shows that the dream of liberalization of China is dead, some thought that we could do it but irony strikes again and instead of opening up China our corporations and institutions have become infected and we're in the midst of The Reverse Opium War.
I assume they were, but since most of the world was intent on squashing the country flat as a bug I doubt formal recognition would have done anything for them.
This reminds me of one of my favorite books of all time, Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames, which plays with language and bad French pronunciation. Highly, highly recommend.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d'Heures
Nice, this is a very good idea. Of all Magic formats, I have always been most interested in Commander and there isn't much "official" support for the format (although it has improved over the years), so it's awesome to see this filling in the gap.

I haven't had a large, regular playgroup since college, so I'll definitely try the site out and see if there is a playgroup near me.

One recommendation: I would allow people to put information in their profiles, especially about what competitiveness level(s) they are interested in and what their decks are. The latter should display the color of the deck, the commander name, and a self-reported power level.

E.g.

"Doran, the Siege Tower" (B)(W)(G) -- Competitive

"Vorel of the Hull Clade" (U)(G) -- Casual
link seems to be unavailable now
Ask HN: What Weaknesses Does Amazon Have?
Say you were starting a company in an area where Amazon operates (shopping/ecommerce, cloud, etc).

You are pitching to an investor and Amazon comes up as a potential or existing competitor. What are their weaknesses? How would you exploit them?
"Once you get people used to free, it's hard to start charging money"

You can leave your core offering free/ad-encumbered, but add additional services (ideally, replicate your complements)

For example, YouTube started off as free / ad sponsored, but look at the incredible revenue streams they have added:

• Patreon-like subscription model

• Merch integration with spring-tee

• Music / Premium / TV subscription <--- this is most likely the largest revenue stream after ads.

Now Reddit could be similar by adding:

• Paid feeds for sexual content (r/sexsells), trading, crypto, art, etc.

• Sponsored "TV mode" streams for major news / sports outlets

• Verified status subscription?

• Ability to post longer, Reddit hosted, videos behind a paywall with a preview.

I'm just spitballing ideas which certainly have their complexities and challenges, but free user-generated content is a great way to acquire users for fractions of a penny.

That userbase is reddit's competitive advantage when building any number of additional services.
No, its the fact that you need to re-upload that app every 7 days..
> even elliptic curves with no rational points on them still have points in finite fields

That’s interesting. How is that possible?
I can recommend https://www.amazon.com/Elliptic-Tales-Curves-Counting-Number.... It goes in-depth into the motivating use cases for elliptic curves (as well as their group law) and explains some very elegant theorems (Bézout's theorem) as well as open problems in Maths (the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture).
Thanks for the heads up! I was just about to update. Didn’t see anything about the 32/64 bit thing in the update release..
The headline itself commands attention because it suggests a target to offload blame upon amidst this ongoing climate change narrative. But how many of us manage our own retirement fund (day-to-day)?

The 410(k) can exist and guarantee returns because of things like fossil fuel financing. Over the past several generations, resources have been funneled into railways, roads, extraction technologies, refineries, fleets, grids, etc. This infrastructure has been established for some time now and continues to grow, but perhaps at a reduced rate because emissions now appear to be a threat. Sudden regulation to the end of the drastic reduction of fossil fuel deployment is not compatible with the expected economic growth that has established people's desires and standards for an idyllic life.

The surplus generated by the energy density, abundance, and accessibility of fossil fuels is the reason the aging citizen can anticipate monthly pension deposits or dividends sufficient enough to keep them well fed, housed, traveling, and medically sound. It is a comfortable method of living out the final years of a life spent participating in an economy that can now serve them as a reward for their service to it.

The necessary large scale transistion to emissionless renewables interrupts long term structured and predictable payment plans on the very grids and refineries that have granted us financial security.
My dad has visited Iqaluit on the Coast Guard ship Earl Grey and Narwhal. Nice to see a comment from someone in northern Canada (I'm in PEI).

I love languages Canada is amazing there are so many languages here it should be a priority to support their use. That's a very good point you made about Klingon being supported but not actual languages. I was talking to a friend of mine who is Mi'kmaq about Linux. I said maybe it supported his language but I guess it's more of a

ADLaM is another language that has had a rough history but eventually recognition. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20702404
> How do you spend $4M+ every year per podcast?

I mean the same way any big company blows unfathomable amounts of money. Too many people doing too little (or doing the wrong things), paying too much to consultants/outside agencies, thinking the money will never stop flowing.
Actually, yes, it does. That's exactly what it does.
The parts of the Netherlands are called provinces, and are not sovereign nations.

The larger area you call the Netherlands that includes Belgium and Luxembourg is currently called the Benelux[1]

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benelux
Colonialism (imperialism, more accurately) didn’t slow down much until WWII. Even in the 70s Portugal still controlled its African colonies and fought them in wars of independence.

What the gp is referencing is the argument that the concept of free trade has only obfuscated colonialism. Rather than colonialism by France or UK it’s colonialism by Nestle or De Beers. To someone harvesting cacao for $2/day nothing is materially different from living under colonialism, except their landowner might be some well-connected member of the regime rather than a European.
I think you would love PocketCasts.
I'm really glad this was posted. The rule that makes sense to me, when before I didn't know where to draw the line between accept and nitpick. Gonna start thinking about this in code reviews going forward.
More like ”90% of the people affected by this are the ones with their boots on the necks of their fellow citizens, so how about no Photoshop for them.”
This is really cool. We've been thinking about these issues to create an image masking widget in Streamlit. Would be interesting to connect when we start down that path. If you're interested, please feel free to connect over discuss.streamlit.io. :-)
Is satire a thing over there?

I think it would be too risky as crossing a line could mean prison.

All the Trump episodes on SP would definitely have ended with Trey and Matt locked up in China.
This is flawed reasoning when you understand that some people and some companies are sociopathic. They will never 'turn over a new leaf' because they are incapable of doing so.
I just read "The Worldly Philosophers" by Robert Heilbroner and I can recommend that. I now have a tab with Marx's "Capital" open and I'm about half way through Joseph Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy."

For finance, reading the Market Wizards series by Jack Schwager is a great idea because you get really personal and in-depth insights into how successful traders think.

I also recently read "Commodity Conversations" by Jonathan Kingsman which is similar to Market Wizards, but tailored to commodities and I can recommend that as well.

"The Secrets of Economic Indicators" by Bernard Baumohl is also an interesting overview to macro indicators.

I have no idea what constitutes an undergrad level of economics education, I don't recall my economics class being nearly as stimulating as everything I've just listed.

Good luck!
To be honest, I can't comment on if there's a "big era of podcast" ahead. But I live in a non English speaking country, and what I'm observing is that podcasts _are_ percolating the news, specially in HN, that's where I consume quality content.

I had recently, after getting tired of listening to music on my commute (A 12 minute bike ride, or a 25 minute walk) from home to work started to listen to podcast that I find normally here (My other source of content is reddit, but the quality is not the same).

What I see, is that usually what gets named is really, really good; or at least very interesting. the other thing that I like a lot is that the duration of the episodes is more or less my commute. If it were longer I'd have the possibility of listening to a couple of them, or listening to a longer episode.
When I tried to consume podcasts before they were always long, and that was annoying because they demand too much attention from you, and the UX of a podcast is not the same as television.

I wont provide links but as probably is going to be asked I'll provide the episodes that got me hooked on different podcasts:

"This American Life": Episode about a guy and his years long enterprise of outrunning an antelope.

"Planet Money" and the Indian non-cash experiment.

"99% invisible" and an interview with the writer of "Invisible women" a book about gender bias in daily life (This one was so good that made me scream in anger several times in the street!)

Sorry but I don't remember much about another one, that was about a dirty cop that decided to go live in the wild because he was going to jail, and ended up living alone for more than 20 years (And hr got pardoned when he turned himself up)
I feel like this take is somewhat unfair. Antirez was against threading until jdsully proved that it worked in exactly the same way that you're saying, multi-threaded transport with a single threaded core. In addition Keydb allows users to use ssds in addition to ram only when that is a paid feature for Redis Lab's enterprise support.

jdsully spurred the implementation of two of the best changes that you might see in redis in the near future and you consider even using keydb pointless.

Yea, ok.
Ask HN: [Poll] How many materials science and engineering people are here?
Hello everyone,

I just wanted to get a quick assessment of what percentage of HN community represent people who work in the materials science and engineering (MSE) domain (both industry and academia). Please comment "MSE" (or, better yet, "MSE, {industry|academia|NL}"), if it's applicable to you (and "!MSE" otherwise). Feel free to upvote as well to improve this post's exposure. Thank you very much in advance.

P.S. "NL" above refers to national labs.
Could they counter by not paying off their credit card balance?
Amazon was just being tried in court.

This isnt about being caught- the evidence is clear as day and was presented in court.

This is about a failure of our legal system to protect basic rights of a laborer to be paid the agreed upon rate.
The web interface only allows you to add text. (No due date, flags, etc) You can't even view the "smart" lists.
What makes you think they're not already doing that? It's not like Adobe is flying under anyone's radar.
I thought professional audio developers try to exploit very low level access to the hardware for the sake of minimizing latency. If these same exploits allow system vulnerabilities, it seems to make sense that developers of macOS are constantly changing the software in ways that unintentionally impact anyone writing kernel extensions or other software that tries to access the hardware at a low level.
Whether a state uses terrorist tactics is orthogonal to the issue of it being a state. Was the Russian shooting down of MH-17 not a terrorist act undertaken by a state? How about the bombing of the Beirut barracks? How about any number of acts by Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, or Imperial Japan?
No, but I did have Adobe CS 5.5.

Haven't reinstalled that software. It may have been the root cause.
Talk about kicking a dog when it's down - wtf has this to do with helping the Venezuelan people? Unemployment and inflation is sky high so let's make it even worse for everyone by wiping out as many of the companies still surviving as we can. Great policies Donald. Every day you somehow manage to surpass your prior level of cluelessness.
> As for scavenged parts, you're going to need a warehouse of manuals and datasheets, eh?

You're right! As a thought experiment, let's say I download CollapseOS and then switch off my internet.

I have in my house a normal complement of electronic devices. I have a soldering iron, some wire etc. I assume if I start taking things apart I'll find some Z80s. Those Z80s will be living on boards with clock chips and memory etc. Where do I even start?
They have an erroneous trailing semicolon. If you remove that, the link works fine.

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_sands_tailings_p...
Not in New Zealand either.
I recently rebuilt the theme of my moderately-well-known WordPress-based site to use all vector graphics for the site UI. Further, I implemented SVG sprites so all relevant SVGs are embedded in the main HTML, eliminating the overhead of subsequent HTTP requests for those images. Along with a few other non-image-specific optimizations, that change made the site blazing fast, even when under heavy load (i.e., when linked from HN or /r/TodayILearned).

(I'll refrain from linking the site to avoid the appearance of naked self-promotion, but my username is a dead giveaway if you care to see it in action).
> Those are all terrible, terrible places frankly we shouldn't trade with them purely on a moral basis - but we would tolerate them if they played nice.

The Saudis are the same and they also didn't play nice.

> FYI: Cuba did not 'steal oil' this is false.

I wrote "oil refineries", and I must be misunderstanding Wikipedia then, when it says:

"on October 19, 1960 (almost two years after the Cuban Revolution had led to the deposition of the Batista regime) the U.S. placed an embargo on exports to Cuba except for food and medicine after Cuba nationalized American-owned Cuban oil refineries without compensation and as a response to Cuba's role in the Cuban missile crisis. On February 7, 1962 the embargo was extended to include almost all exports.[1]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...

> And nobody cares about Iran's Oil power,

Doubtful, given the amount of oil they have and export.

> they care that Iran has a publicly stated objective literally of overthrowing the USA.

Which is entirely because of the "tried to take them over and fucked up" thing I mentioned.

> And Syria has no oil, your points verge on conspiracy theory.

Of course it has oil, it's even an exporter. But here I thought about the longer-term US involvement over the last decades. They didn't start messing with countries in the region because of terrorists or WMDs.

(I don't claim to be an expert in geopolitics, I'm just saying how the "look at these sanctions, they're all against dictatorships!" claim upthread reads to me, with my mind currently primed on worldwide energy economy.)
I spent a few weeks there every year, my mom goes out there for audiology rotations and it’s a great excuse for me to see more of my home country and family at the same time (I’m in California). I’m thinking of trekking out to Pang next time. Congrats on the new restaurant opening, that’s a big deal ^_^ ill be sure to let you know next time I’m in town haha
> I've had to use Pages instead of Word and can't use Adobe products anymore

And this "doesn't seem too bad"? These are the industry standards for productivity. Pages on the other hand is only good for throw-away projects. Last time I checked, importing and exporting to Microsoft Office sucked. So, Catalina pretty much turns your professional machine into an overpriced netbook.

Microsoft/Adobe will of course eventually release 64bit versions of their software. But these will cost extra $$$ on top of the premium you have already paid for Apple hardware. A lot of money with doubtful productivity gains. This won't make any professional happy.
Agree completely. PRC comes across a lot like a spoiled, entitled brat. Such behavior should never go unchecked otherwise we are enabling it.

On another note, it was refreshing to see South Park creators giving some love to Chinese censorship.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2019-10-...
Or launch ddos on a third party with a series of unique executables.
Yeeeah, I made the mistake of updating Catalina first... oops. If others do this, you have to reboot into recovery to fix it.

https://www.obdev.at/support/index.html?product=LS&topic=faq...
Bootstrapping a Free Market by Borrowing from the Future
you do yourself a disservice if you don't read the atavist piece
The short answer is that "tidyverse" is a set of third-party packages that was developed by a different team than base R. It's not a modification of the language itself. This is possible because of certain features of R that make it particularly syntactically flexible (see, e.g., https://adv-r.hadley.nz/metaprogramming.html).
And here we are stuck with just a sun and moon!
I think the key is that Windows 10 sends all new binaries to Microsoft by default. This is a total security and privacy (they're the same thing) nightmare.
Great story. And really great of David Bowie to do such a thing.
It's amusing to read your post because Apple seem to be touted as the OS for audio people.

I wonder what MacOS has that Windows doesn't(which is a lot more backward compatible) that makes audio people stick with them.
I've developed my own widgets for personal use, that you can pry from my dead fingers. Or when I decide that any desktop or laptop that came out post-2009 is sufficiently not infuriating. Sincerely, have fun. And good luck. Bless your heart and all that crap.
> But I live in a non English speaking country, and what I'm observing is that podcasts _are_ percolating the news

Sorry but my comment is crap here. This 2 ideas are separated one from the other. I live on a non english speaking country so I can comment on that (The big era thing).

But even then, all the rest and blah blah blah. sorry about my lack of writing skills (And proofreading).
Late to respond, but because outline sometimes doesn't work for me (for instance bloomberg articles), I've found it easier to just disable javascript in that tab via chrome dev tools.
How a Pizza Rat changed the image of video arcades from fiendish to friendly
Wow, did not hear about the Rockets thing until now. Thanks.

I am confused tho, as an NBA fan, should I support the Rockets now that the Chinese are boycotting it. Or should I boycott them cause they bowed down to Chinese pressure?
It's been quite a few years now, but back in the day I had success leveraging `mod_pagespeed` in Apache, to rewrite server-generated markup on the fly, and to respond to raster image requests with webp assets for browsers that supported them. For other similarly conditional responses I relied on a proper WURFL integration -- not just shallow UA-sniffing -- but IIRC mod_pagespeed handled the webp conditionality on its own. Which is to say, I think mod_pagespeed was able to generate and cache a webp version of my jpg assets, and it would simply serve them in response to requests that included the relevant value in their "Accepts" HTTP headers.

If you go that route, be aware that HTTP caching mechanics can get tricky, and some CDN service providers (deliberately and self-interestedly) violate the rfc's (eg refuse to cache anything w/ a "Vary" response header at all -- looking at you Akamai)...

In retrospect, it was great fun to effectively piece together a web performance optimization service layer to support and accelerate the heck out of a traditional 3-tier web application... but doing it all by hand, these days, might not have great ROI.
No dark mode on their ecommerce website, or in the AWS console. Seems like a critical weakness.
You can't really do e-mail from home anyway, unless you get some tunnel to a fixed IP address that can build trust.

But it's possible to run all kinds of other stuff, if you know how. All kinds of scratch your itch apps, monitoring, backup, small web apps, file sharing, audio server, seedbox, databases, etc. Stuff you'd not find a service for, because it violates copyright when it's not done for personal use, etc.

It's especially useful if there are multiple people in the household.

Most of what you list are or can be one-time costs. And most of it can be automated in a run-a-script, check for errors and forget about it in 1 minute, or deal with some failure in 15minutes.

The main benefit of running your own is that there are almost no ongoing costs. Lot's of the SaaS prices are really overblown, so running your own is appealing there.

And people spend time and stress on dealing with SaaS issues too from time to time, so it's not like you just pay and use without any additional costs.

It just needs a serious consideration.

Also running your own can be fun/fulfilling in its own way, because you now have more control and you're allowed more creativity. For some people that may ba a benefit too.
I’m not really understanding how this is different from the VAT taxation scheme.
Let this be a lesson in the political implications of relying on cloud/SaaS. Centralised, remote services also represent a centralised, remote single point of control. That has implications not only for data security but also for denial of service on political grounds as Trump has now demonstrated.
A recent South Park episode parodied this quite well.
The same weaknesses that come up when you make any David/Goliath comparison. They are big, and slow to react, so you can hit them with speed and agility. Think early 90's when MicroSoft was slow to move to the web while tiny startups ate their lunch. Amazon will be hesitant to make major changes because they don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Portuguese uses Latin letters, but good luck pronouncing even half the words correctly without a lot of practice.
If using money to buy property is "exploitative", you've redefined that word into meaninglessness.