skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What defines "success" in learning French?

This is similar question I had. I think a lot of people on HN think learning means becoming an expert, but many people just want tourist level of fluency. That means vocabulary, phrases, and basic conversation. Whether someone learns perfect pronunciation and sentence structure or not means little as a tourist trying to get by.

I found Duolingo sufficient for tourist level fluency.
Weak types.

When neither the function nor the parameters have hard types, you have to create heuristics. There could be a test for numbers there, but it would also be surprising because at the older days people expected "10" and 10 to behave the same.
They order does not matter and can be arbitrary. But when you compare two entries you need to sort them, because the entries are arrays. It's like the trick of converting sttings to lower-case to get an case-insensitive comparison (which is a bad idea in a non-Latin world, but that's another story).
In a sense if that is the major complaint then it makes sense why they are getting relected - developers are taking land and building things people want. There has always been a background level of corruption in construction afaik. Everyone wants it to be a squeaky clean process, but everyone also wants infrastructure; we have high immigration and we need the groundwork laid in Sydney to support population growth.

We can argue about whether they are making great long term decisions. They probably aren't. But there is a lot of activity in the right general space; they took political risks with their light rail build up for example. And the recent Federal Labor party has a questionable record at infrastructure projects and it seems unlikely that the NSW branch has a better handle on the situation.
Negative gearing and franking credits seem to be more important than absolutely everything else.
Monitors are bad for your eyes because of the strain of long term focusing at a plane a short distance away - not because of the light hitting your retinas.

Lasers are dangerous to the eye because there's no real ramp up for the beam - you can produce an almost arbitrarily powerful pin-prick of light which gives you no warning before it's all hitting the same spot on your retina and destroying it. The beam doesn't diffract of diffuse because it's all one wavelength and colliminated so it puts all that energy suddenly on one part of the eye.

But that property is also what makes the idea of using them for VR/AR amazing: because you could more or less directly target individual parts of the retina with no diffraction, then there's no eyestrain - everything can be made always in focus because the nature of the beam means it essentially bypasses your eye's lens. Your eyes relax because you think everything's in focus already.
Protest is a sign of democracy, really. If you find yourself somewhere where there's never any protest, ever, well, you're probably somewhere very nasty indeed.
> Whether you like it or not, Unicode exists to make USERS' lives better.

They've been using multiple scripts long before computers. When computers came along those users quite reasonably demanded they be able to write the same scripts. This created a problem for the programmers. The obvious solution is a universal set of code points - and ISO 10646 was born. It was not rocket science. But if it had not come along some other hack / kludge would have been used because the market is too large to be abandoned by the computer companies. They would have put us programmers in a special kind of hell, but I can guarantee the users would not have known about that, let alone cared.

Oddly the encoding schemes proposed by ISO 10646 universally sucked. Unicode walked into that vacuum with their first cock up - 16 bits was enough for anybody. It was not just dumb because it was wrong - it was dumb because they didn't propose unique encoding. They gave us BOM markers instead. Double fail. They didn't win because the one thing they added, their UCS-2 encoding, was any better than what came before. They somehow managed to turn it into a Europe vs USA popularity contest. Nicely played.

Then Unicode and 10646 became the same thing. They jointly continued on in the same manner as before, inventing new encodings to paper over the UCS-2 mistake. Those new encodings all universally sucked. The encoding we programmers use today, UTF-8, was invented by, surprise, surprise, a programmer who was outside of Unicode / 10646 group think. It was popularised at a programmers conference, USENIX, and from there on it was obvious was going to be used regardless of what Unicode / 10646 thought of it, so they accepted it.

If Perl6 is any indication, the programmers are getting the shits with the current mess. Perl6 has explicitly added functions that treat text as a stream of grapheme's rather than Unicode code points. The two are the same of course except when your god damned compositions rear their ugly head - all they do is eliminate that mess. Maybe you should take note. Some programmers have already started using something other than Unicode because it makes their jobs easier. If it catches on you are going to find out real quickly just how much the users care about the encoding scheme computers use for text.

None of this is to trivialise the task of assigning code points to grapheme's. It's huge task. But for pete's sake don't over inflate your ego's by claiming you are doing some great service for mankind. The only thing on the planet that uses the numbers Unicode assigns to characters as is computers. Computers are programmed by one profession - programmers. Your entire output is consumed by that one profession. Yet for all the world what you've written here seems to say Unicode has some higher purpose, and you are optimising for that, whatever it may be. For gods same come down to earth.
Stephanie Hurlburt talked on the IH podcast about doing 7-figure contracting deals for C++ graphics work (math, C++, GPU optimization and various technical work).

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/044-stephanie-hurlburt-...
The article doesn't go into any specifics. But I can't say I disagree, unfortunately, with actions like the bipartisan legislation on strong encryption last year.

Australia needs to adopt the US Bill of Rights - just cross out "Congress" and write in "Parliament" and be done.

It won't stop abuses, but would give a way to fight back.
I think the issue is that they want people who use it less than 10 minutes a day to still make progress and feel they are making a lot of progress. Following spaced repetition rules they can only add minimal amounts of vocabulary and they need to spend that vocabulary on intros to new themes that can be completed in 30 minutes or less.

Older versions were a little less tuned to keeping the large audience, did typing without seeing the options, and went into some areas of interest of members of each language group. Reverting any of which would be improvements for teaching the most engaged users at the cost of losing 10X as many barely engaged participants.

It is the general problem of tuning content to learner's with out an outside authority preventing tuning to learner laziness.
That is really valid advice! I am currently just starting consulting. A friend of mine told me to put my daily rate around 1,500 Euro. Thie first contacts I had so far didn't object. No project came to fruition, so. But then I just started a couple of weeks ago.

Just one question. How do you approach future clients?
Developers split over split-lock detection
I remember this history teacher who was a breath of fresh air. He told us in advance his test where very simple. And the reason was quite genius: if you just listened and took a few notes here and there, you’d pass the test. Which freed the mind to really absorb the knowledge and have fun with the subject matter. He was also very good in discerning knowledge and teaching why a certain topic was good to know. I think I remember more from those classes than any other.
I think we should just drop book work questions altogether and allow students to take notes into the exam. Just make the tests about analysis and synthesis, which is the stuff you should be able to do if you truly understood something and didn't just memorize some facts.
Techniques for Rendering Text with WebGL
Unfortunately made in Chinazi.
Lots of exchanges now capture that themselves.
Nuclear reactors are cost-efficient on large scale, and quite expensive on smaller scale; if you have nuclear reactor that makes 100 times less power, you don't get 100 times less complexity/risks/maintenance/manpower/etc.

Nuclear power makes sense for if you need a lot of power for a ship and/or very long range without refueling, so aircraft carriers, missile subs and (barely) long-range icebreakers are a good fit; but diesel is not a big problem for a ship that's designed to be fuel efficient and is on a route where it can refuel frequently.
I'm one of those weird outliers I guess, but even when there were only 1-2 exams for the whole course I stayed diligent throughout. The night before a test I just did a bit of review, and got a good nights sleep. I never understood those who tried to cram because it's not something that would ever work for how I learn and understand.
But actually they disproved this belief:

'The researchers indeed observed this very thin layer around the gas bubble and measured it to be about 1 nanometer thick. That's what quenches the movement of the bubble as theoretical work had predicted. But they also found that the liquid layer (which forms because the pressure in the gas bubble pushes against the walls of the tube) doesn't disappear, but rather stays at a constant thickness at all times.

Based on their measurements of the thin layer of fluid, they were also able to calculate its velocity. They found that the gas bubble isn't stuck at all but is rather moving "extraordinarily slowly," at a pace invisible to the naked eye'
Yes. It was tongue in cheek. Another objection is that smartness isn’t an ordering. You could be the best person in the room at something but still learn on other things.
Duolingo is useless on its own, especially for harder language pairs. The only reason it's popular is because of the gamification, I find that apps like Memrise or LingQ are massively more useful to actually improve your language skills. Those apps focus on specific skills (vocabulary learning through spaced repetition for Memrise, learning comprehension for LingQ) which means that you have to use other methods to work on other aspects like grammar and conversational skills but at least they attempt to do one thing and they do it mostly well.

The only added value I have from using Duolingo is getting some amount of practice actually constructing my target language but even then it's hugely limited because:

- You never have any context which makes the experience always completely artificial and makes it harder to get a feel or the language. IMO Duolingo would be 10x better if lessons followed (even very loosely) an internal story instead of just having random, often contrived sentences one after the other. Something as simple as recurring characters, simple common situations etc... It would make it a lot easier to have a mental model of the world you're talking about and it doesn't seem like it would complicate things heavily.

- The bulk of the practice involves translation exercises which is limiting and can even be counterproductive. A very important step towards fluency in any language is to stop translating and start constructing the language directly. I'm not a native English speaker but as I write these words I'm not translating a French internal monologue, I know what I want to say and I say it in English directly. It's faster and more natural that way.

- The killing blow is that those translation exercises are corrected by, as far as I can tell, some sort of complicated regexp engine. It's very common for a correct-but-unexpected solution to be rejected and when it gets reported it can lingers for years without being fixed. As such you start not to trust the correction given when you don't understand precisely why your sentence was wrong.

That last point is really frustrating. I'm a native French speaker and I tried finishing the "French for English speakers" tree using shortcuts to get an idea of the quality and I simply can't reliably unlock the checkpoints on my first try because some of my perfectly fine and idiomatic French sentences end up not fitting the regexp and be marked wrong.
> The reactor would spend the vast majority of it's time running at much lower than peak capacity, which is a huge waste.

Not so sure about that. I think current trans-oceanic cargo ships generally run at fairly high fraction of peak power (otherwise they could have saved money buy buying a smaller engine in the first place). Also port operations tend to be pretty fast and efficient these days.

Of course, for ships running shorter distances and spending a larger fraction of their time in port loading and unloading, synfuels, hydrogen or for really short routes even batteries are probably going to be a better option.
Off topic, but seeing "wustl.edu" as the source brought up some memories.

In the early 90s, I used their ftp site at wuarchive.wustl.edu very frequently. It was a reliable source to download open source software like Perl, tcl, trn, gcc, and so on.
Not sufficiently understanding my own brain. If I'd known then what I know now about ADHD, things would have gone very differently.

(OK, I don't really think of this as a mistake, but still...)
That would not consitute such a problem. The script is what provides the amplification factor here.
Oceans Running Out of Oxygen
The difference between JS and C++ is that C++ is addressing a complex problem domain whereas JS is addressing a simple one. So JS can put its complexity budget towards features that improve productivity whereas such features in C++ require huge amounts of complexity. Take for instance anonymous functions in JS compared with lambdas since C++11, the C++ version needs a complicated capture syntax, capability for capture by value and reference, type inference, templating, and more. All that complexity is useful and needs to be there (I have used most of it in my own code) - in JS anonymous functions are immensely simpler. That's why JS will never become even 1/2 as complex as C++.
> How is a reactor at partial power less efficient? I suspect you're not talking about thermodynamic efficiency, and it's not energy that (you think) would be wasted.

Efficient in an economic sense. Nuclear plants are generally capital intensive, whereas fuel is very cheap. So you want to run them at close to max power as much as possible to recoup capital costs. But contrary to the previous poster, I think trans-oceanic ships generally do that.
Nice. How does measure fitness?
> No one was pulling all-nighters two weeks into the semester.

As a physics student, I can say we definitely pulled 2am-ers 2 weeks into the semester. Our Condensed Matter professor gave us some of the most random questions that no one could anticipate. To be honest, I was one of those "diligent" students who got good grades. I'll tell you right now his quizzes were not hackable. The following held true:

|quiz subject matter| >> |lecture matter|

He tested on the former, so we had no way of memorizing or hacking the quiz. You had to really understand the concepts to do well on his quizzes. Ditto for my grad Quantum Mechanics class.

On the other hand, I've also had professors who give exams pulled from the internet and allow use of the internet while taking those exams. I hacked that immediately during the exam, then almost got in trouble for it.

> ...if the professor tells you that there were three underlying causes of the Schism of 13... you'd better know them.

A professor like my Condensed Matter Physics professor would go on and on about 3 fundamental causes and then quiz students about the 5 fundamental causes, giving a zero to anyone who couldn't think of all the base 3, then grading the remaining students who thought creatively of 2 additional causes
against each other on a bell curve. :)
I've been running some live services on Hetzner Cloud (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud) and it's been very reliable. One server blip in ~1 year.

2Gb (20Gb storage, 20Tb transfer) from €2.49 - there are a few different DCs now so you can hedge your bets. The higher spec ones are great for Dockerizing a couple of postgresql backup servers.

Their VPS ('Cloud') offer is relatively new, with the dedicated and server auctions being their historical staple.

P.S. Very Euro centric, so probably not so good for Americas/AsiaPac
Yeah, I read that as well. I found the paper:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/12/20/503...

"Avalanches were analyzed in terms of size (S, the number of spikes), and duration (D, time) (Fig 1A), and power law exponents were fit to the two distributions. In critical systems, the exponents of the two distributions can be used to predict the mean avalanche size (<S>) observed at a given duration (i.e. the distributions scale together). When <S> is plotted against avalanche duration, the difference between the empirically derived best-fit exponent and the predicted exponent serves as a compact measure of the deviation from criticality (Deviation from Criticality Coefficient, “DCC”, Fig 1B)."

Recap. There are several matters that are at times conflated.

+ Define an order parameter which "significantly changes" (undergoes a phase transition).

+ Define a control parameter that drives the system through those different regimes.

+ Establish that there is a critical point (not just a "region").

+ Define properties at the critical point that are scale-free (or having "all scales").

+ Define this critical point as an attractor in a dynamical system sense. (The system gets infinitely close to it given enough time.)

They show however that the system has an attractor "near" the phase transition. Moreover, do not really establish that this is a critical phase transition. They establish "nearness" w.r.t. the critical phase transition by fitting two power laws (size vs duration) according to an expected exponent relation (a-1)/(t-1). They see this as a quantitative measure of nearness. In other words, their nearness measure depends on their definition of criticality.

A lot of these studies talk about "near-critical" states. However, that doesn't always make mathematical sense.

PS: If you think, ah, you just have to have the control parameter as an output of a system with as input a value that defines the criticality of the system, yeah, that might work. However, the real interesting systems do not use this type of macroscopic information, but have local processes leading to the same results.
Top Tech Skills That Will Be in Demand in 2020
This spends too many words justifying the stale "real hacker" tradition of dunking on education, and kindof ignores the problem of how to measure something so subjective as learning.

So people who are good at tests get ahead. We get that you're not interested in grades. We all know people who play the game and win, not sincerely engage with their job or education or whatever.

But I'd like to hear from pg / other people in YC how they think they are "hacked". What do their successful applicants actually optimise for when "delight" and even "growth" are just as subjective as "learning"? After all they fund lots and lots of companies and founders, many of whom make no returns. How do founders keep their funding "success" long past the point it was deserved?
Yes, but consider what this means: in a MSR, reprocessing is not optional. Unlike a conventional oxide fueled reactor, the spent fuel cannot just be stored and ignored. So the cost of reprocessing has to be paid, even if it's not otherwise economically advantageous to have reprocessed the fuel, as it is not for today's reactors.
The third book is also good for bragging at work about devops.
I honestly didn’t know San Jose had a transit system.
The big difference that many .NET Framework libraries won't work on .NET Core, and even less on Linux, because they depend on C++/CLI, Win32 interop or COM.

Then those corporations start to evaluate a rewrite to portable .NET Core and come to the conclusion that several third party components also don't work on .NET and they need to go shopping.

In the same process, they find out that said components actually have a perfectly working counterpart for Java since Java 1.4 or something.

And a new RFP goes out.

As for what to opt for, platform languages are always the best bet longterm.

As long as the platform is relevant on the market they stick around, guest languages come and go, and tend to be insignificant outside the platform where they have guest status as they have to reboot an whole new platform experience.
Is there are reason why an angry mob could be ... angry at some company for ties with you? /s
this is not the same. textedit isn’t a window into your personal life, chrome is. and because of some simple feature you’ve decided to throw away privacy. i agree with the parent here, this is ridiculous
Very recognizable; I always try to remember that they hire me to solve a particular problem. Most of them really don’t care how. Don’t explain, just do the work. If you’re good at your work it will be a good service / product you delivered and your client trusts you with this.
"The capacity to just build things without fear of being judged is invaluable"

For me, I had to unlearn self judgement. This has helped so much over the last few years.
That is a great essay. Thank you for sharing.

I've worked in tech for quite a while now. I used to buy into the meritocracy cant but as the years wore on, I realized how much bullshit it was.

I think the biggest moment came when I started to think about how to explain to people in my new home, South Africa, that working in tech would free you economically. There's some truth to that. But that's not the whole truth.

The truth is that all those years ago when I got my first coding job in financial services, I ticked 3 important boxes for the interview: white, male, and university-educated.
Also for Pittsburgh - excited to see what your up to at BrdgAI, good luck!
Why does Twitter need to perform as well as Facebook or Google?

Facebook is dying down and being replaced with Instagram. Instagram is littered with ads and doesn't feel irreplaceable.

Google's core product (search engine) is nearly unusable these days thanks to all the ads and the push for e-commerce related results.

Sure, they're profitable. But the products are garbage.

Twitter feels like something that's harder to replace. It feels more like an utility. The core product has changed little over the years and that's why it's good and people keep coming back to it. If someone doesn't ruin it, I wouldn't be surprised if it outlives both Facebook and Google.

I already find the ads annoying. If they add even more, plus a bunch of useless features, and try to censor the discourse on the platform to top it off, it will be the death of twitter.
Yes, it's converting .NET code to run on FPGAs by creating an equivalent hardware design to the logic contained in the .NET code.

And yes, it's all about parallelization. As the docs also say, this only makes sense if your algorithm is embarrassingly parallel. If you check out the examples are like this too (within the limitations of a small FPGA).

BTW "programming" an FPGA in my understanding is the process of flashing the bitstream onto the board.