skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been learning Portuguese to near-fluency over the past few years and I've started learning Russian intensively for about a year using a variety of resources but mainly language learning apps like Duolingo, Memrise, LingQ and a few others. I currently have a 800+ day streak on Duolingo: https://duome.eu/liofla

I find that Duolingo is the least useful of these apps. Its main advantage is that it's easy and a small commitment if you decide to do one or two lessons every day. For the rest I don't understand why it's so popular. Duolingo's main strength is that it makes you actually construct the language instead of just memorizing individual words or expressions but I'm not super impressed with that either, mainly because in my experience it's very, very common to have a sentence rejected because it didn't match the internal "regexp" used to validate it even though it's perfectly correct (and sometimes these mistakes linger for literally years despite being reported). I actually got a very mediocre result in the placement test for the "French for English speaker" tree despite being a native French speaker who's reasonably fluent in English, mainly because some perfectly correct answers were rejected by the system. That really destroys your confidence when that happens (both in yourself and in the app).

You have a forum to discuss these issue which contains some very valuable information but it's the worst forum software I've ever used bar none, it feels like a teenager's first PHP project in the early 2000's.

Oh and if you use the mobile app it'll have you build the language by selecting one full word at a time, which means that you usually won't have to thing about the conjugations/declensions and just vaguely remember what word means what. It's fine for English, not so much for Russian and its complex declensions and aspect system.

For vocabulary Anki and Memrise easily win because they only do that and they do it well. You can find podcasts aimed at learners of many languages to improve oral comprehension and LingQ is great to improve reading comprehension, although it's expensive for what it is and I feel like you could make a better clone of it in one weekend.

In general I haven't been really impressed by any of these language learning apps, it seems that they really lack the resources to do anything but the bare minimum. It's probably too niche to generate some real R&D.

So overall if you enjoy Duolingo then stick with it, but keep in mind that you probably won't get anywhere just using this app. If I had to recommend only one language learning app it would be Memrise because it's got some decent decks for many languages (including user-contributed ones) although of course you can't learn a language solely by memorizing the dictionary.
I started to use https://getmemex.com/ a few months ago. It's working nice for now (locally stored, screenshots, text search, include results in duckduckgo, ...)

Worth a try I would say, but I won't make a definitive recommendation for now.
http://snafuhall.com

Rantings about Hemp, Raspberry Pis, games, and whatever else im doing, so far.
We actually broadly agree that it is a shame that Apple don't support their Unix utilities.
First, maybe there are different reasons. Then, having clearly defined commercial icons, clearly defined and easily uninstallable (as in right click, remove) is clearly acceptable with me. Ubuntu needs to make money, be it with this or Google default search, as long as I can modify preferences, a default is ok. It s a quation of balance. Slippery slope is not a really good excuse either it's acceptable or it's not.
LMS and Its Impact of Social Learning
We had a bug that would pop up only when we weren't working (at lunch breaks, meetings etc) but when we were at our desks it never reproduces. It ended up related to the screen saver starting up. It took us too long to find that out but that was a very good laugh.
I'm a linguaphile with a lot of experience with Duolingo. I've joined
in the very first months of Duolingo. There are many problems with it:

* First and foremost, Duolingo isn't a product, it's a series of
products, which all have different characteristics. A person using
Duolingo on Android will have an experience completely different from
the experience of someone who uses iOS. And the difference is even more
drastic when comparing mobile with the desktop version. The desktop
version is sometimes three or four time more challenging.

* Even within one platform, the A/B testing has become so large-scale
that even two Android users might see a completely different product.

* Courses for “popular” languages get way more attention than the
“unpopular” ones. And the quality varies greatly.

* The ads they show are sometimes loud and obnoxious, NSFW, or straight
up scams. That doesn't happen that often, thankfully, but I've had my
portion of loud-as-hell game ads and borderline pornographic hentai game
ads. And before you say what people always say when it comes to NSFW
ads, Duolingo says that ads aren't personalised, so no, my search
history has nothing to do with them.

* Finally, it is indeed a good way to learn some basics and acquire
some basic vocabulary, but there is no way you'll get fluent with it.
A friend of mine has summed Duolingo up very well: it gives you
a feeling that you learn something, even if you don't progress at all.

That's just the stuff I could remember off the top of my head. It's
still nice to have it, but we still should remember that the service has
lots of issues, some of which could be eliminated, if the management
wanted to do so.
Google Login vs. Regular Email – Almost 50% Used Google
> It's the complacent "everyman for themselves" mentality I don't understand.

It's a classic prisoner's dilemma game: you don't know what's the winning move is until you see what others are doing. And this kind of preparation is just getting ready in case this prep is needed. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and etcetera.
LInQer – C# Integrated Queries ported to Javascript
Links rot all the time. The web is already broken.
I'll be very pleased, but I can't promise anything. Good job by the way, Speech synthesis and Speech recognition are not easy subjects to work on.
Gulenist movement was certainly a cult, I live in Turkey and been to one of their school. I have the first-hand experience of their brainwashing methods and Gulenist indoctrination.
A $100M Bet That Vacationland Can Be a Tech Hub, Too
I love LibreOffice and rely only on it. But its Impress part is really cumbersome to use compared to PowerPoint (and I hate to admit that).

All the icons are lined up front and hard to distinguish; some bugs are really annoying (animated transitions don't work on my computers); some functionalities are tough to find : grouping/ungrouping for example.

If only I had time, I'd work to fix that...
Using voice actors and doppelgängers does not scale.
It is similar to the argument that automated surveillance is not bad because you could as well observe someone yourself. Sure that is possible but in reality it is limited to the niche of police and private detectors because it does not scale well.
I've been using it for more than a year to study Hungarian, pretty regularly : 2 lessons a day, pretty much no streak break.

It's pretty good for the first steps, and to get some vocabulary.
I can't follow a non-basic conversation, but I can pick up words from native speakers.

I'm now at the point where I should work on my own with more seriousness.

Overall, it's good to start learning a language, and to keep a regular practice, but it's not enough on its own to actually speak the language.
It would also help if many made proper use of UI render threads as well, which I admit following best practices on Android is a task on itself given how often they change.
I hit a similarly puzzling bug a few years ago in Gwenview (an image viewer) when a user reported it could not open some PNG files of a certain width.

I wrote about it here: https://agateau.com/2012/qt-image-decoders-stepping-on-each-...
Don't forget about:

- source of fire

- waterproof (perhaps also fireproof and thermal) blanket.

- sharp long shovel

- knife

- rope

The lower down the list, the more optional it is.
> Also about telemetry if all power users turn it off then you can have situations where developers will drop a feature because they don't use it and there is no data to show that more then 12 people are using it.

Yet another reason not to put telemetry in your software.
Startups of 2020
Does Wine still require the complicated, hard to manage, and poorly documented use of various combinations of WINEPREFIX, Winetricks and WINEARCH?

It always seemed to me the easiest thing was to spin up a new VM for every application I wanted to run in Wine.

I feel like that isn't the intention, but without any built-in profile management you're always one typo away from wrecking your entire Wine setup.
$70k in revenue with CSS Scan browser extension
That's disturbingly fragile filetype heuristic TBH. Couldn't they use anything better?
Pinboard. Cheap, and works very easily.
As a lifelong Mac user, it seems 2015 MBP was "peak Apple" and I've also been frustrated with more recently released machines.

This is probably not the answer you're looking for, but - I built a desktop Hackintosh for flexibility, repairability, extensibility. It dual-boots Ubuntu, for now. I'm migrating off of macOS gradually, and looking at Thinkpads for laptop.
We built a tool for this as we had the same problem. A place you can collect, tag and share you links in a visual way. Right now it's only for articles, videos (YouTube) and films, but will expand into other domains. Have fun, let us know if I can help you navigate it. dean@discovereel.com www.discovereel.com
That system is pretty tiny though. It just covers the main strip downtown. Maybe 6 blocks.
I created a Google Sheets with a few different pages.
Deploy FastAPI on Heroku in just 6 minutes
My reasons are actually:

- linux is faster and smoother (for me)

- better support (for the tools I use: git, jdk, dotnet core etc)

- better ux (again, for me. I love KDE but I'm not here to convince anyone to leave their favorite desktop behind.)

I can choose Windows or Mac every time my laptop is up for replacement so cost is not a reason for me.

Also, the IT department at work and with most of our customers has probably put some thought into it and still approved Windows, so I guess it is OK for work.
The evolution of product management, in the age of artificial intelligence
To the attention of Mac users:
Wine won't work on macOS Catalina 10.15

Apple is doing us no favors here, so be aware.
I share some links on my blog: https://jlelse.blog/links/.

Articles I plan to read later are saved in Pocket and archived after I read them.
They would take the easy to extract fuels first. But it was still there, distributed the same way as the hard to extract stuff.

If somebody got it before us, they must have got very little of it.
The higher the margin the more inefficient the market.
I served on a jury for a drug trafficking trial where the defendant's associates were doing this on a regular basis.
Map proposal for German long-distance train network
Ask HN: Fast Counters/Scoreboards as a Service
TL;DR: I could not find a serverless solution to scalable likes / votes / dashboards. Do services like that exist? Would anyone be interested in something like that?

I've been recently developing a prototype app with Firestore that allows users posting their proposition and other users viewing it and potentially liking / unliking it. Users want to see their own posts ranked by total views and current interest, and there's also a public scoreboard showing the last 200 hottest posts.

While sketching an app with serverless services like Firestore is quick and easy, handling unique votes and dashboard is a pain: due to technical limitations, you have to heuristically shard counters, implement sets on top of lists, hit a huge amount of Firebase functions to maintain your data structures and the whole thing doesn't really scale well. I ended up rewriting the whole thing with another database and hosted server, which defeated the purpose of sketching a quick app with serverless technologies.

Now, while there are companies offering serverless solutions to certain kinds of problems (for example, Algolia for searching, getstream.io for feeds and chats), I couldn't find any company solving the particular problem of serverless likes, views, scoreboards. Maybe there are and I just can't google properly? Or maybe the niche is just worthless? Would you use such a service if it was implemented?
Why Is This Painful?
Well, glad to hear it's consistent at least :) Good news is we got a handle on all the little issues and now our code runs well on a wide selection of devices, but yeah, next time around I'd find a library that handles all the gory details.

I find image manipulation works pretty well, though I've only been doing Android dev for 2 years so maybe it's improved. Or I just haven't done anything 'fun' yet...
@yoz is right. If only web browsers didn't render bad HTML, the web would not be so much better, it would not have worked.

There is a historical precedent to show it.

I remember when XHTML was the future, about 2002-2005. Pages were loaded in Firefox by a XML parser. If the page was invalid XML for any reason, Firefox would render a parser error message: "error X in line Y, column Z" with a copy of the offending line and a nice caret under the error position thanks to a monospace font.

Wrong percent encoding? No page rendered. Invalid entity? No page rendered. Messy comment separator (two minus signs)? No page rendered. Inserting an element where not allowed ? I guess no page rendered.

This is nice for a rigorous developer perspective, I appreciated it. But (I used to hate that but a wise person sees the world as it is) it is a catastrophe for real-world adoption.

Fixing one static page on your dev machine, thanks to the error message, is a thing. Making a dynamic website become practically impossible unless all your engineers are extremely rigorous and well-organized, and/or use a framework that generates guaranteed valid XHTML any time.

But all frameworks (except a few unknown ones) had (have?) no notion of a document tree or proper escaping but just concatenate text snippets.

From a business perspective, it means your website is much more difficult to get displayed at all (let alone correctly displayed). And even if it works today, it can blow up at any time because of a minor fix anywhere. Worse, the pages your team tests are okay, but real-world visitors will hit some corner case and get an error message intended for a developer.

One may have hoped that some cleaner framework would appear and serve guaranteed valid XHTML any time. I would have liked this option. Developer would create tree hierarchies in memory and serialize them into XHTML. Please commenter name some that do and how popular they are. Did it save XHTML?

That aspect may be the reason number one why XHTML was ditched in favor of HTML5: the web worked because it did a best effort to render invalid pages. Any solution that strays away from this principle will not be adopted at large.

Meta bonus: we're discussing the HTML level but this kind of discussion we would have had at any other level, had the stack been consistent a few levels higher (script) or lower (HTTP, TCP). It's funny how HTTP and TCP looks like they just work, but they have their own corner cases and spec holes. The ecosystem just happened to have mostly converged on a few implementations that mostly work okay. (No, let's not talk about IPv4, NAT, and the like. ;-)
What a peculiar combination of tone of subject matter. It was ultimately an industry case study, the kind of thing that you might find in any number of general-interest magazines, except that the author feels the need to remind the reader that Capitalism is Bad every couple of paragraphs, just enough to assuage his conscience before getting back to the analysis of Amazon, B&N, and the publishing industry.
s/and feel/feel/
Reminds me of this story from WW2 [0]. I'm sure I saw a documentary about this but that's the only reference I can find.

"In late December 1942 Grimson and Allan Morris walked out of the camp with a group of German servicemen but were recaptured 2 days later, when they showed more courtesy than was expected from a German Officer. The prisoner forgery department had produced the documents necessary for the escape and the German uniforms to go over their civilian clothing. Both Grimson and Morris had again noticed that they had near doubles serving as officers in the German guard company who they impersonated and both had lain in wait for 3 nights fully disguised in their German uniforms waiting for the right moment when the two clones attended the show. Outside the wire they changed into civilian clothes disguised as foreign workers, walking to Sagan station and catching a train to the outskirts of Leipzig before being caught."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grimson
I've used pocket for many years to collect articles and web pages that I want to read later, and kept using it almost by default when Mozilla took it over and integrated it into Firefox.
You should try out the brave browser. Using it on my laptop, I actually thought this was a fine site until I saw the comments, that's how effective it is at blocking some of these anti-consumer patterns.
I've tried it multiple times (android) but I found it incredibly boring. So much time repeating the same basic words over and over for weeks. Real courses with live people are much more interesting, although expensive and challenging.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing. I wonder why the warbling is easier to detect in the male voices. They sound like a computer. But very cool advancement.
Shaking up the Diamond Industry
Autumn – The macOS window manager for JavaScript hackers
Crossover works, and Wineskin + the Crossover engine works if SIP is turned off.
Presumably the same thing that happens in most normal robberies; the robber gets the item but gets reported to the police. Presumably the delivery robots have cameras, making it easier to identify the criminal.
Sure, see:

https://cjslep.com/c/blog/this-blog-is-federated

It's pretty bare bones and has had significant downtime due to Mastodon spamming "account Deleted" activities, which would crash my little server. I hope I have now fixed it.
I used to hoard bookmarks to never look at them again. It wasn't adding any tangible value to my life, so I got rid of that habit.

What I'm doing now instead, is curating a set of links around some topics, and sharing them publicly. The most portable way of storing and presenting them is either an HTML page on one of my websites or a markdown file mirrored to Github. That way I can be sure that my data isn't locked into some proprietary format by an entity who might get Incredible Journey-ed for whatever reasons.

Here are my personal favorites: https://jmstfv.com/bookmarks

And here's the curated list of businesses publicly sharing their expenses: https://github.com/jmstfv/open-expenses
I somehow read that initially as RedHat as well. Curious as to how my habit of skim reading and incorrectly logging information has filled by brain with bitrot over the years.
Hopefully Wine 6 will find a comfortable adaptation of the CrossOver 19 method.
Should Your Startup Have One or More Advisors?
I recently started with a personal website [1]. I wanted to dive into static site generators and used Zola[2] in the end. At this time I only published a few blog articles, but at least I started somewhere.

As my personal knowledge base I love to use Joplin[3]. I wanted to write my blog post with Joplin, too! I wrote a small script to generate the blog articles from Joplin notes and wrote about this in my first blog post [4].

I also plan to have some kind of linkage site. The biggest problem is to revised my large bookmark collection and pick out the best ones. I probably should just begin with new cool stuff I stumble upon. Secondly, I would like to have some kind of feedback system (comments, activitypub, ...) but without any (or at least too much) server side code and without using some external provider.

Btw, the site is also available fully decentralized via dat. Yeahh.

[1] https://blog.jdsoft.de

[2] https://www.getzola.org

[3] https://joplinapp.org

[4] https://blog.jdsoft.de/a-blog-a-blog/
When I look at Uber I don't think anything has changed.
Pretty sure Office is available as web app[0]

[0]: https://products.office.com/en-us/free-office-online-for-the...
What happens if you go back to photos via the task switcher instead of home screen icon? (I don't use iOS so I can't check)

Personally, I'd prefer that going back via the task switcher maintains state but going back via home screen doesn't. i.e. task switcher is how you get back to what you were doing, home screen is starting fresh.

If I open the photos app on my phone, I don't necessarily want it to automatically bring up the last photo I was looking at 6 hours ago or whatever. At the very least, if it's going to resume from where I was, there should be some visual indicator IMO (e.g. on Windows taskbar, it's icons are highlighted to show that a window of that application is open & clicking will bring that up instead of a new instance - plus there's the option to middle click & bring up a new instance regardless)
Ask HN: Is there any lanuage which satisfies my need?
I have the following requirements
1. I need to work with complex data, so I need easy data transformation constructs (map, filter, lambdas etc.)
2. I need strongly statically typed language, as in my experience they are easier to debug, read and maintain
3. Binary compilation

I have worked with Go, Python, Scala and Kotlin, and seems now all of them fail somewhere.

Scala and Kotlin don't compile to Binary and my team doesn't want to maintain JVM dependency

Python is dynamically typed

Is C++ or any other language viable?
Sure, https://smokingonabike.com/ I blog a couple times a year about my personal projects, mostly woodworking and lately grapevines.
How to add tests on existing code when you have short deadlines
I'd say it's much simpler than that. In nature things don't fly across the ground unless they're alive, prey.

So a ball or stick flying/rolling across the ground mostly immitates a small prey animal.

I believe that is what our training is nurturing.

I have a jack russel and she is genetically predisposed to hunting after small things.
Can someone explain the difference of this and a typical Instagram / Snapchat filter? Sorry I'm a bit of a deepfake n00b
Rounding to the value that's nearest in linear light is not exactly right (if anything evaluating distances in linear light is a bad idea in general, but that aside). What you want is to find out exactly how much of each colour to blend in order to get closest to the actual value and blend the colours in those proportions. The formula in the OP is the right way to do this.
https://blog.randomstring.org

It's mostly at the intersection of technology and philosophy. There's an RSS feed.

If you don't like either

https://blog.randomstring.org/2018/09/21/why-computer-securi...

or

https://blog.randomstring.org/2015/11/23/a-musical-analogy/

then you probably won't like the rest, either.
I use WordPress, which obviously has support for comments, and I've actually been thinking of turning them off. I get tens of thousands of spam comments every month (Akismet nukes 99.9999% of them) and the real comments I do get don't add a whole lot. I'm not sure they're worth the trouble. Perhaps just prominently feature your email address?
This would be clearly visible to investors because the company is accumulating assets.
Virus's don't care about ethics.
I love this article, and that people are leaving their own sites below - more food for my RSS reader!

Here's mine: https://jamiesnotes.com