skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The language discussion is pretty navel-gazey and easily falsifiable. There were loads of Japanese-market PCs in the early 90s (stuff like the MSX). Hell, Apple did huge pushes in Japan as well, thanks to its high-res stuff. If the language was maybe a barrier early on, it's pretty hard to argue that it continued to be so.

"Something" was different, of course. And maybe there is an argument for there simply being not very many cheap machines available for the Japanese market.

My pet theory is that the US in particular quickly started doing things like asking students to type up essays on computers to get them printed, and that basically served as the uber-excuse for people to all have computers at home in the US.

If you want more exoticism, people in Japan are less likely to have home offices because they would just go to their real office or whatever. Less likely to play DOOM on your parent's machine or whatever.

The specialized device aside is also super weird cuz it forgets to mention stuff like rental CD markets which make analog-in totally fine as a concept anyways. "Why is this problem not solved in Japan" can often be answered by "this isn't really as much of a problem because of some other incidental technical reason X, and the good-enough thing survives" (just like ACH in the US)
No, I think he's missing out on the best part of life - building creative things for others to enjoy and to improve their lives. And elevating the total refusal to add an iota of value to the world from your own existence into a form of sainthood is the apogee of lazy Gen Z culture, isn't it? I pity the guy, as any sane person should, but I also think it's grotesque that hangers-on are attracted to his lame opinions.
Bad analogy. This is idle power not off power.
I will suggest using Fraidycat. https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat
you can and should write. it doesn't have to be your exact findings, could be case studies, thoughts, a blog can be anything, or side projects to show, whitepapers.

I did cyber security for years. I worked with government agencies, financial institutions and other sensitive work, so you know you can't publish. so far I've been working through word of mouth but when I considered career change, I had not much to show for to people who aren't in the know. so I made a few side projects, posts.
It seems so. I primarily see it played for laughs in media these days, with hyper-advanced toilets or useless robots.

Of course Japanese suppliers are involved in many advanced industries (image sensors, displays, solid-state storage, heavily-integrated packaging, battery cells) but now days they often outsource production too.
Well you live in Australia.

In Portland where I live, murders have spiked and many of my local businesses have armed security now due to the decline in social cohesion due to the proliferation of false narratives.
I wondered this too when learning Pinyin. I believe the reason is that while Pinyin's X and Q may sound like "sh" and "ch" to English speakers, they are actually different sounds (and contrast with the "sh" and "ch" sounds that also exist in Mandarin). That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei", "shi" is pronounced "shr", "-ian" is pronounced "yen", etc...

MPS-II seems much closer to intuitive pronunciation for English speakers, although it never caught on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Phonetic_Symbols_II
...except that it's also used by companies from every other country as well. It's more of a slush-bucket "everything goes here" TLD than anything.
But it isn't a valid syllable in the orthography rules. Pinyin has a set of syllable onsets and a set of rimes. You determine the spelling of a syllable by choosing the onset/rime combination you want and looking it up in a table. Thus, the spelling of n-/-ü is "nü", and the spelling of ∅-/-ü is "yu". Same syllable column; zero characters in common in the spelling.

And if you look up ch-/-ing, the table will tell you "no such syllable", just like it will for "m-/-iang" or "h-/-weng".

All three of those are invalid in terms of orthography -- the standard specifically defines that there is no way to spell them. But "miang" is perfectly valid conceptually, and "ching" isn't even that.
I am not sure what appealing alternative you could offer. I didn't have a car up until recently. I got one because I had a kid. Even though I live in a small European city [0] (400k inhabitants) with bus lines everywhere, taxi's that are dirt cheap etc.

It's impossible with a kid. I tried for the first few months. I don't have time to wait for the bus for 10 minutes with a screaming baby, neither do I want to stress that the entire bus or train needs to listen to my crying baby for the ride. Taking the kid to the doctor halfway across town is just a nightmare with any of the alternative modes of transport.

Give me a good alternative for taking a screaming baby to the doctor without pissing off everyone and I'll happily get rid of the car.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluj-Napoca
Is there a resource (maybe with sound samples) that expands on the voiced/unvoiced vs aspirated/unaspirated distinction? It sounds fascinating, but I'm struggling to conceptualize it just with the text here.
Does Tesla have data showing how much better or worse AutoPilot is at driving vs a human driver?
Meanwhile I posted this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxqC9SiRh8 here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27941820

And some people here have promptly flagged it for some reason.

@dang can we please give this a second chance. I think these people should be heard and acknowledged, if they want it. I think we, as a society, owe them at least that. And if possible, for the medical community to figure out a way to help them.

And I wonder why the companies are not providing support for these people. Does the agreement of the trial include a clause that deny them medical support if they get injured by the vaccine during the trial?
Okay and we can sit here and pontificate on how the way things should have been done or we can think about things we can do today based on what we have.

I accept that you want to look back and lament what we didn't do. I find that depressing, so I'd rather think about what we can do right now based on the infrastructure we have to encourage people to adopt people centric modes of transit.

Having a safer bicycle would get us there. It would keep people closer to homes, encourage the creation of smaller business centers instead of massive strip malls, and revitalize downtown streets as more people decide to opt for the convenience and enjoyment of the human powered methods.
> I thought that the last decade's music was considerably less dark than the music of my youth, circa 2000.

Do you have any data to support that more generally? Necessarily, anyone's experience of a field so enormous as music will be narrow and biased.
The article is from 2008. Anyway I feel like the article makes many leaps which weaken its specific argument:

> the direction that the Japanese electronics industry took makes perfect sense. Everything needed to be designed as stand-alone appliance.

> By the year 2000, most of the technical difficulties facing computers in Japan in the 80s and 90s had been resolved, and home computers were becoming mainstream. Japanese consumers wanted PC connectivity from their appliances, and the iPod offered a well-designed, highly functional package. So Apple created the iPod, and Japanese electronics manufacturers were left to re-evaluate a new world where the home computer is the hub for digital media.

For me, it's really about CD/Mini-disc vs Mp3. Before the Mp3, I remember my friend showed me the mini-disc and I was blown away by it. Crazy better than CD's in terms of size.

But then Mp3's showed up, but I think specifically Napster, Limewire etc drove the crazy crazy adoption of Mp3's. Sony and other portable companies took notice and built Mp3 devices. Japan was slow to adopt the Mp3.

Why was Japan slow to adopt the Mp3? I'm not sure, could be because of the lack of personal computer? Or was it the lack of rampant piracy? My feeling is music hardware was "good enough" for what the market wanted at the time.

Eventually Mp3 became the standard and anyone slow to adopt it was forced to accept and switch over, like Japan.

[EDIT]
Quick search shows that Japan had rampant priacy issues, but simply avoided the Mp3:

> But as of the beginning of 2004, Japanese record companies have
largely avoided an online file-sharing epidemic.[0]

Still not sure why the Mp3's adoption was slow in Japan. Could very well be the lack of personal computer.

[0] https://anthropology.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/c...
The OLEDs all seem to be LG designed these days. With you on the image sensors though - a few years ago it was one of the most successful Sony divisions thanks to their Apple deal for the iPhone
> This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries!

Yes I totally agree, my daughter who grew up speaking English, was having trouble reading some Japanese words that were transliterated (Romanji) because she couldn't figure out how to pronounce the vowels, but for me (I'm Italian) it was easy to read them correctly, even though I had never seen those words before and I didn't know what they meant.

> This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet

Yes and surprisingly it works fairly well even with some non-European languages where the Latin alphabet was adopted, such as Malaysian and Indonesian.

However there are some languages that have frequent exceptions, e.g. French comes to mind where there are several word endings like e.g. "-eau", "-aux" and "-aix" etc., other languages also have exceptions like "-de" endings in Portuguese and some diphthongs in German like "ie", "au" etc.

PS. it's strange that the Great Vowel Shift is not widely known among English speakers - it caused the English language to have highly irregular phonetics which is one of the most evident features of the language.
Incidentally, I left LinkedIn this year as well
I grew up on Long Island in 60's, which is a bay (called a "sound", like Long Island Sound) bordered by states CT, RI, Mass, and NY/Long Island. Many relatives caught lobster there, but no more. In the summer we would walk down to low tide and pull steamers clams out of the sand and cook them on holidays, along with periwinkles which are 4" snails (not the same as French periwinkles which are tiny!!) Now all areas are polluted and shellfish cannot be eaten. Is it crazy/sad? Yes.
Based on the way the article is written, I assume that software engineering was not new to the author when he first started writing CSS. It seems strange to me to write an article like this because it's just an indication that the author chose to dive in without understanding the fundamentals first.

I'm honestly just trying to understand how articles like this get promoted to the front page of Hacker News more and more often. I imagine that writing an article about [insert related field of mathematics] before diving into [insert field of physics] every week would not land me on the front page of Hacker News every week.

Edit: "basic field" -> "related field".
None of those things are simple. They require immense top down effort whereas starting a company providing a safer bike is able to be done right now by a small group of individuals without any political approval or lobbying or legislation.

Like I said in an above comments we can sit around and think about what we should have done, or we can make suggestions based on what we have. One is more constructive than the other.
90% of covid deaths are people over 70, most with multiple co-morbidities and thus a very limited remaining life expectancy any way. We went to such extreme lengths to prevent the deaths of these people from covid, yet so many are willing to see those same people die just a few years later from other aging-related illnesses, when it is within our power to cure aging.
Is this article true though? I use MP3 players and small pocket computer from Casio and Sharp. Are they not connect to the PC? Or are we talking about the wrong history here.

I know their pc standard is different from ours. But iPod is really 2000s things. Many problems solved.

It is just like why no one has iPhone. There are smart phone. Just you want to have the genius to reinvent the game. There are MP3 players before iPod. Just wait for a genius or a company that look for user pain points and solved it.

I think that discuss reinventing history.
During an undergraduate research program, I discovered a gap in a theory in PDEs which I’m assuming nobody else did because I was the only one who tried to follow each step (just getting that far was the entire purpose of the effort!). My advisor said it would be best to fix the gap before publishing about it because multiple students entering the job market depended on the result being true. That was an eye-opening social experience.
I think at this point I'm on the fourth consecutive laptop that this just won't ever boot on. This time, however, it just says "Haiku" on a splash screen and then stops completely. No errors, no debug message window, nothing.

(At this point usually someone here insists that I file a bug. Which I won't do because a) I have no useful information to put into a bug report and b) I think after eleven years of this nonsense it's probably in there about 200 times already anyway.)

Oh, look. Can't even press the space bar to get an unintelligible error anymore.
They're not making more power available to citizens. They're literally trying to silence people they disagree with on Facebook because their ideas are more persuasive than their own.

Stop with the moral high horse, the left in this country fell off long ago. We're all on the ground now so it's time we look around and accept reality.
It depends, JOLED makes some panels for LG. Smaller scale but technically interesting.
I think Japan's products often miss the bigger picture. They often excel at one specific problem, but lack cohesive strategy to tie back into the whole ecosystem. In this post, there was discussion about SD cards and music hence why they needed some kind of PC connectivity. I view that as a symptom of the lack of a bigger strategy. Apple came out with iTunes that was one answer to the music industries problem, and that allowed them to eventually iterate into the iPod with less need to support alternative ways for PC connectivity such as the SD card.
This is a terrible strategy, it never got anyone anywhere. It's the result of a sort of bleeding heart learned helplessness. It's the attitude of people who have lost the ability to be confrontational in pursuit of goals.

Take smoking as an example. How did we reduce smoking? (arguably one of the most successful public health campaigns in recent history). Did we stop being anti-smoking and instead promoted something else? No! We banned smokers from bars, we told people that smoking sucked, we plastered ugly pictures of black lungs on boxes and we taxed the crap out of smokers.

Ironically, the big change is often easier than the small one. Cars are the problem, point it out. Haggling about bike lanes is a colossal waste of time. We need to completely revamp how we commute and how we life, communicate that clearly, and point out whoever stands in the way.
Update: I have switched to Gnome after couple of menubar crashes.

My earlier misconceptions regarding Gnome seems to because of default integrations on some distros, But vanilla gnome on arch seems to be robust, functional and is indeed beautiful.
Wow! I never heard about this. It happened only a few years after I was born. Back in '97, probably only the nerdiest of nerds would have cared about it, so I'm surprised that the judge(s) over this case ruled correctly given how new the technology was. Is there an article about it? Seems like a fascinating topic
This, exactly. The rolled r is only r in IPA, but way too often people reach out for the wrong symbols when representing English pronunciation. Often I also see ◌ʰ being often left out when a consonant is usually aspirated, and so on.
> it's just an indication that the author chose to dive in without understanding the fundamentals first

You'd be surprised how many otherwise-competent engineers don't take CSS seriously enough to seek out the fundamentals, and instead spend their days avoiding it as much as possible and cursing it when they can't
Someone should beat the shit out of you for the garbage you said to me. Dang, why did you let this creepy fuck back on here? You permabanned my old account for way way less.
> this notorious "tabloid journal", as statistics professor Andrew Gelman calls them

One professor's statement (citation?) doesn't discredit the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. I would need much more evidence than that. A snarky comment - a common means of discrediting institutions, a popular trend these days - costs nothing to make, and carries little evidence, reason, or meaning.
They make pretty good trains.
You can buy abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw.xyz for only $63K USD!
He is still spending money, no matter what.

Just because he doesn't touch the money, what does that have to do with anything. If someone like Queen Elizabeth never touches the money herself, mean that she does not spend money? If Jeff Bezos has a person following behind him 24/7 and never touches money, does that mean he has no money and doesn't spend? Of course not.

If someone gives the dude food for free, the homeless guy still paid money for it. Maybe not cash, but he paid some form of money. The person purchasing the sandwich loaned or gave the homeless dude money, and then paid for the sandwich on behalf of the homeless guy.

The homeless guy spends money living in the guy's house.

Not only that, the sandwich he received for free is taxable by the IRS. It's like on those game shows where you win a car for free, you still have to pay taxes on it. That is because it is legit income, as in money to you. The gameshow gave you money for the car, but the gameshow then bought it for you, hid it behind a wall, and made you work for it.

If the guy needs healthcare and goes to the hospital for free, he's not going for free. The doctors and nurses and rent and utilities and tools all cost money that someone pays. Nobody is working for free. The homeless guy is getting money from everyone, he just doesn't touch the actual cash, but it is all the same thing. He is spending $10,000 or $50,000 or $150,000 or whatever the medical care may cost, in value.
US set for punishing temperatures as ‘heat dome’ to settle over country
I live in a dense city center where there is a severe shortage of space for dedicated infrastructure. As more people ride their bikes, the logical next step is to remove cars from the roads to ensure cyclists have ample space and cars can’t pass recklessly or otherwise discourage further uptake by newcomers. A four-lane street that has one lane for buses and taxis, two regular traffic, and a two way cycling lane separated by a low curb is perhaps the most dangerous place I’ve had to ride here, and that’s because cyclists are all packed into such tiny areas. Closing roads to further discourage commuting would go a long way to wrestle back control of the streets.

Being anti-car isn’t the best first step, but it is inevitable that we take up this position when viable alternatives — not just cycling — are available and convenient.
I agree, it's crazy how often the news talk about China nowadays and almost nobody pronounces the names correctly.
From the abstract:

> This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample
Thank you. I agree with the systemic critiques, I just don't see how they move us closer to a workable solution.

This is just more of the division that we do to make ourselves feel morally superior. It's the "I don't shop at Walmart like the poor's" mentality that seeks to elevate the status of the critic while ignoring the very real issues that make people want to shop at a giant big box Walmart store rather than their local downtown.
Also the english term "fair-weather friend" for friends who aren't around when times are difficult.
Are you in college? I don't mean that as an insult, I'm just curious. I associate this kind of over-the-top writing with the kind of writing I did when I was 18 years old.

About this:

“You aren’t as happy as you think/report” is as silly

I don't know why anyone would write like this. Who are you trying to convince?

There is an incredibly rich literature about people's ability to lie to themselves. Here is a starter course:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201508...

https://lifelessons.co/personal-development/selfdeception/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-deception

Unhappy people often convince themselves that they are happy. This is a well-studied subject. If these unhappy people are lucky, they have friends, and the friends try to intervene, to get the person the help they need, or perhaps, to simply confront them with reality.

We often have an easier time understanding others more than we understand ourselves. Again, there is a rich literature on this. Spend 5 seconds on Google researching self-deception and you'll understand how well studied this is.

About this:

“Happiness comes from within” is a core element of every major religion and most secular life philosophies across all cultures on Earth for thousands of years.

Wow. You might want to re-read that in a year and see if it still sounds as intelligent as you thought it did. You might eventually feel that you've exaggerated the strength of your argument.

Stated simply: people do often understand one another. Humans engage in conversation with other humans, and by this process we learn about each other. And over the years we build up a complex "theory of the mind" so as to better estimate what is going on in someone else's head. We can generally tell when someone else is miserable. And if the miserable person says they are happy, we can take note of the discrepancy. If you don't want to read a few articles on this topic, you can simply refer to your own personal experience. Surely at some point you've had a friend who seemed depressed, and you realized they were depressed without being explicitly told?

About this:

The champions of the thesis that “Happiness comes from without, not within” tend to be marketers and salespeople of products, ideas, ideologies, etc. who need to generate discomfort with the status quo in others to make a buck

I suspect that you are smart enough to realize that if you had a strong argument you would not have to resort to putting words in my mouth.

One of us has an agenda. The other one is linking to articles that will be educational if the good people of Hacker News decide to read them.
I Realistified Star Wars Drawings in Photoshop
The private cartel would never give up that power. So common sense tells you that if they ever appear to willingly give up that power (by use of the media propaganda, etc), there's a major catch to the whole thing.
Isn’t the ballast only required for a fluorescent bulb?
I see this a lot in with Americans having Polish surnames (or other Slavic). People typically pronounce theirs somewhere on a spectrum between the original and a monolingual english-speaker's attempt to make sense of the letters, so you just have to wait for them to say it. Example: Susan Wojcicki, whose name is apparently pronounced "woh-jisky" but I think in Polish (not a speaker) would be more like "voy-chitsky". This site shows a whole variety of other American pronunciations: https://www.pronouncenames.com/pronounce/wojcicki
Just talk about MP3 codec: Sony already developing their own ATRAC. Panasonic (and Sony) contributes for developing AAC (from patent list). Since AAC was standardized in 1997, maybe mp3 for 2000s looks a bit old from their perspective.