skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a foreign language instruction services company. We mostly serve government and military, but we do accept private students. All of our linguists are extremely skeptical of apps like Duolingo. And before anyone replies something like "your company has a vested interest in propping up instructor-led language training", if apps like Duolingo actually worked, the government--especially the military--would stop paying us in a heartbeat.

There is a lot of diversity in instructor-led training. None of our classes are anything like what you would have experienced in highschool or college. Our largest classes have 4 students in them, and that's strictly a cost-cutting scheme that Gov has insisted on for maintenance training. You'll be one-on-one with your instructor. They'll be a native speaker with often decades of experience teaching language. They'll be tayloring a lot of supplemental material specific to you. We even have some of our own apps that we've developed (that's my job), nothing like Duolingo (though nothing you can just use without our curriculum or instructors).

A lot of people say "the best way to learn a language is to live in a country where it is spoken". Clearly, that is unrealistic for the vast majority of people. I would also say it presumes you are a specific kind of extremely extroverted, fearless person. Most people find themselves becoming quite introverted in situations where they can't communicate easily.

For these reasons, I think the most realistic answer for the best way to learn language is private tutoring. The OP take about having used Duolingo for almost 10 years. That seems absurd to me. I would hope they have mastered at least half a dozen languages with that kind of effort. Language training shouldn't take that long.
Gosh... can't imagine paying for my pilot training (even in the USA it's usually half of what's here) and be paid $52k.
I humbly suggest Alan Watts’ take, for example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df8wNh8-HLs

Somewhat flawed transcript here: https://alanwatts.org/2-5-4-meditation/
The first link mentions no more NAT as an advantage, but I think it's actually one of the big issues holding up adoption. Rightly ot wrongly, since the 00's the perception is that sitting directly on the internet with a public address is a big security no-no.
It's a paid app, but I enjoyed Speakly's approach of "endless stream of open cloze exercises". It forces you to actually type words in the target language (unlike Duolingo which is mostly translations into the source language), it has a clever spaced repetition algorithm, and it lets you practice for as long as you want and stop immediately at any point, unlike Duolingo locking you into 20 question long lessons.
In the past there have been cases where firewall defaults were configured incorrectly for IPV6 and stuff would get inadvertently exposed. I don't think that's as common now but I could see just entirely disabling ipv6 to avoid this if you don't want to specifically test to make sure the configuration is correct.
Read "the mind illuminated" it's the best non bs guide to meditation imo
City of Austin should require a fully "paid up in advance" insurance fund to completely protect all buyers (and sellers to buyers no matter how many times in future) for the full current value of the purchase price - - against cracks in slab, walls, structural failure, etc.
"More addresses" has a handful of knock-on benefits; or, perhaps more accurately, ipv6 would let greenfield systems skip out on some workarounds made necessary by not enough addresses.
In the context you mentioned it, the streak sounds like a powerful demotivator.

This is a more general problem with gamification and external rewards: they are just as good demotivators as they are motivators, if not more so.

This is why I wanted to turn off streaks when I was using Duolingo. I knew it was just a matter of time before I had my streak broken, and I was very concerned about what would happen then.
> You can import Dhall expressions from URLs that support CORS

We seem to have very different ideas of what a "configuration language" should be capable of and what its parser should (be allowed to) do.
There's a snack food in Finland called Hot Rods that ignite pretty easily with an ordinary match. It grosses people out but hey, that's calories !
Gitlab does support this with “Merged Result pipelines”[0]. We use them extensively alongside their merge train functionality to sequential is everything and it’s fantastic.

[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/pipelines/merged_results_pipel...
I'm curious how much of this is mobile vs desktop. My assumption is that a much larger percentage of the traffic on mobile is ipv6.
At a much smaller scale, that's what happened to me with the Wordle game. Once I lost my 100%, I never touched it again. With Duolingo the drive is the learning so I've lost the streak many times (current is highest at 60) but that matters nothing to me. With Wordle, I think I was no longer having much fun, and keeping the streak probably was the only reason I played.
"hi!"
"very good"
"good"
"not very good"
"good? bad?"
"goodbye!"
You are self imposing a certain discipline on yourself, as people have done for thousands of years.

You’re not asking for your family’s speech volume to be policed.

I get the technical similarities but the reasons are very different.
its probably made up to not scare "unscrupolus productive" people too much
I think it's crazy how the guard, after just having watched the approaching army maim his comrade for life, still brings up the resolve to make a mockery of them.

I guess this goes to show how accustomed the people were to casual violence and bodily harm.

(Or it might strengthen the "two factions" theory: That the guard and the hostage were from two opposing factions within the resistance and therefore the guard didn't have much compassion for the hostage to begin with)
Either in terms of the exponential function, or by its Taylor series.
Powering the lunar base, version 2 – Casey Handmer's blog
Once, while traveling, I suddenly realized that my streak deadline had just passed, and I managed to cheat by changing the time on my phone. However, when I tried that again at some later date it didn’t work.

Duolingo is pretty good for getting you started with a new language, and can provide some valuable practice, especially if you don’t yet have a teacher. But don’t take it too seriously. Its translations are often poor:

https://lee-phillips.org/whyDuoLingoWhy/
Not sure if you’re presenting not being able to work your employee to the bone as something positive or something negative :)
Use the website from a desktop/laptop. Almost all the gamification takes a back seat there. Also don’t use the word bank - force yourself to do the freeform typing.
It's like when you see things labelled as compostable. Almost everything is technically compostable, but many substances require conditions which can only be achieved when composting on an industrial scale using heat and oxygen. Until there are legal definitions, it doesn't matter if some people are doing the right thing when others will take advantage.
The reality in which we live is one crafted by people, and if you don't have a seat at the table crafting the rules, then you are the one being taken for a ride.
What if it was possible to have a local build system that would run tests etc and provide a cryptographically secure hash proving that the tests passed, the build was good, etc then a “centralized” CI system just verified that before permitting merge/deploy.
There’s a lot of hand waving there but it doesn’t seem wildly implausible.
Local use of containers or something like nixos could provide sufficient protection against the “works on my machine but not in production” problem.
I used the Swift API. Response times were generally very fast, but it was also not a production build with a beta iOS version.
Because of colons. Colons separate the different sections of an ipv6 address but HTTP URLs also use colons for the port, so the ipv6 IP must be encompassed in brackets to differentiate between IP and port.
If it's so full of errors, surely you can provide an example.
Best Table Tennis Robot vs. TableTennisDaily's Dan (2019)
Lost my 635 day streak last week, offered £5.99 or something to repair it. I was pretty gutted but actually on reflection, the gamification just added undue stress. Duolingo is great for vocab and repetition, it was only with a tutor that I really became conversational.
[I'm well aware of who I am replying to here, I'm merely taking the bait and providing some hopefully fun links for people to dig into. :)]

Because that's how Professor Wirth ¹) does it ²), because it allows for some interesting educational side-treks ³), and because the difference between a fictional and real microprocessor is smaller than some might think ⁴).

¹) https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/index.html

²) https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/index....

³) "So what instruction would you add to this CPU to make the work we've been doing easier? Great, implement that instruction in the provided emulator."

⁴) https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/FPGA-relatedWork/index.html

(edit: And, of course, there's FPGA implementations of Professor Knuth's MMIX (http://mmix.cs.hm.edu/), too: https://github.com/tommythorn/fpgammix)
I would bet that 95% of the open source projects on GitHub have no community. Does that mean they are not open source to you?
Add to that energy saving features that suspend tabs and you can get variable length, setTimeout(() => { console.log('timers'); }, 1);

...

...

...

...

timers

see: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/timer-throttling-in-chrome...
I think you just have to select the right ancestor element.

news.ycombinator.com##.athing:has(a[href="user?id=example"])

seems to work.
How effective was medicine before WWII? How complex was it? How many instruments for extensive tests were there? Labs that would run analysis to find out what is wrong with you so that doctors could figure out how to best cure you?

Sure, the current system is preposterous and prices are way higher that necessary, but we can't just compare with the past unless you also want a service like the one you'd got in the past, which is probably still quite affordable.
What's the Point
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/60000-tech-workers...

"former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and top executives from [Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm] had reached "no-poaching" pacts prohibiting each other from trying to lure away each other's top workers with offers of higher-paying jobs."

These were the ones for whom DoJ had enough "smoking gun" proof, but Jobs and Schmidt had a lot of friends elsewhere (Larry Ellison...), so the cartel was likely much bigger.
I just hope ipv6 doesn't have privacy nightmare that 1 device will always get 1 IP. Currently, the isp I use provides dynamic ip, so on every router restart my ip gets changed. If they starts to provide ipv6, I hope they give options to rotate it frequently, so toxic companies like meta, facebook, microsoft can't connect my device & ip.
There is a huge phone network/ISP called Jio there. I read they are using 624 only.
how would a corporation death penalty work? probably with company closure ( equity destruction ), banning the brand and force all ill involved managament to not work in that specificindustry for 5-10 years.
There’s a bit of truth in that perhaps, but I don’t think anyone is advocating legalizing free sales of opioids. Apart from scumbags.
Because it's an interesting concept for a computer language, and the HN community can reliably be counted on to find other sources to dive into. HN has been known to deep dive on software archeology.
Here you go:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245192941...
Are the hopes of a direct conversion of astrocytes into neurons dashed?
I had over a year of completing the health three rings on Apple Watch (maybe failed on two or three day) - but a flight tripped me up and it fell apart very quickly.

The ability to make up the missed days might have led me to carry on. Or maybe forgiveness if you'd gone over in the precious few days.

It's sad really it was quite an accomplishment.
Progressive web apps suffer from an ergonomic issue where people have to read 2-3 tutorials to figure out how to put a site on their homescreen. If that hurdle vanished and was more intuitive and didn't require reading tutorials, PWAs would gain more traction.

This is why people who are developing PWAs need to evangelize for better, more intuitive deployment of PWAs on popular mobile OSes like iOS and Android.
Private tutoring has to be, with a good teacher, orders of magnitude better than anything else. Services that ask you to "request a quote" instead of naming a price are of course not for everybody.

Has anyone had success with finding tutors on platforms like italki.com? I tried for a bit but probably didn't spend enough time to find the right tutor.
Words are references. Without a word, we could just point and gesture. Call it “pizza” if you wish.

When I first learned about pizza I didn’t have much use for it. I heard from others their interest in pizza. This was my growing awareness, but not interest or focus on pizza.

As with many things, as I have grown older I hear more about pizza and I encounter different practitioners and media discussion of pizza.

I only became interested in pizza as a practice when I heard an interview between zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and radio host Krista Tippett.

It doesn’t take more than a few very clever ideas for me to take notice, and these people are clever and insightful thinkers. It was an interesting discussion.

I learned that pizza was part of the practice, and that pizza can be practiced by lay people.

It was then that the reference pizza lost its singular representation and became, for me, something more. It became something for which the term pizza was useful and convenient, but not necessary.

I don’t question pizza in terms of the single referent pizza. My interest has transcended the singular reference. My thoughts on pizza are many, multi-facetted and self-sustaining (in my memory and understanding).

For me this missive is very honest account of how, leading to what, pizza is to me. Not what I do with pizza, or how much pizza I … consume (haha!). Maybe I’m not _persuasive_ enough to bring you to the point of liking pizza as much as I do.

Maybe you’re interested in other things and pizza is just the ‘word’ or object you have focused on?

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/nf961AVmNQCRARXq7
I live in a country and I'm trying to learn the language. I also take weekly classes and occasionally use private tutoring when I have time. I still get a ton of value out of duolingo, its exercises are easy to do in spare moments and it's a great way to work on vocabulary and passive grammar understanding, I love it.

It's not nearly enough on it's own to learn a language though, it's very very good as a supplement though, ime
Add a "Show HN: " to the beginning of the title, it might get more traction
Three data points: The best econ prof I ever had taught us, "Someone wants to buy your dream? Great! Sell it! You'll have another one." And two start ups I worked for, sold to Microsoft, and destroyed by the absent managers from Redmond.

I've got a new dream now, and if the boss sells it, pfft, I'll just keep dreaming.
I've been invited in the building of several masonry homes. 3D printing is mostly good for putting up walls. Walls are quick, easy and require relatively little skill if you use modern thermal bricks. Comparatively, just about every other element is much more trouble.
Similar in the UK. People take "fine to flush" on the packaging to mean "fine to flush as many as you like at a time": https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-61922999

Quite what these people are using so many wet wipes for is beyond me. Changing babies and removing make up are the only common uses I can think of, but why not just put them in the bin?
of course, in retrospective now it makes sense - thanks for taking the time to look into this, appreciate it.
There's a setting to turn off the "ding" when you get something correct. I thought it's annoying, so I turned it off. Suddenly, the app felt very dull, and maintaining my streak felt hard - I kept forgetting to look into the app. So I turned it on again.

... Pavlovian conditioning works, even when I'm the rat. For the time being, I'm okay with that, because Duolingo does help me learn French, let's see how it goes long term.
Here is a video of Icon's CEO (the company building this community with Lennar) explaining more about the company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63uhYWkictE

It's a bit long but worth watching if you're interested in this technology.
These houses will be way above the median also. Median includes a bunch of 1500sf ranches and split-levels built in the 60s and 70s.
Somewhat related question: are there proofs that meditation benefits do not come exclusively from placebo effect? Meaning, if I'm able to convince you that a certain ritual (however esoteric) is good for you and you end up doing it on a regular basis and this ritual is somewhat different from meditation, will you reap less benefits than with meditation?
thank you - I already had GreaseMonkey installed (for old.reddit.com redirection) - wasn't sure if they're compatible but they are - it worked nicely without any modifications - thank you very much.
depending on the size of the list this may be cleaner than the ublock origin one - thanks again.
> I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but accept that diminishing returns will kick in at some point.

You're most probably right Paul. I agree with Thiel and Graeber (in
their now famous conversation) that this began 20 or 30 years ago.

> The pattern is that it's only getting harder to discover new secrets
of nature.

Not sure about that. What pattern do you mean? There have been stalls,
hiatus and centuries of dark-age. That "past performance is no
guarantee of future success" swings both ways. No strong
epistemological statements can be made. Maybe the patterns we see have
more to do with power dynamics than opportunity.

> Everything discovered until now has been the low hanging fruit.

We cannot know that. Imagine the discovery of a new force that
connects electrodynamics and gravity, or an extraordinary development in
mathematics that changes the way we see data and statistics. These
could seed a 100 year run of paradigm shifts.

> Today it requires decades of education,

I've been on this line of thought too. I did a talk at Kings College
on the problem of the "pulled up ladder", the resilience of innovation
and the possibility of reconstructing a post-calamity society due to
lost knowledge and the apparently insurmountable demands of
education. But as I think more on it, hasn't every epoch faced the
same challenge. It's terrifying when viewed as an individual prospect,
but on a collective scale we always advance.

> There will likely come a point at which reaching new discoveries
requires more energy, resources, and time than any human(s) can
afford.

This might be a bit Malthusian. Let's hold out hope for genius and
luck too.

> We live on a finite planet as a precarious existence. Learning to
first live sustainable is probably a better bet than burning the
earth to send few people to another planet for a while.

That's an interesting debate. I also have reservations on the
expansive/exploratory mind-set. It's a cliche to say it, but very few
people understand the scales, energy and likely opporunity from space.
A period of sustainable consolidation might be what we need. On the
other hand some will wish to push on regardless and I don't think
anyone ought to discourage them or that they need to "burn the planet"
to do so.
That goes to show how easily humans are manipulated. When I read these comments it all sounds incredibly pointless. People cherishing a counter they are allowed to increase.
Well, the method is shown in the video. Put a test tube of saltwater in front of an 13.56 MHz RF generator (radio antenna) and light ‘er up.

The paper I posted uses a focused beam of RF and more deliberate lab methodology. But with just 5 citations, I feel like there might be a missed opportunity.
Try sprinkling some chili flakes on top. I didn't expect it to be good but it's amazing.
We're talking like a normal every 6-weekish haircut. Nothing crazy.
You might even call it a poor way of pouring.
> I felt that conclusion was unwarranted. So she was a 'fake' heiress. Aren't they all? Just jumped-up rich claiming some sort of divine right? Why wasn't she as good as any of them?

In many European countries there's still the concept of nobility[1] with titles, lineage, inheritance and all. It isn't some abstract thing that people choose to believe in or not.

The comment is about a young woman living in NYC who faked being one of these nobles, and used it to defraud people. She went to jail for it[2]. I have no idea what your comment is about or how it ties to any of this.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CILANE

2 - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17503259/where-is-anna-delvey-...
I assume for mobile operators there are advantages for location roaming. I'm not sure when you change cells if IP stays the same, but must be a routing nightmare.
Oh yes, good point. And format...

Format code as code, text as text, math as math.
This.

I've been in a similar situation, but on the other end. We hired a very expensive (for us) freelancer with the goal of fixing some very critical performance issues. We had all aspects of the issues documented, even line numbers of where the problem was (thanks, datadog). So we knew about the issues, but had no time to address them properly (very small team).

So this new developer starts refactoring a bunch of unrelated or seemingly related code, with pull requests in the 5k+ changes range, but no real performance gains (we needed to see CPU going down by 50% or more).

It would have taken us more time to review those pull requests and provide valuable feedback, than to fix the issues ourselves (which we finally did, by updating one or our dependencies).

Point is, as a new person on the team everything looks bad because its unfamiliar to you. But there's a reason for that current state and unless you try to, or show that you are trying to, understand why it's like that I don't think you are actually making things better - just more familiar to you.
It's sad how much has changed in the past 10+ years. I remember arguments advocating for ipv6 for exact reason. 1 device per 1 ip. Back then, it was seen as something great.

I agree with what you said. It's just interesting how it illustrates how different things are now.
It works but it completely breaks standard behavior.

Arrow keys can work normally, or select paragraph, or do nothing, or behave erratically.

Page-up/down make work or may not work, and may have some weird interaction with the arrow keys.

The scrollbar is nonstandard on Chrome. It is not completely broken but the mouse pointer is wrong.

Mouse-based scrolling works, it is the only thing that seems to work as expected.

Reader mode doesn't work.

I don't understand why websites go out of their way to reimplement perfectly good browser behavior. I am sure it is a lot of hard work, and it is almost always done poorly, in fact, I am not sure there is a way of doing it correctly.