skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have an Android device, so I haven't played around with your free version, but I'm a big fan of using spaced repetition software (SRS) for language learning. Here are some questions:

Is your SRS algorithm based on one of the published Supermemo algorithms? If so, is it one of the older ones like SM-2 or one of the complex ones that eliminates the "whoops I missed a day" problem?

Rather than make a custom deck for Anki or Mnemosyne, you're reinventing the wheel a lot by writing your own SRS. Is the main reason so you can have that awesome-sounding handwriting matching feature? Does that handwriting feature work flawlessly for native Japanese control groups? Have you found that the Supermemo/Anki/Mnemosyne approach of users self-reporting their accuracy isn't as reliable as using handwriting recognition?

As for marketing, there's a sizeable community of people already using spaced repetition software for learning Japanese, and they tend to be centered around forum.koohii.com and alljapaneseallthetime.com (although I'm not sure how much activity the latter gets nowadays). They use SRS to commit to memory the mnemonics in James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. That community is probably the only place in the world where you can find multiple people who achieved competent Japanese literacy in a month or two. So show them what you've got and ask them how it stacks up to what they used and pick their brains for suggestions!
There is one Japanese learning app that does rather well called Human Japanese. At least it has sold 5000-10000 copies with a current price at $9. It's not spectacular, but for me reaching similar figures would be a success.
Single page:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation...
To me those 7 points in Teller's article are very much related to EMOTIONAL DESIGN which is getting very popular among web designer. It is a very interest reading. Thanks for posting it.
Ok. If I were you, I would keep in mind "deep focus on core features of the app, then and only then, let's add social/gamification layers."
They're not some kind of overnight start-up, they've been around since long before Dropbox.
One of the major points raised is that pricing is largely elastic; i.e. raising or lowering your prices doesn't affect revenue. This may mean in some circumstances the correct price is the one that is so high that it leads to just one customer.

If it is the case that the pricing for this product is highly / almost completely elastic then a high price makes perfect sense. Just look at Apple's pricing strategies.

[Edit] fix grammar
Put this as a template on Gumroad and I'm sure lots of people (including me) would buy it.
If people do this, how do you propose the R&D to produce the music etc is funded in the first place?

By people buying and going to shows. The meme that file sharers don't pay is false¹.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira...

They just pay for different reasons (helping the artist, financing new works, etc), not as a moral imperative for getting the content.

The argument that more file sharing leads to less works is also far from proven:

Data on the supply of new works are consistent with our argument
that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. The
publication of new books rose by 66% over the 2002-2007 period.
Since 2000, the annual release of new music albums has more than
doubled, and worldwide feature film production is up by more than
30% since 2003. At the same time, empirical research in file sharing
documents that consumer welfare increased substantially due to the
new technology.

(...)

The decline in music sales -- they fell by 15% from 1997 to 2007 -- is
the focus of much discussion. However, adding in concerts alone shows
the industry has grown by 5% over this period.

There are also the consecutive MPAA record profits: http://www.zeropaid.com/news/92692/piracy-who-mpaa-celebrate...

¹ There are certainly those who don't, but then you have to discount all of those who wouldn't have anyway - "going without" may make one feel good, but does absolutely nothing to benefit the artist.
The point is, whatever we think about the litterers, the note is not going to change it. Yes, you can go draconian and put cameras in toilets. Or you can adapt to those people at little cost (in this case, of course — if they drop cigarette butts on the street the situation is very different). Instead, both sides here engage in passive-agressive behavior. The litterers litter, instead of asking the management to move the trash can. The management puts up notices, instead of moving the trash can (it's pretty easy to guess why there's litter). Both sides are trying to prove a point instead of getting things done.

Besides, there really should be a trash can near the door.
> It withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005, and gave full control over to the Palestinian Authority.

That's not true. Israel continues to control what can be imported to of exported from Gaza.
He didn't go over the common example of paging by including

nav { prev: '...', next: '....'}

in the response. But, the thing that always concerns me about this is that it requires the client to maintain state. If you consume such a web service in a web app, and the user hits "next", you'll have to have stored the next url somewhere.
Didn't Pass Interview Coding Challenge -- Okay to Ask Why?
I recently went through the interview process at a small company. As part of their hiring process, after I spoke to their in-house recruiter, I was sent a coding challenge that I felt I completed successfully, but was swiftly sent the "thanks but no thanks" e-mail. I've asked a couple people to review my work, and they couldn't find anything directly wrong with it that would result in an immediate no-hire.

Is it appropriate to reply to the rejection e-mail, asking for some sort of justification as to what I did wrong?
For more resources on this topic, I have been leafing through O'Reilly's Hypermedia APIs book, it's been interesting.
It is an interesting example, but I will bet that putting the trash can by the door didn't work either. I've worked in a place with a design that has the trash cans by the door and there is still paper on the ground. So, the next step would be to put a camera in the bathroom and review the tape to find all the people who didn't use the cans. Simple, quick, and only takes a couple of minutes after the cleaning staff says there is still towels on the ground.

At some level, the people throwing stuff on the ground know that someone has to clean it up. They probably justify it, when they think about it at all, with some happy thought of keeping those people employed. After all, they are probably sure that is all the maintenance worker does (never mind all the things they need to do everyday).

Pirating content and throwing towels on the floor both come down to placing a lack of value on the work of others and not caring about them.
Why? Is it too much hassle to take two minutes to install another program if they go under?
I thought this op-ed was important because I agree with the author that companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook (etc.) get the bulk of the media's attention when none of what they do could have been done without the work that came out of Bell Labs. Real innovation is not done at Google or Facebook or Apple for that matter. Those companies are too tied to meeting quarterly results to invest in real innovation.

I think the other important implication is that the US doesn't have an entity like Bell Labs innovating today. And so we rest on the work that was done back then (cramming more transistors onto a smaller chip, etc.) vs. new innovation that would provide the platform for decades of future growth.
Yes, I've thought a lot of what to include in the free version and I'm still wondering if it should be changed. As you say, a lot of people quite early, so maybe the free version includes too much. How much do you think should be included?

I've also thought about adding ads to monetize it and having paid ad-free version.
Nice to see the "official" Node.js response to this change...

> "Rails to use PATCH instead of PUT" Http nerds annoy me

> "it's actually doing is un-breaking HTTP caching
> and proxying semantics" ... roll eyes

- ryah

https://twitter.com/ryah/status/173683063371464704

https://twitter.com/ryah/status/173683909723291648
Oh god, I love you so much right now. Does it work as well as dropbox? I'm installing it now.
To push the analogy to the limit - no, putting the trash can by the door doesn't stop 100% of the people, but for the 95% of the people who just don't want to touch the door with their hands, it does.

Likewise, making content easy to purchase won't stop 100% of the pirates who can afford to pay for their shows, but for the 95% of us who can, and just want to watch Game of Thrones, and are more than happy to buy it from iTunes, it will capture our revenue.
Automating testing with node.js, mocha and WebStorm
Well, the thread did not shift to "webservers", it shifted on the topic "well, Sudoku solvers are nice, but were are the real world Alonzo-Church style programs, and why are we functional types living off of C and the like for most of real world use?
Sure. I was responding to the tradeoff question. It just doesn't seem very likely that some animal survived because it wasn't making Vitamin C (the other case is some animal surviving even though it didn't properly make it).
Not only that, but urine is -- assuming you don't have a UTI -- sterile and even a mild disinfectant. The purpose of washing hands isn't to remove any urine; rather, it's to remove any fecal bacteria along with other pathogens which may have been picked up outside of the washroom.

If for some reason you can't wash your hands, you'd probably be better off deliberately peeing on them.
And what of Lisp, of which most dialects have mutable state? If a Lisp compiler would convert to genuine λ-calculus it would be as large a step as it would for C.
This was posted 7 months ago on HN (with 510 points!): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2724488

Very lengthy discussion at that time.
Reaching The Next Level
I think that premise is flawed in today's environment. It assumes that minors get a lot of their information about sex from MPAA rated movies. That might have been true in the 1990's, but ever since file sharing and the web took off, porn has been ubiquitous. Not to mention the last few years with all the porn-centric youtube clones.
You seem to have misunderstood my comment which is probably my fault due to unclear wording. Evolutionist was indeed a bad choice of word but in my defence over here in Europe the word "evolution" is really not that emotionally charged. I should have written "evolution researcher" or something similar.

Welfare society is a common expression to describe the model of post-1960 Western and North European societies. America is rather different but my understanding is that in many states there have are at least some measures in place to help people in need.

About "mass healthcare": here in Europe we have universal healthcare. That's not the case in America, however, regardless of its problems, healthcare is accessible to large portions of the American society, as opposed to other countries or historical times where only a very small percentage of the society has or had access to any form of healthcare. I don't think that this expression is a very bad way to describe that.

It's really nobody's business but to put things in context, I do believe that "welfare society", "universal healthcare" are very good things, and I would describe myself as a "non-believer" and a "European conservative".

I agree that with your opinion that these phenomena "re-order the traits that are being selected for" but I stand by my assertion that being able to compose Vitamin C is not one of those traits. In general, my understanding is that many genetic features in the past that put individuals at disadvantage are considerably less relevant today. Even in extreme cases where these traits make reproduction impossible these effects mean that individuals affected by them will be able to stay around and increase the survival chances of others in the family. Once again, I would like to mention that this is only my understanding and I am not qualified enough in these areas to make authoritative statements. However, I would consider myself to be as well-informed about these subjects as anyone in the general population cat get, having read numerous books on the subject aimed at the general population authored by scientists who are considered to be experts in the area. One of them is a well-known advocate of atheism these days which I personally think is a shame, I much preferred when he was "only" a very good writer of books about evolution.

In addition, I appreciate your constructive intentions but this kind of patronising tone is really not necessary.
Speaking as a programmer, I'd love to provide feedback as to why potential employees weren't thought to be a good fit.

Speaking as an employer, responding to such a request opens one up to all sorts of legal challenges.

Net result: on the advice of our legal consultants we never provide feedback.

I personally think this is a tragedy, but it's a direct result of the litigious nature of today's society, and the aggressive nature of some people.

But consider this. If it's a small company and they responded so swiftly to code that you (and others) thought was fine, would you be happy working there anyway?

Of course, if you don't ask, you don't get. Why not phrase it carefully to show that you accept that you haven't got the job, but you are keen to learn from the experience, and would welcome any comments about your code, understanding that this cannot form the basis of any kind of action against them.
> evolution cares not at all for separation of concerns

That is not really quite true. Look at human anatomy: it is structured into various discrete organs. That is separation of concerns.

Evolution indeed appears to create, adjust, and maintain systems of abstraction, somehow . . . and when you think about it, it seems central to what evolution is doing.

You can start with the thought that there must be some coherent, discrete, mapping from genome to body -- otherwise evolution, by selection, could not work. It is not simple or clear, but there must be significant logical structure.

Chaitin postulates hierarchy as a basic form (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/jack.html): it is a way to restrict the effects of mutation, and is indeed evident in the body. Chaitin also explains the genome/body separation (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/ev.html): it is a way of amplifying mutation -- small changes in the genome make large effects in the body (otherwise, large changes in the body would require comensurately large mutation) -- thereby making evolution more powerful.

It seems there must be some significant relationship to software yet to be unravelled.

http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20090831T2006.html
Hm... so am I! shameless plug: http://japanalicious.com

Although it's still a major work in progress.
The SRS algorithm is based on SM-2, but I'll probably tweak it to handle the "missed a day" problem as you say.

The main reason is the handwriting feature, yes. Maybe it could be implemented on top of Anki, but it seems more work than to write the SRS part myself. The recognition unfortunately doesn't work flawlessly, but the native Japanese who have tried it said it works well.

I haven't done any study on if it's more reliable compared to self-reporting, though it would be very interesting to do so. From my experience, with self reporting there are some subtle mistakes you can make that you won't notice yourself so you can't correct them. For example, when writing 田 it's easy to write the middle two strokes in the wrong order. But when self reporting it's hard to notice this since when written it looks the same.

I'll take a look at the forums you suggested. Thanks!
The definition of curtilage applies in this scenario.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtilage
If I install the camera, I will catch 99.9% and know who is so unconcerned with our maintenance workers. In a pragmatic world that is an acceptable solution. It would probably be a good idea to find out who those people are so you know not to trust them with doing anything that is not convenient.
Stable | Bizcovering
The more I think about it, the more I think I would skip the free version and do $0.99 for the Hiragana and Katakana and then have the Kanji available in a price point similar to what you're doing now.

An example of this is http://www.amazon.com/Kanji-Pict-Graphix-Japanese-Mnemonics/... , which also offers the pocket size http://www.amazon.com/Kana-Pict-Graphix-Mnemonics-Japanese/d... . I've owned Kanji Pict-o-Graphix for almost a decade, but I also bought the cheaper, pocket size Kana Pict-o-Graphix for my brother-in-law (who hadn't studied Japanese before) before our trip to Japan.
Well if you have OnStar or a Tesla, remote tracking is possible.

For Tesla, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3619088
Speaking to the headline, it's because we got "free" services from someone like Google for long enough to realize the fallacies of free-- no support, lack of privacy protection, less input into the design & development process --and then purchase a service that gives us more control.

Speaking to the article itself, water is only "free" (the consumer of the water didn't fork over cash on the spot) if you use a public restroom or a water fountain. You pay for the water coming out of your tap at home. Maybe you actually get a water bill, maybe it's bundled with your other utilities, or perhaps it's included in your rent, but you are directly paying for the water. (Sure, you're paying for the cleaning of the water - dubious distinction.)

Speaking to the 'silliness' of bottled water, I agree that it's absurd to have water bottled in Italy and shipped around the planet to sell it in the US just so that someone can purchase "sparkling Italian water." But in general, bottled water has its purposes: we stop at the convenience store, decide hydration is required, decide sugar won't do, want water to carry along- it needs to taste good or we're not going to drink it.

Is all bottled water the same? Absolutely not. Coca-cola is absolutely obsessed with consistency with its products. HFCS Coke tastes the same everywhere. Sugar Coke tastes the same everywhere. Dasani bottled water (yep, made by Coca-cola) tastes the same out of every bottle. I can't get that kind of consistency from the tap. The public water supply cares about water quality as far as it doesn't make someone sick and they couldn't care less about taste. Yes, I can taste the difference. I can also taste the difference between Dasani, Aquafina and Deer Park bottled waters (Deer Park tastes like dirt - I'm guessing 'minerals' are to blame for this. Aquafina? Can't remember exactly because I avoid it and it's been so long.)

When making flavored drinks at home (coffee, tea, iced tea) the additional flavors do an acceptable job of masking the flavor of the tap water. Acceptable enough that I'm not buying filtered bottled water to make them. I'm not a complete taste snob, but I do expect consistency in the products I've purchased for a high markup from a corporation that claims to care about it.
The Darknet Lobby of Anonymous
It's amazing people still want to work at Google. You don't have to be an employee at a certain place to do amazing things or good work. And wouldn't you rather work in an inclusive, supportive environment? Yeah, they pay a lot and have slippy slides and colorful bikes. However, If you do good work the money will come to you and the google types will stay at google.
My tip of the day:
work hard in solitude - stop reading Hacker News :)
I'm not sure whether you're just arguing or genuinely of this opinion.

Whichever the case, I hope you can accept that a great number of people, when in the described situation, will not think the message “pro-active and respectful”. Is their dickish response justified? No, but it is what it is.
Where did the "Palestinian arabs" come from? Arabia. What is their language? Arabic. What were they doing outside Arabia? Like the muslim conquest of north Africa, Spain, Persia, India, etc., the area of Palestine was taken by violent conquest. If Arabs had a right to be in Palestine by virtue of conquest, then Britain had the right (again by virtue of conquest) to do what it liked with the land. Why is it there is one standard for Arabs and a different standard for non-Arabs?

You try to use the narrative of colonialism, imperialism and racism, to obscure the fact that the islamic empire used weaponry and war to take control of almost every part of the world that is islamic (certainly all areas of africa, the middle east, europe and the indian subcontinent). And then it imposed its own forms of racism and colonialism on the subjugated people. Let's not even talk about the jews. Here's two books documenting the history of islamic slave-trading in Africa:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Legacy-Arab-Islam-Africa-Inter-relig...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Islams-Black-Slaves-History-Diaspora...

It seems it was every bit as bad as the racism and colonialism of the atlantic slave-trade. Even the UN expert panel on slavery in 1951 said that 1:20 people in Arabia was a slave. That was 1951. Three years after the establishment of the state of Israel.

Let's have some consistency here. At least the jews did not go into Palestine with weaponry and enslave the Arabs living there.
Make sure you consider the observable differences in app store behaviour in your definition of "it's working", also check out services like macincloud if you're not sure about buying Apple hardware yet.

App looks nice :)
Having been at at some of the business shows where the BBC look for contestants - we even had the stand next to them one year.

They pick the contestants in terms whos the most loopy /and or will make the best TV.

And watching the live versions of Dragons Den they also did at some of these shows its brutally obvious that the Dragons are all property developers plus an accountant who got lucky and when they get a real high tech biotechstart-up pitching them the blank looks on their faces was priceless.
Thanks a lot Paul.

I have learned a lot from your work on Boiler Plate, HTML5 and Modernizr. Let me dig deep into zooming and come up with its results.
Back in bio class, my professor said that in lab tests, replacing the non-protein-coding dna with something man-made hasn't been shown to have any effect. (Removing it does have an effect).
Actually, I started studying Japanese some 10 years ago or so (time sure flies...), and I don't think Skritter was around then. And actually, I didn't find them when I was looking around lately. My app tries to be as close as possible to real handwriting on paper, so you get nothing more than a blank space to write. For me, it needs to be touchscreen based instead of mouse, but maybe you could get a similar feel with Skritter on a tablet?
If you want to show any content to the user, you'll always need to hold it in memory somewhere; that's inevitable. Storing an URL for an action is just part of the rest.

Personally, I'd just use a closure and bind it immediately to the event handler of the UI element.
It's cool, but it's another thing one has to do beyond cmd-C. Why not just have a proper shared clipboard plus keyboard/mouse sharing in a multi-computer, multi-monitor setup?
and unfortunately, outdated
Indeed - but that is the nature of the Internet. There should always be a counterpoint to a good view.
True. And since one of your friends being Muslim is correlated with another of your friends being Muslim, this makes the distribution of number-of-friends-being-GPS-tracked even further away from Poisson.