skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I kind of agree with you. Spaced repetition is raping your brain. School makes you want to do that for stupid stuff. Life sometimes brings along stuff, your brain is more susceptible for.

I use fluxcards that I wrote myself and have some 2600 facts that I'm learning.

The Spanish words work smoothly, cause I actually want to really not use them wrong in my daily life in Chile.

The friends and family birthdays work so so. Yeah, I admit, I don't care so much. I learn them as a favor to my friends that enjoy when I remember their birthday but I find birthdays kind of unimportant.

Then there is Farsi. I was in Iran and for my Iranian friends I learn some 35 words of Farsi. That is the worse. It makes no sense and my brain just won't accept these weird words to stick. Every time I want to use these words in a chat with my Iranian friends, I don't dare cause I just would mix things up and I don't get these words above the one month level in 2 years. If I would want to give up, I would have to delete these cards and acknowledge that I will not learn this stuff. At least not now, but I do it for them, so why not repeat one of these cards per day for them? Costs 3s and eventually I get my * brain to not forget these "important facts".

Critical thinking would only help me to admit that I will not learn this or that now. If I took the conscious decision to learn stuff anyway I know nothing better than spaced repetition.
The Great Venture Capital Rotation
I read it. You should too. It is not as long as the page count makes it seem.

What industry are you referring to? Healthcare? Or insurance?
Doesn't surprise me, either the problems or which restaurants are the worst. Immigrant entrepreneurs from countries where hygiene standards are far below what we are accustomed to in the west just don't "see" these things, or if they do, don't consider them to be problems.
Mini-Bikes and startups
Your browser is doing the GETting. Bring up the network tab in your browser's dev console and zoom in. I was a little worried about getting blocked myself just from playing around on that page.
Cool. Thanks so much.
1.2 billion Facebook users's profile photos on a single page
Agreed 100%. We have a similar group in Indianapolis (http://indystartuplab.org) that meets every Monday night for dinner, talking and hacking with like-minded developers or other tech-related folks.

The accountability is great - the group will not let you get away with blowing off your projects. If you tell everyone about a grand plan one week, someone will make sure you followed through the next week (or you can expect a playful ribbing). We have people working on startups, open source, blogging/writing, prepping conference talk, people writing games, learning iOS, trying to figure out how to start a freelance business, you name it.

People come and go, but even going for just a month will be more valuable than going to a year's worth of the typical Meetup.com groups. It only takes 2-3 people to start one of these and the benefits are immense.

Thanks so much for codifying this Steve!
@idProQuo - Aaron (nullz) is awesome and I'll definitely help you both get this running. I'd love to get some feedback on how to make it more usable. Maybe we could fork http://cljsfiddle.net/ and make chocfiddle?
"16 bits should be enough for anybody." --Anonymous

The funny thing is that 16 bits wasn't enough.

We thought it would be, back then. Just use 16 bits for each character and we can return to the joy and simplicity of a fixed width encoding.

That didn't work out. UCS-2 was a fixed width 16-bit encoding, but it it had to be extended into the variable width UTF-16 to get more code points. You get the bloat of 16-bit data, incompatibility with ASCII, and variable width characters too.

You have to go all the way to UTF-32 to get back to a fixed width encoding.

So UTF-8 really was a smart move. Bite the bullet on the variable width, but make it so you can always find the beginning of the next character even if you start in the middle of one, and make it backward compatible with ASCII too. Genius.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32
OK lets examine the commonly accepted meaning of Agile Development and see where TDD fits in.

TDD is at odds with half of the Agile Manifesto, namely:

* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

* Responding to change over following a plan

You should first try stuff out and discuss it rather than working out how to machine test it before its been tried by a human. Having tests first is clearly having a plan first.

TDD also rubs up against two principals of the Agile Manifesto, namely:

* Welcome changing requirements, even late in development

* Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

It's hard-enough to welcome changing requirements when you have to rewrite software without having to rewrite all the tests too. Why write tests for code you don't keep?

Changing and adapting is harder when you are encumbered by tests. Tests should be written once you've agreed that what you have now is what you are going to keep.

TDD adherents I have worked with in the past also rub up against this one:

* Working software is the principal measure of progress

Tests are not 'working software', they are a protective covering you put over working software to make sure it doesn't get ruined as people work around it.

At its heart Agile is about being adaptive: evolutionary changing plans, iteration, rapid and flexible response to change.

TDD brings overhead: tests that needn't ever have been written; tests that needn't ever have been re-written. They hamper iteration and flexible response as they make it more costly to change plans.
I was quite surprised by the [edit: relatively] prodigious amount of penises.
Get Motivated for Halloween
Can you comment on how are you translating the sentences at esuteru to add to your deck? Ie, if you can adequately translate those sentences already, seems like you don't even need to study them in the first place?

I've been using a standalone SRS app on my iPhone (StickyStudy) and about a year ago learned all N4/N5 vocab (ie, not just the kanji). But I'm having trouble making the jump to full-on sentences/text like that since there are too many unknown kanji or grammatical structures. StickyStudy does have a bunch of sample sentences for any one kanji or vocab word, which is great, but the learning focuses on the kanji or vocab words themselves, not sentences. So the ability to use the kanji in context of sentences is much harder.

I'd love to get to the point of being able to read webpages like that.
I think the story got it wrong - that it's the "thinking" that is harder to automate (as opposed to "doing"). Once we have AI capable of managing a fast food restaurant, the workers will probably be long gone anyway (replaced by robots).
The Pirahã people – Who break Chomsky's Theory apart
Free apps that target massive volume are unquestionably the heavy hitters, but a point I was making was that there can be a value in targeting a niche market with a paid app.

A moderately profitable app can give an independent developer the runway they need to bootstrap and follow up with more mainstream ideas.
I wonder how computers would process text if societies with more complex alphabets had been at the foundation of the industry instead of English-speaking societies. What if Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple were all Japanese companies and grew in a global market where English were not dominant? A big if, sure. Certainly, there must be glimpses at this in history of computing.
Dude made searching my own instapaper articles on my own device a "subscription service", I switched to Pocket just for that. Unforgivable existing-customer f*king.
I agree with everything you say here.

My only question is: is the process you describe for new problem areas actually TDD?

EDIT: I've just been introduced to the concept of 'Spikes' which sound very much like this.
Why? The concept of a "character" actually becomes a lot less meaningful as you add support for all of the world's writing systems (and even all of the features of even the Latin alphabet, such as diacritics and ligatures). Between combining characters, ligatures, case mapping rules that map one character to many, and so on, you realize that actually, there are very few cases where you want to address a "character" as a single independent entity. In fact, for almost everything you do, just acting on a string of bytes is more useful than trying to act on characters individually.
Why? When is this a useful thing?
Legendary poker player charged with defrauding casino
Show HN: Ydeliver, a build and release framework for .NET
A Beautifully Animated Open Letter to J.J. Abrams About Star Wars
Africa’s Coming Drone Wars
The President is still the man in charge. He can stop these things.

If he wanted to.
Microsoft Wants Google to Censor Its Wikipedia Page
First step to reduce plant need for nitrogen fertilizer uncovered
That's bloody awesome.
I thought a function that reads a line from a file would read the entire line and block until doing so. How would turning off line buffering change that? Do you expect 'for line in file' to yield as many bytes as is available if a full line can't be read yet?
Or maybe A Brave New World.

Neil Postman compares them:
http://www.prosebeforehos.com/image-of-the-day/08/24/huxley-...
Spirals of Light May Lead to Better Electronics | Caltech
JavaScript Doing "The JavaScript Rap" (TTS)
that the tablet market doesn’t today* look anything like the smartphone market ever did.

That was correct back then. Also the smartphone market is defined by several competing platforms, form-factors, tech and capabilities.

The tablet market is defined by the iPad, and the android trying to be the iPad.
So iOS 7 plays no part in power consumption? only the CPU? how about apps?

This is AnandTech's iPhone 5s battery review:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/9

The 5s outperforms iPhone 5 in four out of five tests. Regression was only seen in one scenario. The thing is, I don't remember coming across any smartphone review, iPhone or otherwise, that single out the CPU as the source of power consumption change. It's always a combination of different factors.

Now it's totally possible that the new CPU is a power pig as you claimed. Unless you can provide proofs that validate it, though, I have to agree with others that you're making it up.
Well, to be fair, those who succeed in killing themselves don't really care anymore :-).

If someone commits suicide because he doesn't want to go to prison for a long time, is that a bad decision? Seems pretty good to me...
The video mentioned that Japan developed five different encodings that couldn't talk to each other. So in a sense, regardless of who started it, we would have ended up at something similar to UTF-8.
Yup. Alexander's developing the model that this empire, and future empires, will employ to maintain hegemony.
Interesting, but doesn't this pretty much assume that the MITM isn't occurring in the last hops of the path to the server?

If all paths (including those through Tor) lead through a piece of compromised infrastructure (a rogue access-point like a pineapple, or subverted router) both will report that the site uses the same certificate despite the MITM.
I believe it was posted here because it was written by Ev Williams. Your barrier for genius must be pretty high if founding Twitter doesn't get you there.
Top Smartphones 2013
I like to sometimes stay up really late to work on something that's for fun. Something about being the only one awake, sipping coffee in the glow of my laptop screen.
I like this idea a lot!

A less powerful solution implemented completely locally: A "known_hosts" file for SSL certificates for repeat visits. As long as you've visited a site once before, any subsequent visits will be safe.

To deal with certificate upgrades, certificate Y could present a signed verification that it obsoletes a past certificate X. Then, when a client that trusts certificate X receives certificate Y, it can update its "known_hosts" file accordingly. This change would require more than just local changes, but remote cooperation.
You're right, what I am getting out of the sentences is most often the vocab.

Earlier on I could not understand most sentences. At that time I would select the sentences I thought I knew. My understanding has expanded over time I think with great credit to anime and drama. I'm at ~330 series of anime/drama completed. Even before I started studying I had maybe 100 series completed.

Still a big thing for me is to card a sentence even if I do not understand it. The critical attribute I am looking for is "Is this a sentence I would like to learn?". Once it is in the deck I should understand it at some point in time. It may take a year but at least by then I will be able to pronounce every word in said sentence.

Even still there are some sentences I do not understand but those are often found in subjects I haven’t explored. Computer interfaces are 100% ok. Tech news likewise.

Start small and just never stop. Some of my first sentences were from children’s comics. I even have a few from pokemon games.
This article is kind of daft. "Decentralised" doesn't necessarily mean strictly peer to peer, it can mean "write native code, release it under an open license, design protocols to federate".

This way you're not butting up against NAT busting (notably though NAT busting as I understand is a pretty well sorted science at this point, e.g. STUN and friends), but if you don't like your service provider you can still move (or run your own server) and continue to inter-operate.

XMPP (http://xmpp.org/) is a great example.
Okay, since you want comments here, here I'll put mine.

The reason you were so successful in coming up with a new political philosophy is that your "I'm a Martian" trick got you think thoughts that no respectable person would be caught dead thinking.

There aren't the same taboos in computer system design, so while you can refer to the systems people use every day as gigabytes of, what was it, of ass fucking more ass, there's nothing you say that I haven't already heard.

I'm still waiting for the Python of functional programming. Paul Graham announced Arc when I was in middle school. Maybe it will be released as the scripting system in Half-Life 3.

Being an alien from Alpha Centauri, and observing the growing collection of programming languages, what do you think people keep designing new ones for? Why do some Urplatians argue for Scheme and other Urplatians for Python?

Rather than asking the question of 'what is a programming language', and trying to design the axiomatically simplest possible thing, try asking the question of 'how do people use programming languages'.

Is your system a bit of syntax regularization away from the pseudocode people scribble on paper to explain algorithms to each other? No, that's Python.

Is your system something that compiles down to use the bare metal to its fullest potential while maintaining as much creature comforts as possible? No, that's C++.

Is your system something with an ancient history of having a solid ABI, that in fact every other language's ABI is described with? No, that's C.

Is your system a heap of cruft upon kludges with the original intention of providing programming access to a hypertext document? That's Javascript.

I wouldn't want to write a regex as anything but a regex.

In conclusion, you're asking a question that's been asked before and getting an answer that's been gotten before. But, maybe it is finally time for functional programming to come back. Maybe you're a popular enough guy to get people to use your system.
The app store wasn't available when the IPhone first launched. Originally they developed Safari to be a first class experience for webapps and intended the phone to run those. People kept clamoring to be able to develop for the phone and then the app store was announced.
I fail to see the connection between ripping off work and societal privilege as a young, white male.

It's plausible, I admit. But much more likely, to me, is just artistic exploitation 101 (if it turns out he did borrow a lot from her story). She has a specific problem with Eggers getting away with it. She would too if her article was published in the NY Times. She seems to be playing identity politics in a situation that doesn't warrant it: Perhaps she was unlucky in her career? Perhaps Eggers has better agents? Perhaps Eggers is a better writer, or has more experience? Perhaps Eggers' brother works at the NY Times? I would posit that, in this case, it's unlikely that Eggers had his piece published and got away with ripping off her article because he is a white male.

I recognize that sexism and racism definitely exist in Silicon Valley, but the problem she's trying to point out is broader — it's the overzealous linguistic bullshit promoted throughout culture (and that includes other industries, mind you). It's the 'engineering perspective' applied to all situations without discretion. Solve every problem in all domains like its a physics problem. Silicon Valley has a penchant for hyperbole and thus is always "killing," "disrupting," and "breaking" things.

In a linked essay, she declares it to be myopic to promote Facebook's mantra of "move fast and break things" because it leads to unjustly enforced criminal activities like trespassing — and might be "rapey" ("rapey" is her language). Facebook's mantra started in the context of writing internet software. Minorities and women have little disadvantage in that specific context. The problem rose when the life advice language got so widespread (applied to every possible situation in Medium blog posts) as to become meaningless. Now she's pissed off because minorities and women can't get away with breaking things and asking for forgiveness in all areas of life, but young, white men can...and that's exemplified through the popular philosophy of Silicon Valley. First, that again is so broad as to be meaningless (e.g. I can think of plenty of examples where being a young woman let's you get away with things others' can't). Second, "act first and then ask for forgiveness" and related Ferrissisms are all tropes carried over from other industries and books (ever heard of 'sales'?). Third, it targets Silicon Valley as the epicenter of discrimination, which kind of makes it look like she's never worked or lived in any other industry or area of the world.
You can look at Sharp or Toshiba building word processors, which were dedicated electronic appliances, but slowly moving to generic computers as they became cheap and good enough to manage complex input methods and non english character display (i.e. enough pixels per screen to have recognizable characters).

It's funny to think that the concept of a fully functional typewriter would be foreign to Japan until dedicated computers could be built.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't really get fixed width in anyway do you? Because unicode itself is not fixed width. There are situations where one character on the screen is represented by two consecutive unicode code points.
Wikipedia is not a government organization.
Wikipedia was always up, period. In addition, there are mirrors of the data all over the place.
This is no surprise; if phone metadata of US citizens is legal to harvest, then social network metadata collection, which is essentially the same, is also legal to harvest. It looks like this collection is limited only to metadata, if this can be believed:

"The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and e-mails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court."

So, as long as that 1979 Supreme Court ruling is not modified, this collection is legal. I'm a bit surprised it's the NSA and not the FBI, but if you're going to track the intersection of foreigners or U.S. citizens, one agency has to be picked over the other, and they picked the NSA.
Thanks.

About the license - you are correct. I was under the impression this font was already distributed via Google Fonts, but I was wrong.

It's a very nice font, and just costs $67.00. But it could also be swapped for a font with a less restrictive license.
Of course Apple tries to maximize the profit. I fail to find any business that doesn't try to do the same. It's called for-profit after all.

The question is, why doesn't Apple try to earn even more money by keeping the same A6 processor as in iPhone 5? Why bother to upgrade to A7 at all? Also, including an extra GB of RAM would cost Apple much less than upgrading to a whole new processor, don't you think?
Seconded. (Thirded? Fourthed?)

Anyways, the man has a way with words.
> so persistently pushed by MS

People still flame how MS uses 16-bit characters, which IMO is a bit of an unfair criticism. (Full disclosure: I used to work for them. But I was never a koolaid drinker.) I don't think they have any religious aversion to UTF-8, it's just history. By adopting Unicode as early as they did, they made this decision before UTF-8 existed and they stuck with it.

Probably the bigger crime is not switching to UTF-8 as the default "ANSI"/"multi-byte" codepage (to use the Windows terms). This means C programmers who are not Windows experts often end up writing non-Unicode-safe software because they expect every string to be char*.

(Also as has been mentioned UTF-16 is not fixed. And even in UTF-32 there are instances where a single glyph takes multiple code points - the decomposed accent marks are the one example I know, possibly there are others?)
There isn't a grand evil master. There are large numbers of misguided individuals inadvertently assisting the development of certain unfortunate emergent phenomena.
As a college instructor, this excites and worries me. Obviously, major courses being offered online can reduce the number of students coming through our door. Conversely, most of the core requirement courses have become so 'cookie cutter' that it feels more like departments just need a body to teach them.

While this can free up the course load of an instructor more to their interests, this also reduces the dept's budget (since they don't need more people to help teach Computers 101, a core requirement for every field). Personally, the Udacity/Georgia or EdX/MIT partnership are the best solutions to this: finding a way to make MOOC's work for traditional colleges.

Heck, restructure it close to certification tests. You pay X to have access to the study materials AND set a testing date. On that day, you test; pass or fail (with the option of a retake for an additional fee). Now, it is on the student's schedule, but the traditional school's still can turn a profit by removing course size and time limitations.
I don't see that they are determining "guilt" at all. What leads you to believe that? Are people being convicted here without a trial? Metadata collection is only a tool; it is not a standard of proof.
I think he's saying that their culture is very different from the American/Western European culture in some ways, which has nothing to do with race. That perhaps the elements of their culture that make them relatively prone to suicide are related to the ones that make them less interested in entrepreneurship.
Celebrating the release of version 1.5 meSpeak.js.
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.
MVP is a better idea than MVC. I'm not suggesting moving towards mixing code.