skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In English, you can change the relative lengths of syllables in a word and it's still the same word. In Greek this isn't the case: the relative lengths of the vowels is part of what defines the word.

Maybe you don't believe me, since syllable lengths are so fungible in English. But it really does sound wrong in classical Greek. A good way to get a feel for this is to imagine saying English words while putting the emPHAsis on the wrong syllaBLE. Sometimes it's just a bit weird, sometimes it's totally wrong, and sometimes it actually turns into a different word. You wouldn't write a poem and try to fit the meter by asking readers to change which syllable in a word is emphasized. (Or at least, you would do so only rarely and for a specific reason.)

Now, in Greek, instead of emphasis, the relative length of vowels in syllables is prescribed and certain words are distinguished on this basis. In fact, whereas meter in English poetry is based on emphasized syllables, meter in classical Greek poetry is based on syllable length. So there is reason to think it wouldn't change just to fit a song melody. This is also why, though you can read Homer in English that is metrical, you can't get a feel for heroic verse without hearing it in the Greek.

Let me give an indirect example that shows why this kind of reasoning doesn't work across languages. In English, we often indicate sarcasm, emphasis, or a question by intonation. A heavy, slow word might be more important, or a word that is pronounced with the tone rising might indicate a question or uncertainty. This is because "a word" in English is the same word regardless of the tone with which it is said. But in Chinese, the "same" sound with different tones actually is a different word. So in Chinese, you can't indicate a question with tone, because that would actually make a different word. Instead, you have to move words around, so that to indicate a word is the highlight of a sentence you move it to the beginning, or to indicate which word you aren't certain about you move it to the end.

Human language is fascinating!
Keep your downloads folder clean, automatically.
Exactly. The problem with this sample is the same as In Search of Excellence - you can see what the good companies do, but what makes them unique? You can correct for it somewhat by adding comparison companies that failed, but the real thing to look for is very similar companies that had divergent choices at the same point in time, with everything being equal up until then. This is why VC and management is an art, not a science. :-)
This is still awesome.
Surface Wireless Adapter for Typing Covers
The 20% thing is interesting, but Microsoft themselves later empirically established through application usage metrics that there is an ordering of features.

That is, some features (eg, italics) are used more than others (eg, macros). Such an ordering can be used to established, with considerable confidence, the "20% that 80% of customers use".

Which is how we got the Ribbon. It was intended to place the most commonly used features front and centre.
Ditto, pretty consistently 65wpm but in normal typing I get around 110.
don't be pedantic.
How is depending on proprietary software any different than consuming an API such as Stripe which could disappear tomorrow too?
Pretty cool idea, but given that the target audience are people living in China, why is the site in English instead of Chinese? Is the target Americans or other English speaking people living in China?
Well he was carrying documents meant for a journalist, that where to be published by a legit newspapers. Sounds like being a part in a journalistic process to me.

Sure the title maybe a bit edgy, but that it what it comes down to. That is the important (and very bad) message.
It really is!

The mental part of planning a synthesis is a lot like programming. The differences are: parts (i.e. reactions) are less interchangeable, and when you actually make the stuff, you get diminishing returns, "recompile" is not as trivial a task.

Synthetic biology is a lot closer, since you can copy DNA at will, and while editing is not as simple as spinning up an instance of vi, "recompile" is a whole heck of a lot easier.
Meanwhile, while you're waiting for users to fully build out the content I can head to General Assembly or CodeSchool or CodeAcademy or Lynda or any other site.

Just sayin, don't underestimate the person who wants to learn now, not wait.
Unfortunately the electronics manufacturers (and Google apparently) are, well, not very thoughtful when it comes to phone design. It's like they don't really know what else to do, so they've settled on simple-minded memes like "bigger = better!!!"

Often this is sort of a reasonable plan in general... faster CPUs and more memory are usually helpful (if you can keep battery usage reasonable).

But when applied uncritically and universally, without much judgement or thought, in a mad rush to out-spec the other guy ("Now Double The Size of Our Competitor!!!!"), this just leads to mediocrity, where everything apparently has great specs but nobody really likes them very much...
> Which is how we got the Ribbon. It was intended to place the most commonly used features front and centre.

So how come we ended up with something that placed all the features front and centre?
Two things I recall from my undergrad years:

1. Don't sign up for any studies at McLean

2. Daytona is a database of every phone call, ever (or since there were CDRs)

Both were from reliable sources. But heck if I could convince anyone else.
Completely agree. Created an account just to say that the lab work (for orgo 1) was the single most fun, fulfilling class I took in college. It's probably why I like to cook very much.
Actually, ω and o are not the same sound with different duration. You can refer to Vox Graeca pp. 60 & 71 for specifics.
This kind of response is not new sadly. On Netflix, there is a documentary on Daniel Elisberg and his leaking of the Pentagon Papers [1] - The Most Dangerous Man in America [2]. If you watch it and you'll see some of the parallels to today with the responses between the State and Journalism.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
[2] http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/daniel_ellsberg_doc/
Comparison of Novice Software-Writing Accuracy Rates in Three Languages [pdf]
> This is why VC and management is an art, not a science. :-)

Granted, but that said, Tetlock showed that in at least one very messy problem domain (international geopolitics), embarrassingly simplistic linear models crush expert judgement in terms of predictive power.

The problem is that the world is still sufficiently unpredictable that you can't use this insight to turn a buck, since events get "better" or "worse" with about the same frequency.

I reviewed Tetlock's book here: http://chester.id.au/2012/07/29/review-expert-political-judg...

And I heartily recommend it to anyone.
I've been doing C# development for a few years now, and did 100% Solaris/Linux for the decade prior to that.

1. Never heard of them. They certainly haven't impacted anything I've done.

2. I've been ignoring Telerik for twice as long as I've been working in C#, because of their HTML/JS stuff. I'm not surprised their C# stuff is equally bad.

3. You could say the same about OSS projects on SourceForge, GitHub, or other repositories. Whenever you choose a third-party library (vendor-supplied or not) you have to consider how widely deployed it is, how big and active the community around it is, and what it's longevity will be. If you're not doing that (or doing it poorly) and getting burned by abandoned libraries, then you need to learn to judge better.

4. See #3. It's true though, Microsoft does tend to try to include everything; I suspect that comes from trying to develop general libraries/frameworks for use by Enterprise developers. Each Enterprise needs something specific, and most of them need different specific things, so a general-purpose all-inclusive framework winds up trying to have everything.

5. I think that's Enterprise thing again, and it's probably just as true for Java developers. When the vast majority of developers familiar with a technology are doing internal IT development for companies where software development is a cost center rather than an investment, the hiring pool is going to be full of mediocre developers. The best developers will be working for software companies and companies whose business advantage is based on their software, and that's true regardless of the platform they use.

6. See #5. This certainly applies to lots of Java devs too, and also most less experienced devs who started learning the trade in college rather than on their own.
Thanks for linking me to that post, good to hear about your groundwork!

I would be interested to see what your business model is for incentivizing owners who currently do no (!) tracking. They are inherently cheap and taking a chance on $300-$500 in hardware may not look as attractive as the 'free' existing options that are bundled with payment processing.

I think removing the upfront hardware cost by suggesting whatever touch device the owner has would make for much easier conversions. Sell them better hardware after trust is established. There are definitely foreign Android tablets for $100 which are fast enough for a simple browser POS.

As for pubs, there absolutely is a science, and customization is a part of it. Rotating tap lists, happy hours, specialty drinks... but the tools to simplify and apply the science are mostly atrocious and unknown (just Google "bar cost calculator"). Bars done right have some of the better margins in retail though, so I think they could be worthwhile to target. As you can probably tell, I've thought long of doing this (ever since I redesigned the cost spreadsheet when managing my first bar.)

I wish you the best in your venture! I'm subscribed to see how it turns out.
We don't hear much about it, but the NSA has had some stunning IT failures. Development (heck, they can't open their Utah site because of severe, ruin $100K of hardware each time, power glitches), something major above their collection system(s) failed hard once for more than a few days ... and since they're the No Such Agency, we only hear about some of the very worst ones, I'm sure.

Flip side is, doing this in the black budget does allow them to avoid some of the usual government contracting insanities. While that's no gaurentee of success, e.g. look at the NRO's recent expensive stumbles, from the dozen years I spent Inside the Beltway I've gotten a strong impression the intelligence community does a generally much better job than run of the mill open Federal IT.
advice: never put in a job opening you're looking for somebody YOUNG
Such as...? Enumerating would be more helpful.
I just realized that 13 was probably chosen for rot13 cause that's half the number of letters in English alphabet.

I miss "obvious" stuff like that all the time.
Review: Sony's high-end Cyber-shot QX100 wireless camera lens for iPhone
Also, if anyone doesn't want to read the whole paper, here are slides from the same presentation: http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/foswiki/pub/Events/PLATEAU/Program...
This is a bad idea - that might actually be a good idea...
It's quite difficult to write new tests that are unique enough not to be trivialized by access to old exams but of consistent difficulty semester after semester. Even if you could it might not give the result you want: if your university moves upmarket or the high school preparation in your subject improves should the average grade in your class increase to reflect these exogenous factors?

It's hard enough writing a good exam -- maximally descriminating, useful pedagogically, not unintentionally ambiguous -- without also requiring it to be mechanistically translatable to a semester grade.
well I have to admit, I assumed that the bigger screen size meant bigger form factor but I looked it up and the nexus 5 is a smidge smaller than the nexus 4 in the dimensions that matter to me (might be thinner, didn't check). Still bigger than the nexus S, though.
I just watched a video on it, very nice except 1366x768 is a show stopper for me.
The version of Excel mentioned in the article was Excel 5.0 for Windows, that came out in 1993. No one is denying that previous versions were been smaller.
This is a repost, no?
this is the best kind of april fools joke. i not only found myself believing it was real, but actually started to devil's advocate myself into thinking it was a good idea. weirder things have happened.
Who says it's a conspiracy? It's more a matter of culture. I have seen it happen: there's a trend in the class where the homework grades, on average, are high, but the exam grades are low, even though the material is mostly the same. This happens at reputable schools and at "low tier" schools.
I strongly disagree with Joel here. It's true that storage is much cheaper today, but every piece of software I use is downloaded from the internet. Not everyone has 10MBit connections. If you make software, and especially updates, unnecessarily large, you will cut off a percentage of your users.

I'm not saying you should axe features to make the app smaller. But please, if you distribute software, spend a few hours and try to make the download size as small as possible.
The lisp's main problem isn't the correct kind of brackets. It's more complicated than that.
I agree, shallow and pedantic.
Actually, the -p flag works for git commit and even for git checkout - the latter is incredibly useful if you want to revert just a little chunk!
This is music to accompany spoken poetry, so the it's not necessarily comparable to opera or pop music, where the voice is used as an instrument. In Greek lyric poetry the syllables are arranged according to fairly strict rules; having scanned (that is, marked up for meter) lots of Greek poetry, I don't doubt that this is an accurate way to get the rhythm of the piece. However, while I have no background in music theory, the claim that rhythm is the most important aspect to recovering the original sound doesn't seem right to me—I would assume that the tonality and harmonics are harder to create with certitude.

Links of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_trimeter and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochaic_tetrameter

Interesting facts about ancient Greek: in contrast to English poetry, stress is indicated by the length of the vowel, rather than how forcefully it is pronounced; and vowels are accented by rising or falling pitch rather than stress. My professors said that ancient Greek probably sounded more like Chinese (which I gather follows similar rules) than a modern western language.
I don't think so. If I find it I'm going to download it just to check for my email address.
Joel is probably my favourite tech blogger. That said, some perspective on how old this post is:

2001 - 1993 == 8

2013 - 2001 == 12
Thanks for going into that - so in (ancient) Greek, were there words which were the same as each other but for syllable length? Your mention of syllable length being the basis of meter in poetry makes sense, but this is often the case in English too, while English music allows us poetic license to tweak away from the norm.

I also think you're slightly wrong (or at least exaggerated) in saying that in English "you can't change which syllable is emphasized more than very rarely or it sounds like nonsense". If you take a piece of music and then alter this then sure, but actually the emphasis will often be slightly different to how it would be spoken. I wanted to double check on this belief, and thought about it while listening to Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" (which was already playing) and Stanford's Magnificat in G to add a different genre, in both cases the emphasis is often on different syllables to how we would speak it if we just saw the text without knowing the music.

Anyway, thanks again for the reply, I guess it falls (at least to an extent) into the "simplified for the BBC audience", which is much preferable to the alternative of "it's bullshit". :)

edit: Here's the Stanford piece (with music+lyrics if you're not familiar with the text already): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7UorDdRg60 Was just a random picking off the top of my head (added bonus that it's, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful things ever written)
His article is bloatware.

He tries to justify hisbloatware work from the past, and only uses false arguments, like dismissing linus argument about having to load a huge program not being an issue, when excel and outlook are still the only applications i use with a damn loading screen... His article uses space and provide no honest statement, hence bloatware.
The timing in most modern music is metrical rather than driven by speech. Gregorian chant (or other forms of chant) are closer to what much ancient music was like in my understanding . This is also why a lot of poetry of the time is not characterized by huge amounts of metered syllabification and rhymes and the like (though some are cited in the article). I am basing this a bit on the idea that Jewish chant that later impacted the early church a few hundred years later is somewhat reflective of musical practice of the time.
I love the Ribbon. It's fantastic for grouping like functionality together and, most importantly for me, it provided just about every single function with a sequence of keyboard shortcuts. Pilot enough spreadsheets or produce enough decks, and they become muscle memory. I'm sorely disappointed that Microsoft still hasn't brought it to the Mac. The design choice to make the Office for Mac apps look more Mac-like has been a bad one.
> Since 2008 one programming language has seen an unprecedented growth in popularity despite its weird syntax: Objective-C. Why? Because to create applications for the App Store you have to code in Objective-C. Over 800.000 apps in the App Store are a testimony of the popularity of this language.

I laughed so hard
Pivots are an attempt to internalise the market-fitting function inside the firm.

Instead of failing at a company-bankruptcy level, the idea is to fail at a business-model level.

However, company-bankruptcy is a much stronger signal, including to other companies and investors.

Either way, the overall market-fitting function still resembles a kind of optimisation by simulated annealing -- local hill-climbing with a moderate degree of randomisation.
Python is more dogmatic than Ruby.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

Choosing a minimalistic web framework like Flask or Sinatra makes sense if you're experienced enough to know what choices Django and Rails make for you and you're comfortable making those decisions on your own. Otherwise, pick Django or Rails and start building things.
So basically, the plan is to turn C# into F# with curly braces.
Also note, this article was published in 2001. If disk storage was cheap then, it's an order of magnitude (or more) cheaper now.
There is an interesting comment [1] from Ellsberg on Snowden as well:

[1]http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427...
Samsung pays Apple 1 billion in nickles.
Love django-annoying too. It's always got a line in requirements.txt for my Django projects :)
I did a similar analysis a few years back. http://rafekettler.com/2011/06/16/analyzing-the-lulzsec-pass...
This really nicely sums up why I use Django for every Python web project I do instead of something like Flask. Django's size doesn't negatively impact me in any way and the fact that it has so many features and a huge number of libraries and docs means I'm less likely to need to do a lot of building when requirements change.

I think this extends to anything that calls itself a microframework -- being small isn't a meaningful feature unless it actually impacts your app.
Mono works just well enough to convince people that C#/.NET is an acceptable cross platform solution. By the time they realise it's so buggy and unreliable compared to .NET that they'll have to shell out for Windows licenses, they're stuck with it.

See, for instance, keithwarren's comments in this discussion: he hypes up Mono-based cross-platform support in what's currently the top comment on this submission[1], but when someone who's actually tried Mono replies and talks about the problems they've had with it, he makes it clear that they should shut up, forget about Mono and use Windows[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659798
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660976
The more I read Joel Spolsky, the more I realize how wrong he is. He's like the Thomas Friedman of software. He writes lots of things that sound good, but aren't actually true.

For example:

In fact, there are lots of great reasons for bloatware: For one, if programmers don't have to worry about how large their code is, they can ship it sooner. And that means you get more features, and features make your life better (when you use them) and don't usually hurt (when you don't).

Every single part of that statement is false. Your programmers should be worrying about how large their code is. If they're not, and your competitors are, then your competition will release a program that does everything your program does, but better and faster. So what if they're a couple months (or even a few years) behind? First mover advantage is relatively short-lived, anyway. Microsoft Word wasn't the first word processor and Microsoft Excel wasn't the first spreadsheet. Google wasn't the first search engine. Facebook wasn't the first social network.

As far as more features being helpful when you use them and harmless when you don't, well, that's inaccurate too. I find it very ironic that he uses Excel as his poster child for this, since the addition of features has absolutely hurt Excel's usability. These days, Excel is a tool that's comparable to vim or emacs. It's very powerful, but it has a ferocious learning curve to match. Moreover, he overlooks the fact that more features mean more bugs. I think the success of various web-based, minimalist tools has shown that users are quite willing to accept fewer features, if the features that are present work flawlessly.

And even the points that were true as of publication (e.g. ever shrinking prices for CPU cycles and RAM) are no longer true today. If you're writing code today, CPU cycles are definitely not free. You get roughly 4 billion cycles per core per second on a desktop, and somewhere between 1 and 2 billion if you're on a mobile device. Memory is slightly less constrained, but it's rare for desktops to ship with more than 8 GB of RAM, and it's unheard for mobile devices to have more than 1 or 2.

So no, I don't think bloatware is a "mental health problem". I think it's a real issue, and one that's only going to get worse as we run into the limits of Moore's Law.
rcgs is referring to the way that Microsoft has, over time, added more and more buttons into the ribbon, so that at present most Microsoft applications have almost all their functionality accessible through the ribbon. rcgs would argue that this defeats the point of the ribbon in the first place (I'm inclined to agree).
Ranks of 'gig economy' swell with mobile workforce
The site had been collapsing well before Six Apart (the Russians zomg) drove the last nails into the coffin. I think it was a mix of what nostrademons and you said, though.
"Synchronizing files is just not a killer application" (2008)
When I was using Word on the Mac in 1992 (version 5? 6?), it even had it's own built in screen saver... I guess in case you didn't want to look at flying toasters or whatever.