skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do people care about flags when selecting a site language?
I'm working on a site that supports multiple languages, and we are using a flag icon to indicate the current language. The language selection dropdown will have both the flag and the name of the language.

I would love to get your opinions on the following questions, as well as any relative experiences you can share.

1. Is a US citizen likely to be annoyed if the icon for English is the British flag? (assuming we don't support both US and UK English languages)

2. Should both US English and UK English be supported?

3. Would a Taiwanese person be annoyed if the Flag for Chinese Traditional was China's flag?

4. Would it be better to not have flags? If so, what is a good way to indicate that the language can be changed?

5. Would a non-english speaking user recognize a dropdown list control with the word 'English' on it and realize that this how the language can be changed?
I was just thinking about this last night while driving through some very poor neighborhoods near downtown, imagining what kind of childhood those kids were leading and what kind of future there was for them.

The fact that I am being paid to, essentially, automate-away good paying jobs is a bit disconcerting at times. Hopefully efficiencies in the market will breed new kinds of work... but I have some serious doubts.
I’ve used mainstream image editors like Photoshop, Paint.NET and Gimp; some of my best friends are mainstream image editors. And when I saw Gimp I almost went blind. Children were weeping; fruit was bruising. The UI could kill small animals.

Really? Did you really have to say it that way? I use the Gimp every day, and it's quite good in my opinion. It does what I tell it to, and not what I "mean". Photoshop does what you "mean", as defined by Adobe. As an example why that's wrong, something like "I'll interpolate this scaled bitmap linearly, thanks" is frequently the wrong solution, but happens anyway when you scale a section of an image.

Now I know this article isn't about the Gimp, but when someone wants to spark a flamewar by claiming the user interface to the Gimp causes him "to go blind", it really discredits his other claims nearly instantly.
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Already fed up of the auto tweets from this spammy app filling my twitter timeline
Yes, yes it is. The article talks about how non plain text authentication schemes are moot if you've got tls (https). I think you should. While this idea violates defense in depth strategies I think the core of his argument is compares apples to oranges.

Refraining from sending passwords plain text along your transport is always a good idea. Even if on the public internet the password's transport may be encrypted, once it hits your network it might not be. HTTPS accelerators (or reverse proxies) will remove this secure layer and with basic authentication you'll be left with the base64 clad password.

While you could argue that if your local networks are compromised you're screwed anyway. (think bad network topology in your data center) Think back to defense in depth, I'd rather the passwords never enter my network to begin with. (Think digest, or better yet Kerberos.)
Springsource acquired by VMWare
Interesting to see what will happen to the open source community around spring source?
Funnily enough, Plan 9 uses concurrency (via CSP) as a way of structuring programs to make them easier to write and reason about.

Concurrency isn't hard; Sharing is hard. This is the reason that mutable state hurts understandability - things can change under you because the view of state is shared. This is the reason global variables are bad - they are shared between different parts of the program, and can be modified from places you can't see. And this is the reason shared-memory concurrency is hard. Add to shared-memory concurrency a dash of race conditions in operations involving a load and a store, and things get hard.

Of course, I'm oversimplifying as I write this, but I think that's really the gist of it.
I find the Khan Academy videos to be pretty helpful. They start with the absolute basics and go on up. http://www.khanacademy.org/
You can only save people time if they are short of it and can spend money easily.

Hobbyists and big companies have lots of time and are reluctant to spend money.

Sell to small businesses who don't have in house expertise.
Fantastic reply, thank you.

An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning loks good, just going to read some reviews on Amazon first.

Would 'How To Solve It' be aimed at someone like myself?
But for 1000 users or more, you will need someone to support the software. And probably only that person knows the intricacies of the system. It obviously costs the company some money to devote a person to this open source product. Now if that person leaves, it is going to cost [in time and money] to find a replacement.
I know this doesn't answer your question since you asked about math in general, but in case anyone ever starts a "Best Physics books for complete noobie?" thread I'd like to go ahead and suggest Brian Greene's "Fabric of the Cosmos": http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp...
It's ironic that the top 10 "meanest" cities are some of the most liberal.

"By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor encounters racial profiling"

After reading this, I couldn't take the article seriously.

and, he keeps mentioning all of these fines? When we get more expensive social program like universal healthcare, these are only going to increase, because the government is going to need more money.
A Visit to Olin College: A Design-Oriented Future of American Engineering
"The reason I'm asking is because I'm kind feeling that things like maths knowledge is layered on year after year and if you lack the foundation its really a huge amount of work to repair each successive layer."

Absolutely, the layers you mention is exactly why I want to start from scratch
Often you don't need a whole person and you can split the role with several people even then to spread the risk. Even with SaaS or paid support issues are resolved slowly and require a technical person on the customer end anyway.

Open source software is actually pretty easy to support. Windows servers, Exchange and Oracle are all pretty bad and the support isn't great either + they cost money.
I think I agree with most of that. I'm definitely a big fan of CSP, and some of its ideological successors. To this day I think that Occam is one of the most ingeniously elegant languages ever invented.

I also think that making a distinction between concurrency and sharing is rather artificial. Embarrassingly parallel problems aside (where the concurrency is really better characterised as co-habitation of a computing resource), it's still pretty easy to get both shared-memory and channel-based message-passing wrong in concurrent situations. I agree that the presence of shared-memory makes it worse, and while my experiences using things like CML without using mutable storage have been much more positive than say... Java concurrency primitives, I think it's still "hard" in that it requires considerably more intellectual effort than writing non-concurrent programs of similar scope and size.
Increase Sign-ups with Easier Captchas
as catch23 said, one big thing is feeling rocks under your feet.
Another thing is that for the first bunch of runs, you will feel pain.. this is mostly because your feet aren't used to working out and they will hate you for it. But it does build of foot strength.
And I mean it won't turn a fat person skinny.. and it won't make running the most wonderful thing in the world (unless you already enjoy it), but it will make things better, hence the "not a saviour"

I hear you on the "skymall-ish" comment... but trust me it's definitely not some crap like that, it's solid, and I highly suggest everyone at least try them out.
Playing devil’s advocate:

America has killed 200,000+ people in Iraq an Afghanistan over the last 7 years which is greater than 17,000 * 7. Now add all those killed by poor pollution controls and our ass backward private medical system and... [rage]

PS: Per capita the Rich cause more harm and more benefit in society because they have more power to change things. It’s easier to help and hurt a large number of people with a coal power plant than it is with a single gun.
Spot on. S3stat pays my rent, even though I link straight from the site to a set of detailed instructions to roll your own version of the service.

If you have a dozen hours to follow those instructions, debug and get it up and running as a scheduled task on one of your servers, you can get it for "free". Or you can pay me $5/month to do it for you.

Assuming you'll use the end result for one year, your break-even point comes when you value your time at about $5/hr. If you think you're worth less than that, you'll do it yourself. If you think you're worth more, you'll buy it.

People with more money than time will happily trade one for the other.
"but when someone wants to spark a flamewar"

Don't forget getting a lot of pageviews...
As bad as this is, I think their blog post is one of the best ones that I have seen dealing with a security breach.

They give a good overview over what they know and have added an FAQ below explaining even more.

Something like this can easily happen to anyone operating a web service, still I hope they get the bugs that were exploited fixed soon.
If you have flags that might 'offend' then just add the other flag as well and use the same settings.
I hate to ask, but are there any organizations that could have helped? (And maybe still can) Maybe some church or homeless shelter that you could donate to that would use your donations bring free breakfasts for day laborers a few blocks away?

I'm not sure how to solve the problem for your city, but it would help them out and solve your problem without anyone getting locked up. Not to mention providing a little bit of PR for doing an honest favor to the working poor. Combine that with something like city harvest (end of day food that would usually get tossed out is picked up and distributed to hungry people) and I'd go out of my way to eat at your cafe.
How about some real argument?

His 'Bob Smith' example makes a lot of sense.
Cool. Does it work for both receiving and transmitting? If it does, there should be a business opportunity in tinfoil hats for laptops.
I've always thought that if you're going to insist on repeating captchas, then it would be nice if they varied between attempts. There is nothing more frustrating than being presented with the same completely unreadable captcha-style over and over again.

That said, not forcing people to repeat them certainly seems much more humane!
Yeah, we could do that, although there are a lot of countries that speak English but people seem to either use the US or UK variant as far as I can tell.
How to Create Your First iPhone Application
I second the Eccles recommendation. It's a really great introduction to formal mathematics.
And, in developed/first-world/etc. countries, have a habit of not killing a terribly large number of countrymen, most of whom more or less volunteered for the job anyway. (Presumably, they were in fact aware of what joining the military entails.) So it isn't really a crime of the rich against their own countrymen, at least.
[from my comment on the site]

"...there goes two hours of my day searching, configuring and installing dependencies."

This is the sole reason for building Flooha.com. No average person should have to do this kind of thing just to use some website software. We’re in beta and it’s not perfect yet, but we hope to make life a lot easier for thousands of people who don’t want to fight with their software.
I'm so happy. Twitter is run by a bunch of pseudo-technological hipsters. By FB buying FF, hackers unite to face the foe!
One thing I have always wondered about is why don't Amazon show ,whether reviewer purchased the item from Amazon or not, next to their review. NewEgg does it and I do give more weight to those reviewers who actually bought the item. I am guessing that this could have some privacy concerns for certain items (say vibrator) but they can make user opt out of this feature if they want.
Flags don't mean languages. Don't use a flag to mean a language.

You don't need to explicitly indicate what language the page is in, because the text on the page is in that language. What you do need to do is indicate --- without words --- that the drop down box is for selecting a different language.
The differences are mostly in the 'locale' issues, especially dates. I got around that by doing 'Jan 1st 2009', in stead of the strictly numerical options.

The language issues are less of a problem, they're minor spelling issues such as 'colour' vs 'color'. I never had any complaints about those.

Australians and Canadians have long ago dropped most of their English spelling details, Americans don't care too much from what I can see. Some very purist English folks have sent an email or two (one about 'gray' vs 'grey', go figure...) but for the most part it is just whatever works.

There is a lot of tolerance for this in end users, they understand that you have to make choices.

Here was an interesting thread on this not that long ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741093
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Perhaps that request is a good sign to stay away from those types of people then...
Most people, when posed with this question, look in a mirror and write 1000 subjective words to describe themselves.
My search data is likely to be spread around huge numbers of IPs. I'm rarely logged into google. Plus they really have no way of knowing whether I "converted" once I leave the search results. I may open tabs for the top 10 results, but it doesn't mean that I like what I've found, or that I would want to be presented with that kind of information again.

My amazon account, on the other hand, has been tied to me for at least 7 years, and likely has every search I've done, every product I've viewed, and everything I did up to and including eventually making a purchase.

I've gotta say, based on my own experience as a reasonably typical internet user, Amazon probably have less data on me, but it's bound to be better-quality.
>> Some advantages: - Members can climb the 'ranks' faster which satisfies peoples' thirst for power (who doesn't like being promoted).

That's a huge disadvantage. I used to run a site that had a karma system, and the more karma you had, the bigger the impact when you gave someone else positive or negative karma. That "thirst for power" just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and it ended up almost ruining what had previously been an extremely good community. When we (the other admins and mods) decided to drop the system, it only returned to normal after a lot of the previously-helpful senior members were given temporary bans so they could 'cool off' for a while.

The more complex karma becomes and the more people keep obsessing about it and wanting to improve it, it's just going to impede the real progress of the community.
Wish I could upvote you more guy.

Personally, I think the fact that so many of our homeless are veterans should be criminal. But this is a democracy, and I am out voted.
This reminds me of a ted talk about industrial farming and white bread. The argument usually goes that industrial farming destroys small farmers jobs, but the speaker instead argued that it allows community to be able to afford more food for less money and frees up a significant population from working in the fields. While short term people loose their farming jobs, long term society is able to do more with less.

The question becomes when do the unemployed catch up with the "progress".
Enterprises with over 1000 employees can contact us for discount pricing.

It's on the page you linked. I would suggest you look at MS for a better pricing model. Their Enterprise software costs more but you can get a huge bulk discount. Want to save money just buy more. The idea is to start working with a large company and then keep up selling them more stuff.
If anyone is interested in learning a good deal about what it "feels like" to be poor, I highly recommend reading "Down and Out in Paris and London", George Orwell's first book.
yes, you could have 16 misses, but the next n (where n=cacheelinesize/size of entry) after that will all be hits...

You have to risk that miss at some point. And it does not matter whether you see the misses one-by-one or 16 in one go, it's the same penalty.
Google Code Jam 2009
I built this: translate.songbirdnest.com

You don't see flags on the site, but in the language package you download, there are flags. I can't remember if we used to display the flags on the site - it's been redesigned since I left.

1. US citizens are not annoyed by the UK flag. As someone else pointed out, if someone in the US sees a British flag they will probably think the site is not for them. I don't think it works the other way around since the USA dominates international media.

2. We supported US and UK English. The UK people loved this and it was one of the first translations we received.

3. Certain mainland Chinese people are annoyed by Taiwan's existence. Aside from technical errors and categorizations that were simply wrong, the only complaints I received were from mainland Chinese people trying to get me to remove the Taiwanese language pack.

4. Flags look cool but cause some problems with languages that are spoken in different countries, or single countries with many languages. Do you really need Swiss French and France French? Do you need an Indian flag for every language spoken in India?

I actually did have different language packs for the same language in different countries. 22 different kinds of Arabic, etc. However, this was a lot of extra work I made for myself and if I were to do it over again I would not use flags or tie the languages to countries.
I can't say "dependencies" have ever been particularly high on my list of software gripes. At least not since package managers and repositories matured to the point (at least 5 years ago) where 99% of my dependency installation is either done automatically or is available to me mostly-automatically within a few keystrokes.
I tried to save last night and it simply said that I had a wrong username/password combo. The only action available was printing to pdf form. I just tried again and it did allow me to register though. Was something changed or maybe I missed something late last night....

I have been meaning to update my resume for a while now and this is the perfect tool to launch me into action.
While mooism2 is correct and flags don't mean languages, I think it's a common enough pattern on web sites that you can just choose one or the other (USA or UK) for English. But you should then be consistent with spelling.

It depends on how you want the site to be perceived. As an American, if I see the British flag next to an English language selection, I'm not offended, but I do feel like the site is targeted more toward European users.
> Those two sentences together seem bizarre. Estimated at $13B, and yet no analysts or economists are evaluating the business? That can't just be because of a puritan aversion to porn...?

Analysts make their money selling research to investors and the like. Since very little of the porn industry is public (Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse) and there's little chance of that changing, there's no market for research.
"What is Mathematics" by Courant and Robbins is quite good and respected, but it will challenge you: http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-Ideas-... It may be more advanced then what you're looking for though.
Who’s At Fault, Developer or Tester?
I really hate when people use that line:

"Open source software is free if your time is worth nothing."

It sadly misses the point, often on purpose, that "free" in "free speech" is not the same "free" that goes in "free beer".

By using free software you take control of your technology. Maybe that's not a priority for you - and you can live with all your company communications living, say, inside a Notes or Exchange server - but it is important to so many companies it becomes a relevant economic pressure.

So, when you decide to go proprietary, stay aware you are letting another company decide the fate of your data. That decision will have a deep impact on how you conduct business for a long time.

BTW, the 90's called. They want their "complete lack of drivers" argument back.
There was plenty of election fraud in the days of paper ballots, too.

I'm actually a fan of purple dye. It seems effective at stopping one form of election fraud. Preferably accompanied by a bank of cameras to show every ballot went into the box (and no others).
They don't say. It could be he was breaking into houses. Speculating isn't going to be productive.
Why would an irrelevant over-statement discredit the other points? It's a literary device. I'm sure you could mentally replace comments about going blind with "I do not like the user interface of Gimp".

I mean is it really necessary to take it quite so literally? Jumping up and down about deliberate hyperbole and then arguing that it invalidates anything else written in close proximity makes it seem like you probably just stopped reading at that point and didn't evaluate the actual claims made.
A must read for open source developers.
Lose the flags. I'd venture to guess all of the languages you're supporting are used in multiple countries so it doesn't make much sense. Besides, it's confusing to users anyway. A Latin American user is going to be looking for Spanish- not the flag of Spain. You're better off displaying the options as text in the respective language.

I saw someone else mention that using flags is a common enough pattern that it's acceptable. While it may be true that it's a common pattern it's still one that's ignorant. Maintaining a website in multiple languages is very difficult so you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot by not properly leading users to their preferred language.

[edit]

There was a discussion last week about using IP geolocation for determining language that might be of some relevance:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741093
I think next to the button that says "Login/Logout" it might be nice to have a simple welcome message that says "Welcome, <username>" just to reassure users that they are in fact logged in. I didn't realize I was still logged in until I noticed the button said "Logout".
Business Lessons from the Ancient World
Not to mention rewrite it, add skills, etc.
No, it was for not appearing in court.
I would say do not use flags unless you don't mind being dragged into world politics :-)

I can give you the example of Arabic that is the national language across 22 countries. Which flag would you choose there?

The thing is flags come loaded with nationalistic sentiment. You will be dragging yourself into the middle of many political conflicts worldwide. Taiwan/China is one but you will also have Israel/Palestine, Kosovo/Albania and likely others. Users from one national tendency will quickly point out how their flag should be there.

Of course if you are only supporting a few languages this may not be a big issue.
Some years ago I took the same approach to start again from ground zero.
I found Polya to be good, but a Mathematician's Delight is better and more accessible: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0486462404?ie=UTF8&ta...
We use an application of singular value decomposition in our search products, in particular Latent Semantic Indexing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing. This is being used to drive a "concept search" feature.
Heh, it looks bit like a groupoid (albeit PG version even more so)!
Not flash visited sites. It may have deleted Flash cookies but the flash check cookies link listed here still shows sites after a CCleaner run.

See http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=22980.
Pig Latin - High Level Data Processing with Elastic MapReduce