skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm French, so this will definitely color my judgement.

I find English to be rather simple. The grammar is as simple as can get, and due to it being the international language people are very open to weird accent (including ze frrrrench wane ;). This makes it easy to start, even with a pretty rough command of the language. Then the main challenge (IMHO) to a good mastery is the large vocabulary, and the very irregular pronunciation. But nobody expects that from a foreigner starting in English, which is a benefit of it being the international tongue I guess (spoken by all, mastered by... less).

On the other hand the French grammar is very complex. That's not specific to French, many languages are like this. Spanish and Italian are pretty close, and German is also complex (I tried the two first, but have no experience in the later). Still, it requires a significant upfront investment to get to a working level.
There is also a cultural challenge: the expectation in French is that you have to speak properly. For a foreigner there is some tolerance of course, but still the culture has a strong bias on speaking correctly, and for some professional contexts it will matter. There's a lot of history there, but let's say that command of language has long been a class differentiator. Nothing unique to French, I would guess it's the same in British English for Great Britons. But in an "international English" context that's definitely not the case, and it helps get started.
Another challenge is that words tend to be more overloaded in French (smaller vocabulary vs. English), which opens the door for a lot of double meaning. This exists in all language, but can be a challenge to a newcomer and is not as common in "international English".

So all in all, I'd guess international English is easier than French. In any case seriously learning another language and its culture is highly recommended, whatever your choice. It's really a mind opening experience, as any one will find that "obvious" things that everybody knows are actually just cultural conventions. So the more remote the culture, the bigger the gain on this account.

As for French dying, the number of speakers is actually increasing, mainly due Africa rising population and the large number of French speakers there.
Compared to, say, Russian or Ukrainian French is really not that complicated. It also has way less "exceptions to every single rule" than English. You should choose a language based on your goals, not "how many countries use it" (and even by that metric French would still be really high up). For example, if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish.
Same as me. I think I can wait for the list be improved.
No. They serve entirely different purposes.
Mapcodes are a free, open way to make every house or location on Earth
addressable by a short code. With nothing else except your mapcode,
for instance, a navigation system will bring someone to within meters
of your front door.

So what happens if you live in a multi-story block of flats?
Another attempt caused a massive immune reaction. That said, the amount of furor over a few deaths in gene therapy trials seems to be irrational: far worse things happen in cancer treatment all the time.

I really wanted gene therapy to be available 20 years ago and even went to grad school to learn how to make it work. It was strongly deemphasized at my school in a preference for classic small-molecule protein inhibitor therapy.

Gene therapy is truly non-trivial. It took me several decades of studies in genomics and protein functional informatics to appreciate how subtle and complex the problem is. I'm hopeful that we can make technology that enables routine personalized gene therapy a common form of therapy, but it is truly not an easy problem. Causing cancer and immune response is only the first set of easily observed (fatal) side effects.
Agreed. Did you checked the list if it is really good?
I wonder if those 1/4 Americans would appreciate a ~10% pay-cut.
Nice idea to include a check digit. Mapcode doesn't have that (though they recommend specifying the country separately). On the other hand, with only 4 characters, Mapcode should be easy enough to remember.
After a horrible year and a half, which included moving to a new city without any support structures, working remotely for a company not geared for it, losing my mom to suicide, working for a startup which I had to threaten to pay me, doing part-time work for another startup which will probably not pay me, and a failed relationship, I am happy to say that I have a month long holiday abroad coming up soon!

Looking forward to the break and coming back with a clear head!
20 Elegant Lettering Typography Designs
I'm really interested in knowing this, I wonder how many engineers they have working on projects like these and what they're told.
Yep, if this were feasible as a postcode then we'd have switched to lat/long addresses ages ago.
This has a ways to go in terms of content before I would actually use it.
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PostgreSQL! ...man
What to expect on your first day working for a startup
Presumably, for car navigation, that doesn't matter (that's what the address is for).
Examples of French speaking countries would be Rwanda, Congo, Niger and Madagascar. You could be waiting a very long time for these to become significant economies.
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I hereby invoke Betteridge's law of headlines.

(unless they can convince every postal service in the world to throw away hundreds of years of dogma)
My problem is with the times they cite. They say that "on average" the group photo incidents took 5 minutes. That's utter BS. Imagine being at a table, having a waiter approach, and asking them to take a photo. You hand them the phone, they take a picture (maybe even fumbling to figure it out a little bit if they've never used that device before), hand it back, and you're either done or ask for another one. The second one goes faster.

All together that might take 30 to 40 seconds with a retake. Imagine actually sitting there for 5 minutes trying to take a group photo, and it's really ridiculous. 5 minutes is an eternity for one waiter to spend in a single visit at one table, and they say this is an average!
A browser plugin that could detect false images on Twitter
All it takes is replacing the actual phone dialer app (which AFAIK can only be done in AOSP-based distributions) to make it work transparently.

You'd also have to add a phone number broadcasting service to make it work with phone numbers though, but I can see the potential. I'm much more skeptical about range, battery or security concerns.
I think TLP's accent advice falls squarely into the "fake it until you make it" category - like becoming a confident presenter by impersonating somebody confident when you get on stage. It's not that if you try hard your accent will go away, it's more that you (consciously) do an impression of the accent you're learning. So if you're studying German you go full Ahhhnold.

I didn't read that TLP column until I was mostly fluent in my second language, but in retrospect I think it's spot on (and one of his best - he can be a little hit or miss).
I think this is to improve on postal codes, not address multiple-person dwellings. The flat/apt/suite number would take care of that.
The shell scripts that installed the floppy disks looked for a file called 'install.end'. They did not look at the contents of the file, only checked for its existence.

Here is the contents:

For information about getting "Bob" in your life, send $1 to:

Church of the SubGenius
P.O. Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214 USA ($2 US extra if outside US)

http://www.subgenius.com

I'm pretty sure the URL has changed. It was on sunsite.unc.edu.
Wouldn't this change the entire address and number? The problem is, you can't find a place without a GPS (or another digital device) :-(
No, they wouldn't. They'd be rioting in the streets putting rocks through your car soon enough.
i love the hotels.com endorsement at the bottom
CVE-2014-2970 from Dan Goodin article?
CVE-2014-2970 is mentioned in the article as being assigned to the LibreSSL PRNG stuff - When I search for it to get the details it still shows as reserved. Why? The LibreSSL guys seem to have already patched it. Is there something more to this?
Lessons Learned from Manually Assessing 8000 Blog Comments and Deleting Half
> English has much fewer irregular verbs.

English has, IIRC, far more irregular verbs than French but fewer conjugations to learn (for both regular and irregular verbs) and I think fewer regular patterns to learn.

> Conjugation in French is a party of special cases. Participes passés?

English has those, too. Its superficially simpler because for regular verbs (and some irregular ones that are irregular in other ways), the past participle is the same as the past tense, while in French for regular verbs the participe passé is different from any other conjugation.

But that superficial simplicity is, in a sense, one of the traps of English for non-native speakers.
Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy
Objections:

1. This mapcode is country specific (!)

2. Many locations need altitude or fine lat,lon differences to differentiate them (e.g. blocks of flats, offices).

3. What's wrong with altitude, lat and lon on a given projection which can be as precise/imprecise as you want?

IMO it'd be better to have a hash of lat,lon,altitude which was globally unique for each level of precision.

A system like this needs to be globally unique without specifying country, or you may as well use a postcode. The only advantage over postcodes at present is it's slightly shorter.
So let's see... 10 bucks for books, 10 bucks for Spotify, 10 bucks for Netflix. That's $360 a year. It kind of adds up, doesn't it? :)

When I was little I went to the local library. There I had unlimited access to movies, music and books, for free. Sure, it's hard to compare the music collection to Spotify. But at the time I was content. And I actually think I'd still prefer both the movie collection and the book collection of the library (especially as my native tongue is Swedish).
Another interesting similar idea - http://what3words.com/ .
In the UK: Contractors. Military contractors in particular are a huge industry and they've moved into producing surveillance equipment as a natural progress of what they produced previously.

They also buy from abroad (although mostly from the US and Israel, who both produce software like this at a number of shops).
There is already a service like this that uses 3 words instead of that weird string: http://what3words.com
Why?

You vote online, you print a paper ballot, you print a copy of the ballot for your own records, you mail the paper ballot so it can be verified in the event of a dispute.

If anything, that would be more secure than what we do now since citizens can count the votes on their own and have hard copies of their voting decisions to dispute the official record with if need be.

Right now, you send the only copy you have to the government at your polling place...and can't prove anything if they alter your vote(s).
Terrible site design
Create noise to mask specific human-directed activity?
I started to learn French a year ago and I made a lot of progress. There are just a few bugs left to fix in my own vocabulary management tool, and then I'm ready to learn some words, systematically well tracked and documented. ;)
> For example, in English I might ask "Where is (X)" or "Is this street (X)". In French, I need to flip those around to "(X), where is it" or "Here, this is (X), yes?"

I don't know where you got your French lessons but you've been mislead. Both "Where is (X)" and "Is this street (X)" translated directly are more correct than your alternatives:

"Ou est (X)"
"Est-ce que c'est la rue (X)"

> "Thanks of not to disturb"

Rather, "Thanks for not disturbing", which has the advantage of being understable in English:

"Merci de ne pas déranger"
It doesn't replace the post code by any means, but it's definitely a nice way to program a GPS.
Overall, this looks pretty interesting, assuming your goal is to communicate physical locations with an accuracy of a couple of meters using a format that fits on a business card. It can also be used without country names, if you prefer it that way (just select "International" when generating the code.)

Developer downloads here: http://www.mapcode.com/downloads.html?iso3=112&mapcode=49.4V

This is patented, with an ISO standard in progress, and the following licensing terms (from their developer page):

The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be
altered in any way that would result in the production
of different (and thus incompatible) mapcodes. The
mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be used in
any way to generate a different system that produces
codes to represent locations. In order to prevent
misuse, unauthorised alterations, copying or commercial
exploitation, please note that the ideas and algorithms
behind the mapcode system have been patented and that
the term "mapcode" is a registered trademark of the
Stichting Mapcode Foundation.

Part of the motivation is the lack of usable postcodes in many countries:

Unfortunately, a large part of the world population has no address. In India alone, well over half a billion people live in houses that have no street name.

They play some interesting tricks with population density and country "contexts" to shorten codes:

4. People live within a “country context”. Addresses seldom include a country name. Unless clearly stated otherwise, they can safely be assumed to be in “this” country. Codes that are known to be within a particular territory can be designed to be much shorter.

6. Short codes are reserved for areas where the population density is high.
Agreed, every people is different. There isn't the "formula for all".

I'm from Brazil and got curious about the "unlimited vacation", how it works?
patents and ambiguity where you have to also mention the country and sometimes, but just sometimes, the state.
The 10:10 Code (2010)
Slackware was my first encounter with Linux back in early 1995 (I was a field engineer at the time looking after BT supplied SCO Unix and Xenix boxes in doctors surgeries in the highlands of Scotland).

It was very exciting times. I learned to build my own kernels which took hours on the crappy old dell I owned at the time, but very satisfying. It was even more exciting when I managed to get a Novell NE2000 clone to work with it as well and set up my first web and FTP server in my bedroom and then got it to talk to my Hayes compatible modem and Demon Internet.

Happy hacky days :)

I use CentOS these days, mainly because it's our company standard, I must go back and give it another spin. Congrats Slackware!
If the dropbox program is running under your user account, it has the same permissions you do. Unless you're on Linux and have restricted it via AppArmor.
It gave me a map code that was longer than my postcode. I'm not sure how postcodes work everywere else in the world, but in the uk they point to a specific road, so it's pretty good for navigating to a place with.

I do know that in belgium they point to an area, so they're not as good as a navigation aid.
The Minimum Featureset for Bugtrackers
This is blogspam.

Actual source: http://news.xbox.com/2014/07/xbox-one-xbox-one-sales-more-th...

Also, the source domain has an...odd voting history for the articles submitted from it. (6 points for an Assassin's Creed article?)

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kichu37
Amazon's Kindle Unlimited offers 600,000 e-books for $10 a month
> . The accent will teach you the rhythm of the words and the grammar-

I think that in part is how kids learn too. I am watching my 2 year old learn two languages and I can see that easily. They have the accent down very well. Sometimes they would repeat syllables that sound meaningless, but it seems they are just like practice rounds.

Then I noticed they also get excited about a new word that has an "interesting" combination of syllables and sounds. They laugh at that and want me to repeat it. They have this detector "Oh, here is a new challenge, I might want to know more about it".
Reminds me of a little encrypted chat app I made with a friend a few weeks ago. Ours is intended for two-way communication: http://cifrachat.herokuapp.com/
Actually the French suffer from this as well, thinking that every language has the rhythm of French, and only stressing the last syllables.

Having taught Latin to French speakers, I can confirm.
Bye bye desk, hello beach: tips for a great workation
I don't think that would have influence. If you wanted to have many children, there are easier and especially cheaper ways.

The majority of world population wouldn't be able to afford it, even if it got really cheap, like 100USD per clone, only a small percentage of the population could afford it to really have 50 clones, even if it became a trend that would not have a huge effect.

A person can already decide to have more than 10 children in most cases, basically for free, potentially even with monetary benefits (Canada, Europe, ...).

Just have the next big pop star talk about how great it is to have many children and how everybody should do the same.

Or lets have a big debate about the awful effects of overpopulation.
> The whole point of being open sourced is that you can compile them yourselves after your verification and use the product of your own compilation with the server-side of spideroak.

So this is a good point, however:

> More realistically, your distribution maintainers will verify and compile the package, and you trust your distribution maintainers more than spideroak so you delegate source verification to them.

This is actually pretty compelling, but ignores Windows and OSX devices, which not only are the vast majority of all users, but also the least likely to compile their own. They will trust the provided binaries instead.

This is one of those "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" (http://www.gaudior.net/alma/johnny.pdf) situations. I'm not solely criticizing spideroak here, I think this is a more general open problem with any 3rd party service that's meant to be trusted. It's an oxymoron that's been only somewhat breached because of public key cryptography.
The whitepaper:
http://storj.io/paper/storj.pdf

Where can I find some precise protocol specifications? The whitepaper is full of handwaving about the critical parts (namely Proof of Resource).
And everyone starts using another carrier.
I'm a little confused about what this replaces, but it's definitely not postcodes.

* Postcodes have a specific meaning: they're both a geographical area and a mail delivery zone (at least in the US). Replacing one short code with another, which requires a different and less reliable third-party service to correctly decode, doesn't seem like a good idea.

* Latitudes and longitudes are unambiguous, well-understood, and don't require a third-party service to be online in order to correctly decode. So it doesn't seem like this can replace latitudes/longitudes, unless we're talking about shortening their representation.

* Broadly speaking, while addresses have a lot of problems, they're unambiguous with human context. So this doesn't seem like it really replace addresses either.

* For things like a loose description that might not be associated with a single point (e.g. "Central Park"), I could see mapcodes being useful -- you can provide the precise boundaries of the park, where it's located, associate metadata with the mapcode like what hours the park is open, etc. That might be very helpful.

Also, won't there be multiple mapcodes for a single spot and won't that require cross-association of the respective metadata? For example, consider that Central Park is also in Manhattan, also part of NYC, also in Midtown in NYC, etc.

I guess that's not necessarily a problem, but it could lead to a lot of expensive processing for frequently updated locations/boundaries (e.g. a beach, a suburban development in progress, etc.).
Avoid the Android vampire apps
I don't think the responsibility to get legal permission is on the creator of the collection, but on the person using the logo instead.
A New Digital Currency Whose Value Is Based on Your Reputation
> It's nice for speed and the fact that you don't need to use a library any more, bit isn't more secure than JS Crypto was before.

It's a significant improvement in one area: the key storage API. If you use JavaScript crypto, your keys can be read by an attacker who can compromise that code in some way. WebCrypto can't stop that attacker from signing, encrypting or decrypting a message which the attacker has access to but it does prevent the key leaking out, which is often a far more catastrophic event.
My understanding of this, though I'm definitely not an expert is that they will in rare cases.

However, teams where one of the members has no dev. experience are very common. I'd guess that a non-technical person who can't find a developer that's excited enough about the idea to join as a cofounder is a bad signal.

If you're thinking you'd learn to do dev as you'd go, I doubt any accelerator would accept you until you have something written that actually works.
I think you are over estimating the bandwidth involved. They don't state much about the wireless protocol, but I am betting you don't want to send much more than a text message to get that range.
If I have a digital copy, it's important for me to have a physical copy, as well.

At different times, I prefer different media.

Until I can buy a book and get a digital version for either free or for a (very) small added fee, I'm just not getting on board with kindles (or whatever e-reader device).

Amazon did roll out some version of this book+ebook service a few months ago, but it included such a small number of volumes that it was virtually worthless.
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It's hard to get an understanding of the precise algorithm that's being used to generate the code. If it were a competitor of the postcode it would have to be possible to identify whether two places are close to eachother just by looking at the code right?

From the patent I get the feeling that it's a bit like a C-ary space partitioning, where C is 36 (alphabet+numbers). So the first character divides the earth in 36 regions, the second character divides that region in 36 regions, and so on.

With that in mind, I think once people would be a bit familiar with the general numbers for regions it would be pretty easy to identify what general region a mapcode would be in. So it might be a pretty good replacement of postcodes.

Or am I missing some other fundamental property of postcodes?
>>if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish.

Only if you want to work for the federal government or in the decidedly non dynamic province of Quebec.
It's a bit buried, but only some of the mapcodes are country-specific. "Every location on Earth has an "international" mapcode, completely independent of territorial borders. So any location that has a national mapcode also has an international mapcode." http://www.mapcode.com/popup_alts.html
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The Weeklypedia
I don't think it's a "cargo cult" if the official docs mention and warn about entropy pool exhaustion.
No, because postcodes aren't primarily geographical references. They just happen to be really useful for that. UK postcodes are arranged so that each one handles a similar amount of mail. This means that a residential street may share one or two postcodes, but a large organisation may have several postcodes to itself.
But most pockets are only about 32" off the ground. Maybe they should sell hats that it attaches to.
How you gonna raise money or make your site work without JavaScript enabled if you do that? smh.
I imagine that most earnest attempts at problem solving will yield the same cognitive benefits. So I just won't stop programming. Good thing I love it.