skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a lot of respect for your opinions on language (given your background as a professional translator and the solid advice you regularly give here on HN and your website).

Whenever a post about constructed languages comes up, you post this link, which I find disappointing: Rye's rant is, well, just a rant and his reasons for not learning Esperanto are just bad.

There was a time when I spent a few months learning Esperanto. I eventually gave up because 1) whilst it is relatively easy to get going with Esperanto, speaking it comfortably would require about as much work as any other language and 2) the Esperanto community is made up out of folks that are either much older than me or a little strange.

I don't think my first criticism is a fault of Esperanto. Human languages require a lot of convention and shared cultural ideas in order for communication to be compact and, at the same time, clear. No language, auxiliary or otherwise, can magically remove these requirements.

The second criticism is perhaps a little unfair but still important. Cultural cachet is important for a language and a language that appears to cater only to certain groups is going to have a tough time.

But if someone is keen to learn a new language, especially if that person is a monoglot, they should be encouraged to give it a try, even if their language of choice is Esperanto. They can only improve their linguistic skills.
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This made me think about a moment that brought me a bit more understanding of the plight of my friend, also an ivy league lawyer. We were teasing each other about how we both worked for companies that the other thought brought little value to the world and I made the tired "blood suckers" remark about lawyers. She got quiet and said, more to herself than to me, "Except for those of us who were idealists ready to change the world until we had to sell our souls to eat." At her firm, the biggest client was a well known and widely disliked arms manufacturer and I'd already gathered that she felt at odds with herself about serving them, but this was the moment when I realized that she probably spent a lot of time wondering if she'd made a smart decision by getting into the field. Because of the student loans, she didn't feel she had any choice but to see it through. It was a sad thought.
In science, it's very simple (though not necessarily easy), a theory needs to have predictive power. Important caveat: predictive power about the future.

This way you can even test a hypothesis you don't even understand. Just get a prediction out of someone who does and see if it checks out without being otherwise obvious. Again, obvious beforehand, not afterwards. There are a couple of heavy tomes you can read about it, a couple of common tricks to side step the test (ad hoc hypotheses) but in principle that's it.

For example, you test the theory or relativity every time you use GPS. It usually works.

Everything else is a matter of taste. Do you like consistency? Logical structure? Elegance? Authority? Peer review? You can make up whatever test you like. There's bayesian approach, you can try to consciously correct for your biases... but it's hard to beat the scientific method.
To start with, you're talking about electricity generation, where he is talking about total energy requirements. So your 15% figure doesn't include the energy consumption of cars, aeroplanes, many types of heating etc.

I believe he also includes the embodied energy of imports (this was in his book), where if goods are manufactured overseas and imported, it may make sense to count the energy used to manufacture them, depending on what you're measuring exactly.

For example, there's little difference between importing aluminium, or importing energy and bauxite and smelting it yourself.

Also, area use will not increase linearly with the addition of many renewables, because in many cases the best sites are taken first. Hydro can generate a lot of energy around the clock, but you quickly run out of the best locations. Wind strength varies across the country.

In a small country like the UK, solar isn't going to vary much by latitude, and you can probably build it out all over the country. But time shifting of demand isn't always possible, so even if the panels were free, using them to push from (say) 50% of energy from renewables to 100% is going to involve some kind of storage system, which is either going to be very expensive (probably exceeding GDP) and unproven (eg hydrogen fuel cells, lithium ion batteries), or require a ton of space and specific terrain, like pumped water. So that's going to cost a lot of space.

Lastly, electricity isn't always the desired final form. If you're powering jet planes, you're going to need some type of biofuel, which is very inefficient per unit area. If and when hydrogen planes are developed, this will stop being an issue (electric cars have already proven their viability).

I highly recommend his book. It's a brilliant read, he nicely boils down the issues, and is thoroughly committed to stopping global warming - it's not some doom and gloom oil industry sponsored thing. But he doesn't have his head in the sand about how hard a switch to renewables is going to be, unlike (unfortunately) a ton of the green movement seems to.
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The refusal to write blank checks is more of an exception than the rule. For at least a couple of decades, politicians have begged young people to take any university education, any at all, with many nominally highly educated graduates out of work.

The government pays a $1000/month (pre tax) stipend to all students for up to six years, and offers a similar sized amount in loans on very generous terms. As tuition is free, this is only to cover living expenses and study materials such as books. Taxes are high, even at that income level and so are living expenses, but it's still not a trivial sum.
That's not to mention that Spanish is deletive so those sometimes subtly different verb conjugations are often the only way of conveying the subject of the sentence. It seems much more optimised for speaking rápidamente than listening, especially for non-native speakers.

If you were designing a language from scratch you also wouldn't choose features like the unnecessary grammatical gender (even though it's relatively consistent and easy to get right) and the b/v distinction in the orthography that's unpronounced in most dialects.

On paper it's still a far, far better auxiliary language than English though (I wouldn't be surprised to live to see a day when most people worldwide speak a regularised English with much more basic grammar and sensible orthography one day though; it's easier to build momentum taking the second language people are most exposed to as the starting point)
I don't ever Like anything, because if I did Facebook/Google/whatever would broadcast that everywhere they can in the hope of generating more ad views. If I could send a "nice work!" to the author without telling the whole world, it's more likely I would.
The study of this is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
I found this in my logs from 2013 and it looks really nice now.

Another example app with Kivy + SQLite: Image Viewer and Organizer, https://github.com/gau-veldt/ImageOrg

This is also interesting: http://libnui.github.io/nui3/
I'm not exactly sure anymore about the relation. Is Kivy based on libnui?
Connecting the UK Student Tech Scene
Russians Start Paying the Price for Putin’s Ukraine Adventure
I think for 2D related apps/games which do not require the native OS UI controls this is a good choice.
I'm pretty sure apps can have dependencies, so that looks like the best solution. Yes, users will be annoyed, but I think it's still better than various other "hacks".
Building real startups. Code iOS, Android, and web. 60+ hours of video content
There should be some personality traits overlap between extreme sports people and people creating startups, so combining the two seems interesting.

High intensity events tend to bring people together quicker, so this could potentially create some unique connections between potential founders.

Also, being Norwegian its nice to see Norways strengths being used!
Every time I encounter irregular verb forms, I remember I have a personal hunch for Japanese (basically a handful of exceptions and only two tenses). The leverage of context is powerful and concise in a way strangely similar to Perl. Also I can't decide if their way of typed counting is brilliant or cumbersome. As for writing systems, I have a particular hunch for Hangul.

I wish it would be as easy to prototype human languages as it is for software...
Protest Permit
You got a lot of "scientific" answers.

I want to give you different answer, which almost everyone will disagree with.

My answer is this - you ALWAYS know what is right or wrong, true or false. You don't need anyone to tell you this. And you certainly don't need "evidence". Evidence is for people who lack imagination. Leaders create their own evidence.
> At what speed do you replay text->audio (ie realtime, 1.5x,2x,...)?

Approximately the speed that the guy at the beginning of this video uses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo

> Lastly, if you disregard price is the braille 'refreshable display' a better experience?

It just what you're used to I guess, I know lots of people who can get by without one. I especially like it when doing coding and doing stuff in a terminal. Easier to see indentation, parenthesis, quotes etc.
You mean making the IDE itself accessible? Eclipse is already quite accessible out of the box.
I am surprised podcast apps don't use P2P to download media.

1) Podcasts are made available for all at the same time, and rarely downloaded after the next episode. Lots of people trying to download the same file at same time.
2) Would save publishers a lot of bandwidth.
3) Latency is not really an issue

Seems like a perfect fit.
No, kivy has no relation to libnui.
How can I plan for future cloud readiness?
While we continue to build and deploy new applications within our company and occasionally modernize the existing ones, we are conscious that in the future we may need to move them to the cloud. What are the things we should be doing now to plan for smoothly being able to move them to the cloud in the future?

Please share your suggestions. Thank you in advance.
Thanks for the shout-out! :)

You can also grab the RGASM project from the OtakuNoZoku website. I think Carsten (Surfsmurf) may have revived it on his github. I think I also pushed my source trees to github too. There is a GBC emulator that is both a COM component, and works inside of Visual Studio (at least, VS from around year 2000). Bunch of docs too kicking around. I have copies of most of them still.

I wrote programmer docs, assembler (before switching to extending RGBASM), linker, patcher, emulators, games, visual studio plugins, debugger, cartridge downloader, serial port driver, bunch of libraries, etc. Ah... the good old days.
The important thing about this article is not her age, her gender or her net worth: it's the enormous change her company is saying is possible in blood testing.

Ignore the comparisons with Steve Jobs and other crap and think about what her company is doing and what it means.
Nice. You can find RGBASM at OtakuNoZoku.com and the Gameboy Cribsheet too. Along with a bunch of other tools and code. I can send you complete game source if you want to study it.
Slightly offtopic: "I take photographs; can dress-make, cook, read Latin and lift heavy stuff, although not all at once."

What weight training do you do?
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-native_pronunciations_of_En...): Italians learning English have a tendency to pronounce words as they are spelled.

Being Italian myself, I can't help wondering: "If not for pronunciation, what else is spelling about?".

Just for the record, my first "shock" was with English, but learning French was more painful. Really, when you see a sentence written in French you do recognize its Latin origin. But, when you hear it... What went wrong during its evolution? At least, I was happy to discover that a major problem in learning French is common to several nationalities: there are several groups of sounds which the non-francophones do not distinguish, while the francophones cannot understand how they may be confused with one another.
These are my gripes with Unity, in question format :) Would love to hear from anyone that has concrete answers for these:

- How does UDK build apps for iOS natively on Windows without requiring a Mac? Are they doing some kind of insider thing that Unity can't replicate?

- I see Unity as massively extensible and that's one thing I like about it. Comparisons are often made between vanilla Unity and UDK; what about Unity + PlayMaker + UFrame + Level Builder, etc. I don't see this ease of editor extensibility with UE4 (I'm sure it's there; but the Unity Asset Store just lets me cherry-pick one, click buy and then just have it to use immediately after download - I like that).

- My biggest gripe with the editor is the font size. Will the new UI that's coming in 4.6 and/or 5.0 allow me to increase the font size used by the Unity editor to actually make it comfortably usable rather than fatiguing?

FWIW I've preordered Unity 5 and I use UE4 at the moment as well. Nothing big completed in either engine (just some side work here and there) but no fanboy-ism for any particular one (though a bit of a fondness for Unity as I encountered it back in the old Mac days when Unity were called Over The Edge Entertainment; GooBall was pretty cool by the way).
Another slight caveat -- as well as predicting things which should work, it should also predict what won't work. If your theory is that your medicine cures an illness, it's not enough for people who take it to get better - people in the control group who don't take it must not get better.
Many people here are writing about various techniques/books that talk about science, i.e., for distinguishing scientific truths from non-scientific falsehoods, but as a scientist myself (well ok, computer "scientist"), I think in some sense we give "science" too much credit. There are things we consider "truths" in science which are actually only a veneer on "beliefs as of today" -- i.e., not that far removed from even such non-scientific things as e.g. "religion".

This is very abstract, but more concretely, what I mean is that it helps to read about the philosophy/history of science. The canonical recommendation here is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1], but I also strongly recommend watching James Burke's Connections tv series [2] and then watching or reading his The Day the Universe Changed [3] to understand how our entire conception of "reality" or "truth" is so strongly determined by the technology of the time.

Finally, there are lots of "truths" in fields where this is no scientific basis to fall-back on -- politics, art, etc. For these, you have to seek out and find the best elucidators of each field (usually, but not always, books).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29

[3]
According to [1] in 2012 for the UK renewables provided 11.3% of electricity demand and 3.94% of total energy demand. It's an important distinction, because petrol natural gas and jet fuel aren't renewable.

MacKay is the author of a book - "Sustainable Energy without the hot air" - which lays out all his calculations and the rationales behind the inputs. And it's available online [2]. So if you want to audit his calculations, have at it!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Renewable_energy_...
[2] http://www.withouthotair.com/
I remember reading something quite awhile ago about her and her company, which was very dismissive of the entire subject. Is anyone familiar with what this was in reference to, because this articles does seem rather convincing to me!
On paper being the important bit of this piece.
Nice.

I may try this on my daughter who has been asking to get into programming. I remember the buzz I got building simple visual apps in VB. This feels similar.
Chrome and Firefox support WebRTC on mobile, so you can use it from a web app.
Actually a lot of games are written in c# these days since that's what most unity developers use (and the other options are even less "lean").

I'd say c or c++ is only really standard in the AAA world, most casual/mobile/indie devs use higher level languages & engines (c#/unity, haxe, as3/flash, lua/corona, etc.)
I ended up falling endlessly through a blank void :-\
Greg Egan – Wang's Carpets [pdf]
Read Julian Baginni The Ego Trick. He examines the notion that our sense of self is false. The feeling that 'I' exist is wrong. Throughout life we are constantly re-adjusting ourselves. Our worldview changes. What is right or wrong changes depending on where we are standing, and when we are standing there.
What is the deal with software being hard to release as 64-bit?

I'll fully admit that I don't work in C/C++ on the desktop, at all. This just seems like a button toggle problem (I know it was that way for C#/.NET apps, again, grossly simplify and apples to oranges) though, and it's surprising that you aren't just able to ping someone at these companies and ask for a 64-bit build.
I don't believe you. People don't always know right and wrong. True and false is easier with some practice and the right mind. What is right in one situation can be very wrong in another. Most people's sense of right and wrong are taught by community - I'd give you more merit if right and wrong were indeed universal concepts.

'Creating evidence'... This makes me cringe and brings images of politicians to mind. I believe some pretty odd things sometimes (singularity movment.. 30 years, i'm waiting) but if there is no actual evidence, or if I don't see results in some way, or if it conflicts with science and things with evidence... I'm not likely to believe.
How is it going?
Sure, but that particular ship sailed a long time ago. Most patients track their INR from the lab and simply ask when it swings too much.
Prior (~1.5 months ago) HN discussion on Theranos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951019
> an attenuation more than adequate to prevent the cell phone from working, is not nearly enough to assure a person's safety

On the contrary, if the shielding is ineffective to stop even the cell phone from working, can it be concluded that it definitely won't stop the 2.4GHz radiation. Hence there's a radiation leak.

Update: To answer my own comment, quoting from the source : "Traps and seals that work well at 2.45 GHz might not work so well at lower frequencies. It is true that apertures below cutoff have a shielding effectiveness that improves as frequencies get lower. However, the absorption loss associated with shielding materials gets worse at lower frequencies. Since microwave ovens operate in a very narrow frequency band, their shielding can also be narrow band.
"
Others have noted that this should not happen, but just to comment on the specifics; the size of a plain APK like a Hello World should be just 6-7MB. Anything else is files in the project path that haven't been excluded (e.g. big images in the project directory) or dependencies that the python-for-android tools have been instructed to include. I don't know what went wrong for you, but that size is highly atypical, and if you're ever interested we can help debug it.

It's possible to reduce the size further, one of our devs has recently been experimenting about this in particular and I think has got down to 4MB without too much difficulty. The problem is that reducing it much further starts to mean being more careful about blacklisting stuff like modules in the python standard library, which can be hard to do automatically without breaking dependencies. It's highligted some potential optimisations in kivy's internals though, so maybe we can make it easier to leave out some non-essential kivy components.

Just to be clear about the build time thing, compiling python + project dependencies may take a few minutes (e.g. your 15 minute figure), but subsequent builds don't need to repeat this and will take just a few seconds.
Psychology-niggers have the lowest SAT of any major. Biology majors are low, also, but not as low as psychology.

Computer science is lower than electrical engineering. Physics is tops.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-estimates-by-intended-colle...

http://www.joshuakennon.com/sat-scores-ranked-by-intended-co...
Think you've mastered the art of server performance? (2010)
Ok, my apologies. I genuinely thought you were trying to make some kind of point. Haskell has a REPL, Scala has a REPL, OCaml has a REPL, F# has a REPL; it's not at all unusual for a statically typed language to have a REPL.

(If I had to guess why Java doesn't have one I'd assume its emphasis on OO and everything-is-a-class; expressions in a REPL are almost inherently not contained in a class. For C/C++ I'd guess the emphasis on manual memory management and programmer-visible memory layout don't play nicely with a REPL. And for go I'd guess because it doesn't like including features that weren't in Algol '58. I don't think that's the real reason, but I am literally incapable of understanding what people like about go. Those are just guesses though)

> It should be obvious to anyone in the field, because the current method of developing and deploying games completely sucks. Do you honestly think that in 100 years, people are going to be deploying games through Steam, or worrying about cross-platform OS support? If so, you may want to rethink that. If not, then why wait 100 years? You can invent the future today. There's no reason to put up with the current limitations.

To me the browser just seems like an extra layer of junk, particularly when you're talking about things like WebGL where the API talks more-or-less directly to the graphics card. So I certainly hope the future looks more like steam - a library interface where I can run any program I want, automatically updated, with my saved data automatically kept in sync. Once you have a system that looks like that, what's the advantage of the browser? Put another way, if we're writing a game runtime, why would we include a document layout engine, an extremely complex styling system, and all the other stuff a browser comes with? I certainly hope the future looks more like Steam than like the browser.

I agree that developers shouldn't have to worry about cross-platform. I think it's a damning indictment of our industry that the best way to get a cross-platform runtime environment for your program is to bodge it into a scripting language that was written in three days to bolt on to a remote document viewer. I'm hoping that things like MonoTouch mean we're getting closer to a cross-platform runtime that provides a better platform for general-purpose applications and games.

"Boring" is what platforms should be; stable, reliable, almost invisible unless you're looking at them. I agree that there are better things than C++, and I do what I can to contribute to them. But I really hope the browser isn't the best we can do.
Yes, already happening ~ Open source projects / products on www.github.com

But driven by the right leadership for each project.

If the collaboration tools are attractive (significantly more usable than currently available alternate offerings) enough for the leaders, rest will follow through.
So the elevator pitch has been replaced with a base jump pitch?
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