skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did not know about Homebrew's Cocoa Emacs. Thanks for the tip. I'm installing it now and will see if I get 24.4 with eww or some previous version (minus the eww). Thanks again!
Modal dialogue box with two buttons: Enable Internet Searching and Disable Internet Searching. Make it a choice. Pretty simple.
I went through this tutorial a few weeks back. It's very well laid out and by the end of it you really want more lessons.
> "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first."

What nonsense, the article says the complete opposite of that. All of the article deals with examples of why other writing systems (misnamed "languages") have specific properties that make it hard to deal with on computers. Latin and Cyrillic alphabets just so happen to be easier because of their regular properties, not because they were the first to be implemented. Lucky us.

Summarizing the article as being rooted in politically incorrectness is disingenious. Or do you really want to suggest the Chinese would have had an easy time implementing their writing system on computers if only they had invented them first?
Who cares about tone? Why be sensitive in this context? It's a language. Why would anyone get offended when someone says "Your language sucks"? It's not like they're saying your hair sucks or your tongue is incapable of tasting sweets or your ear is shaped like a tulip.

It's a language. No one can help what language they learned when they were a child. It wasn't up to them. Of course some of them are going to suck overall more than others, and of course there are different reasons for the suckage, and of course all languages suck in different ways.

It seems like if someone is getting offended about someone else saying their language sucks, they're probably going to get offended about pretty much anything.
This particular application uses http://ckeditor.com/demo#inline

As a WYSIWYG editor it's very stable and popular.
The people with the worst offending languages had plenty of headstart for developing printing presses (at large scale) and advanced mathematics (calculus, algebra, abstract geometry, set theory, etc) first. Yet, for some reason, they didn't.

Nobody studding sociology has came out and claimed they couldn't do it only because of their language, but nearly nobody questions that the language was an important factor, and they were very diverse groups, with little else in common.
I see good business sense here.

the company is going under and they are most likely out of cash. They don't want to go into debt/get stuck with a huge bill.

Justin.tv did the same thing. They closed up shop in pretty much 24 hours.

A business isn't a charity to make you feel good. Sometimes you need to make tough decisions like this.

They provided a free service for many years. Be happy that someone put the time and effort into giving you that. I also don't know why some people decide to use it as a backup service, because clearly it isn't.

..and the guy trying to archive all of the customer data? Why would any business hand over all of their Dara like that? It's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

This is the problem with demanding everything is free/cheap: the service doesn't last.
Well, this may be the first time anyone, anywhere called the Georgian language "straight-forward". Georgian is a very cool language with a fascinating alphabet, but it's almost mind-bendingly complex.

Also, Russian, the other language listed in addition to English and Georgian as "not-broken", has many irregular noun declensions ("unstable" cases in the writer's unusual terminology), which was one of his indicators for "broken" languages. In fact, 99% of all languages with a noun case system have at least some irregular cases. I'd say 100%, but then I'm sure someone will point to some language spoken by 10 people in a remote village in the Caucasus mountains that features strictly regular noun declensions.
> If a computer's handling of a language can vary so drastically, imagine how the human brain must deal with expressing or receiving complex thoughts through these.

Orthography and language are not the same thing. Having a complex orthography has no bearing on processing complexity. If a language has a complex orthography, it may be hard to read and write, which are learned skills, but it won't be hard to speak and listen (which are naturally acquired skills given exposure to a language in the critical period).
> As a Finnish speaker

So how does Finnish compare up? Do you not have silent letters?

In Dutch we have some useless things like combined letters: "c" and "h" are both used (like in "cake" or "hotel") but when combined to "ch" they sound like a "g". There are even duplicate ones: "au" and "ou" are both the same sound, and "ij" and "ei" too. You can't mix them though, "ijs" is ice and "eis" is a demand even though they sound 100% the same. I'm not sure about silent letters though, the "h" is audible even if only slightly.
We're talking about a law that has had misuse baked into it from its very inception.

So far, I've yet to see anything to convince me that there are any valid uses of this law. Just censorship.
Dealing with actual clients that sends e-mail campaigns, trying to get them to deal with Markdown would be an absolute disaster.

Then again, we have in-house editor similar to this (though less polished), and letting them use that is often also a disaster. We've found that making the templates more restrictive (give them places to type text, but not much more) tends to work best.
In fact, English has had several great moments in history where the orthography could have been reformed.

One of my favorites is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin's_phonetic_a...
It didn't stop the owner of Justin.tv. They said two weeks and gave 24 hours to get all archived videos.

Anyone boycotting twitch.tv? Anyone????
Mechanizing Korean: The Evolution of Korean Typewriters is interesting thought-fodder along those lines. This LWN comment thread touched a little bit on the effect of printing on scripts, as well how different means of input, such as cellphone keyboards, interact with different scripts: http://lwn.net/Articles/607599/
Virtual time as in Jefferson's Time Warp system?
We explicitly ask people to include their needs in this. They are people, they have needs - ignoring that is stupid, in my opinion. If we have someone on staff who is contributing greatly to the company but has high mortgage payments, and I pay them less because I have this other person who is contributing the same but has much lower monthly costs, and I pay the first the same as the second, I will lose the first because they can't afford to keep this job.

The best answer here would be to pay the two equal employees the same amount. The responsible one can save, or treat him/herself, or whatever. Paying irresponsible people more is dangerous for your company and your employees. I spent years on the pointy end of that stick. It was a really shitty situation; I knew that the guy "needed" a lot more money than I did, because he had a gaggle of kids, a nice house in an exclusive neighborhood, a bunch of cars, etc, while I live in a modest house, owned my car outright, and kept my expenses low. The worst part about my resentment was that I felt bad about feeling it; I denied to myself that I even felt it, because I really didn't feel that it was fair to deny this guy the ability to feed and pamper his kids, keep his house, etc. So, I worked hard, kept my head down, made about a third of what he did, and bottled up and denied my resentment for years. I'm still trying to repair the damage.

So, that was long-winded and just an anecdote, but seriously, be careful with treating people of roughly equal value differently because one of them needs more money than the other one. It can work out poorly.
Plundered by Harpies: An Early History of High-Speed Trading [pdf]
I disagree. The rendering engine of the browser is the performer who looks at my script(HTML/CSS/JS) and produce the final result for the visitors to the web page. Writing HTML is not closer to performing music, but actually closer to composing music, if you will.

Also, I think although knowing theory would help you play a song with an instrument, it's not required, is it? More likely knowing music theory is for understanding/appreciation of the composition/structure of the music. So no, playing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on an instrument is NOT equivalent to writing "Hello world!" program. On the other hand, composing a super simple but complete song is closer to writing a "Hello world!" (or a Fibonacci series) program.
Sold.

Now we just need to get 7.2 billion minus 2 people on-board.
How are you supposed to get them to https the first time if they type in http://site ? I'd suggest rephrasing that to "use HSTS even if you also redirect http to https". Of course it's not secure, technically, but are you willing to annoy (and lose) users until browsers only use https? If you expect visitors only via links, then I suppose you could do away with http, but I don't think any business that cares more about money than about making the world a better place (any public company and most private companies) would want to stop accepting connections on port 80 today.

Binding a session to a specific IP might be more secure for the typical case, but it will annoy the living crap out of fringe, but legitimate, users. As already mentioned, Tor users would bear most of the pain and suffering, but if your service supports multipath TCP or something like it, a simplistic "store connecting IP with the session" approach seems like it would cause those users to suffer, too, although not as much.

It's also possible the client might be in a corporate environment with corporate SSL (MITM) proxies, and maybe there's a cluster of them so the public client IPs change for different connections. So you'd have to bind sessions to networks, not individual IPs, but what network size do you use? Then even odd MITM attacks that don't use the client's real public IP could use another IP on the same subnet as the real client to connect to the remote service, so how much do you actually gain?

If session cookies are httponly and secure, what's the reason for binding sessions to IPs?

If it were just Tor, you could set up a hidden service, and detect clients that are connecting from Tor exit IPs and redirect them to the hidden service. But it's not just Tor.
">How many years have to elapse before that icon is rethought? When was the last time you personally held an actual floppy disk? How would you even fit a floppy disk into a phone (or website)?"

I don't think any of that matters.

How many smartphones run on AA batteries [1]? How many people have ever configured anything involving gearing [2]?

Rethinking an icon feels like a contradiction. It doesn't matter what it's 'supposed' to be.

It's not a floppy disk, it's the save icon.

1: https://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=battery

2: https://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=settings
Yes, Uber Drivers Are Rating You. Welcome to the Future of Reviews
I think your points are correct. However, it really is difficult and requires lots of specialized domain knowledge to properly support a big group of the world's languages. I'd almost go so far as to hire a specialist developer just to do international character handling if that was a requirement of the software.
How much money does instapaper make
Should we now have this expectation for any free github project that's popular?
No mention of Arabic anywhere. Has OP not worked with it? In any case, how easy/hard is it to work with in data processing?
> Who cares about tone? Why be sensitive in this context? It's a language. Why would anyone get offended when someone says "Your language sucks"? It's not like they're saying your hair sucks or your tongue is incapable of tasting sweets or your ear is shaped like a tulip.

Yet article 1 of the United Nations Charter states that one of the four purposed of the UN is "To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion".

Language politics are in fact really complicated. I myself am from a country that less than a decade ago went without a federal government for 20 months because the different language groups couldn't get along.

> It's a language. No one can help what language they learned when they were a child.

And while we're at it, why would anyone be sensitive about skin color or nationality?
Leaving aside the semantics, I'd always begrudge any control I gave away after being 100% in charge for so long.
Spammers actually still make money if the spam lands in the spam folder, because people still look at it.

Also, believe it or not, there are actually people who buy things advertised in the spam folder and get legit product.
Btw, I noticed that Yosemite has slightly enhanced its dictation tool for use with Automater. Might come in handy.

http://www.macworld.com/article/2834532/ok-mac-using-automat...
Really in depth theoretical analysis.
So every piece of paper the NSA touches is classified, and we're told that even the most innocent dripple of bits of information are vital to national security.

And here is the CTO working part-time for private companies.
I wonder how discussions with clients at this security consultancy go? "Should we use TLS for our internal networks?" "Uhh.. let me think about this... uhh.. I think that's classified".

Right, that is clearly how it will go down.
My understanding is it's actually declining as a percent of email sent.
I switched to LastPass recently due to convienience, but I still don't feel safe using it. Just waiting for a day where there is some sort of breach and all of my passwords will be leaked.

Before that I was using KeePass, which is great to use, but it is nice having the autofill, password generating, etc in the browser for you.
You can recognize a broken writing system truly from two hints.
A) It takes several years to learn how to write for a native child.
B) Or there is spelling competitions with native children.
English speaking people got luck in that phonology had almost no importance on the development of computing.
ICU is very good, but even it isn't perfect, and they know it. http://userguide.icu-project.org/collation/customization:

"ICU provides a data-driven, flexible, and run-time-customizable mechanism called "tailoring". Tailoring overrides the default order of code points and the values of the ICU Collation Service attributes"

Also, you sometimes need context to properly sort strings. Examples:

Are you sorting phone book entries or items in a dictionary? In some languages, that does make a difference.

Are you sorting Swiss German or German German?

Given two 'obviously' Italian words, should you apply Italian collation rules? You probably/maybe shouldn't when both are words in an English-language dictionary.

Some library catalogs want(ed?) to sort "2001: a Space Odyssey" as "Two thousand and…" (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog#Sorting)

For the latter, even that ICU feature to customize sorting won't help you.
i think the blocks-as-syllables concept in hangul makes lots of sense. that, and the straightforward mapping of letters to the english alphabet, made it fairly easy to learn how to read korean. understanding what you're reading is a completely different matter however.
Well yes, because you're distinguishing between Masse and Maß (Mass). They're not precisely equivalent if you're attempting to determine meaning, but for many purposes they are.

For example, searching for "ss" in Chrome will hit ß. That's good behavior.
> the company is going under and they are most likely out of cash. They don't want to go into debt/get stuck with a huge bill.

Two separate people have offered to cover the bandwidth and other costs of transferring the files to some other place.
> 65 GB could take weeks to download.

If someone lives behind a 1 Mbps home connetion, then yes, about 1 week.
Startups that get big have more than one founder. If your goal isn't just to survive but to grow big, statistically at least you are better off with a co-founder.

I say this as a single founder of a startup that didn't grow.
In MIT's book [1] on negotiation strategy they suggest that instead of bartering on a figure one should negotiate a way of determining the figure. That way you don't have a numerical anchor and you also have a mechanism for the future.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes
As in you can specify the time at which things execute and swap out the concurrency model at any time. This makes it perfect for testing: https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions/RxJS/blob/master/doc/...
Raising money is over valued in the valley
Many years ago I was involved in the design of several very high end listening environments. At that time I built a series Excel-based tools to analyze room acoustics and design wall, ceiling and floor treatments in order to fix problems.

I remember one room where we ended-up custom fabricating 150 Helmholtz resonators to tame the beast. If I remember correctly it had a 2,000 W sound system with an array of various speakers. The walls has six layers of drywall glued and screwed together. The concrete floor was isolated from walls and floated on hard rubber.

We ran impulse tests with specialized software as we went along to fine tune the resonators and other treatments. The speaker system manufacturer sent their acoustics expert to help. As an EE you sometimes get to work on projects far outside your area of expertise. I have always embraced those opportunities and usually come of of them having learned a ton of new and interesting stuff.

Interestingly enough I was showing these Excel tools to my oldest son the other day. He is getting into Excel and this workbook has examples of doing things with VBA one does not normally see on normal Excel spreadsheets. At that time I thought it could be interesting to re-code this with Python and build a neat little website around it. The comment on this thread by acqq made me come back to that thought. Could be interesting.
> Include phonetic training. Make the user distinguish between each minimal pair in the language, possibly even every single syllable in the language. This is simple, but rarely done.

I believe that this is very good advice.

The realization there are actually different sounds in different languages has came as surprise to me. I always naively assumed that the same sounds where just combined differently. Obviously this has had a negative impact in my learning.
At first I thought you were being sarcastic, but then I realized you are actually arguing that only overly-sensitive people are offended when their language is insulted.

Since language is a core component of human culture, many people become offended when their language is insulted or threatened. Countries have gone to war over language. Provinces succeed over language. Language is a very, very sensitive topic in many places, such as Quebec, Catalonia, the nations of former Yugoslavia, and so on and so forth.

You may think that people shouldn't be sensitive if their language is denigrated or insulted, but that is demonstrably not the case now. Some of us may not care, but many people -- maybe even most people -- would become angry or annoyed if their native language is open ridiculed.
It is difficult and does require some learning, yeah. In fact, it's more difficult than the article hints at, because while it falsely speaks of languages it's actually only concerned with writing systems, and a lot of the more interesting localization problems happen on the actual language/grammar level (for example, plain gettext isn't good enough to handle Korean post-positions, so we try to do better[1] in KDE).

But we can and have built reusable tools to shoulder much of the burden, and because these problems are so fundamental and culture-enabling, it can actually be a really rewarding and satisfying area to work in. In fact, I bet if you catch the author on a better day, I wonder if he wouldn't agree.

1 = https://techbase.kde.org/Localization/Concepts/Transcript#Ko...
This is very helpful! Thanks to OP for sharing. :)
It would have been good for the game to tell me that. I played another time and got a slightly different ending. It doesn't make much more sense.

The game is great the first time around, but it's absolutely boring the second time around. I'm just skipping through the text because it's stuff that I've read the first time around.
Yes. You probably should. But there is no point in ranting, the same is true if you want a good graphics system.
A lot of devices in the M2M communications world already perform operations similar to this with available networks. Alongside use various weighting metrics regarding such as network strength and bandwidth cost to determine which one to use.
Ligatures and letterforms like the "long S" (ſ) actually arose as a result of printing, interestingly. If you look at 13th century manuscripts created in Norman England, they're extremely legible and regularized. The very earliest printed texts ("incunabula") produced in England tried to mimic this medieval blackletter script, and are actually quite easy to read if you get used to them. By the Elizabethan era, many typesetters were switching to Italian-derived forms that they thought looked more distinct and elegant in a letterpress context (serif fonts like Garamond). German printers kept working with the medieval style, however, giving rise to the Fraktura script that we now tend to associate with WW2-era Germany.

I wrote a bit about the ſ letterform here:

http://theappendix.net/blog/2013/7/why-does-s-look-like-f-a-...
Behind the Mic: The Science of Talking with Computers
I found this particularly interesting even though it is quite light on details. The next step they illustrate at the end is really a major turning point in interactivity.
I don't understand either why many are suggesting you get a cofounder. You just need another person who can work on UI, branding, PR, etc. Don't give them any equity, don't give them any control over the innards of tarsnap, just pay them a handsome wage (for the handsome job that they'll do).

p.s.: in my ideal world, you are every founder (doesn't partake in shitty, ethically-questionable growth-hacking techniques), and your company is every company (offers a decidedly great service, no gimmicks). I think it's extremely unfortunate that you have to do these extra things to be successful on the next level... I wish things weren't this way. But unfortunately you do have to play this strange ballgame to get there.
That's very interesting. Thank you. Which cultures have gone to war over language? I'd like to educate myself on their history, and try to understand how something like language was one of the primary reasons for something as serious as a war.
I'd be really interested in reading that, but my google-fu can't seem to turn it up (I can find the author, Dr. Kim) but not the book. Any ideas where I can find it?
Penguin 3.0 Update, data, figures and thoughts
Right, and that's exactly what I'm planning on doing.
Doesn't it depend on region? ISTR they don't use ß in Switzerland, so there is no Massen versus Maßen.