skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> and informative.

There's a lot of half-knowledge and misdirection in this blog post, though.

* Languages aren't writing systems, and vice-versa.

* There are often decent reasons and upsides to the things he calls out as sucking. His rant on Hangul, for example - for human users, the morpho-syllabic grouping of letters into blocks in Korean writing tends to be beneficial, because they make the orthography of morphemes in different contexts more regular and morpheme reuse smoother. I also tend to consider the way Hangul is implemented in Unicode actually quite clever (you can use a formula to map from the code points of the individual letters to the code points of the pre-composed blocks). (I've contrasted Chinese and Hangul a little in this LWN comment: http://lwn.net/Articles/608260/)

* The German ß isn't a simple ligature for 'ss'. It has a different history, an orthographic dimension and also serves as a useful prounciation hint.

* Point 5, "The width of a character depends on context", is full of half-knowledge. First of, it's not "Jamo vowel" - 자모 (ja-mo) is the Korean word for "letter", so it's "vowel jamo" if anything. The alphabet is called 한글 (han-gul). Second, combining characters aren't in any way unique to Asian scripts in Unicode. Unicode contains separate code points for the individual Hangul letters and the blocks they can be combined into. Unicode also contains separate code points for Latin letters and the various diacritics and accents they combine with in Latin-derived Western scripts, along with code points for those combinations. For human users, these sort of consistent combinatorics in a script are a boon, and that Unicode chooses to represent both primitive elements and combined versions is a general trait of Unicode.

In general, the thrust here is "your writing systems sucks for me while doing my job", which is subject to this guy's performance and qualifications. It's not the same as "writing system sucks for its users". I find the specter of stuff like this catching on as memes among linguistically and culturally ignorant hackers (because hey, we write English, so we're in the doing-it-right camp, right?) frightening, because programmer convenience is only one factor among many, and most likely not the most important one.
The Stradivarius Affair
Really? It just sounds condescending and arrogant in a very Anglo-centric way even if I try to read the satire between the lines.

If that was the intention, the author isn't very good at it.
Your colonial approach to understanding diverse forms of human to human communication sucks. Like seriously, ASCII is supposed to be global? Lazy at best.
Defeat airfare price discrimination with Skiplagged
Defeat price discrimination with Skiplagged, an airfare search engine that matches tickets where your destination is not only the final stop, but also any stop leading up to it. Those hidden tickets, which can easily cost up to 80% less, are actually usable. All you have to do is take the flights up to your destination and ignore the rest.

More Info: http://www.portlandtraveltips.com/2013/11/20/save-money-on-airfare-with-throwaway-ticketing/
Skiplagged: https://skiplagged.com/
Is Online Dating Revealing Our Biases, or Reinforcing Them?
Yep, languages are not made to be easily encoded in binary form.

Also, symbol systems are just tiny bits of what a human language really is. In regards to grammar/semantics and phonetics for example, English is painfully loose to deal with in a programmatic way. That's just the way things are.

That said, I believe Unicode's approach to inclusion of new characters in the set is wrong. It shouldn't be so dynamic. Unicode needs a smaller base, a standard extension system and standard extensions (in a standard extension format, reviewed in long but predictable timeframes, lets say every 10 or 20 years). The current system is a pain.
> talking to you was the highlight of the weekend for me

Sounds like attending was worth it for you, after all, and for the same main reason you noted in your post: networking.
Comcast not welcome in city, council says
"I also like that political is a dirty word now"

I think the word is acquiring dirt from that acts; the slimier and more partisan the political conversation is perceived to be by people, the less they want to associate with it in any context.
Yes, the tone is a far cry from the cool-headed, neutral, sterile aesthetic one would expect from technical or academic writing. However, the article is very informative, and should probably be bookmarked for later reference --- in case one ever has to do this kind of work.

The article may have been written in anger, and thus it provokes anger. Good! Programmers who don't get angry while solving hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable problems are, in my experience, unlikely to truly solve those problems --- sweeping issues under the rug, or passing the problem to someone else is more likely. Anger is a very powerful motivational force if honed correctly, whereas contentment often leads to docility, complacency, and quitting.

I find that problems that make you angry or enraged are simultaneously: important and instructive. Most performance problems (or even multi-threading problems), for example, fall into this category.
Computing was born in English speaking places (as far as I am aware), probably why it doesn't cater well for more complex languages.
IMO Colin is spot on. I attended startup school 2 years ago, and had the exact same experience (well, sans tarsnap conversations)

It seems worth going to once, if you don't already know/follow "startup ethos" but otherwise, It doesn't seem very useful from a practical standpoint.
Cops Need a Warrant to Grab Your Cell Tower Data, Florida Court Rules
"POSIX doesn't do Titlecase."

So that's an example of why your language sucks, not why POSIX sucks? Sure thing, guy.
I'll do my best to fix my language as soon as you fix your units.

Your units suck.
How would that company's pitch go? "Hey, you can trust our services - our guy works for the NSA".

Seems insane to me. What's next? The Stingray makers hiring FBI's director Comey as an "advisor"? You don't see see this as a huge conflict of interest?
Original Author here. I fixed the Firefox bug and merged a pull request to allow answers to be transferred to other browsers. I will add a Show All Answers button soon for folks who just want to browse.

rcfox: These exercises teach functional programming concepts, and that includes composition as it applies to the Observer pattern. I use RX but you could also use bacon JS or build your own lightweight Observable library. You should check out rx.lite.js which is a minimal subset of the library. As for your concerns about including a library, I urge you to reconsider if you can afford the extra download size. The Observer pattern is ubiquitous in software and you'll be amazed how versatile Rx is. At Netflix we use it on the server and client for a wide variety of different tasks. Rx has more than paid for itself 10 times over.
As a Finnish speaker, I must disappoint you that both Russian and English do have broken alphabets (although this might not affect their character coding). English makes extensive use of silent letters and letters whose pronunciation is dependent on the context (word) they appear in (take e in "context" and "appear" as an out of hat example). I haven't studied much Russian, but I know that the letter ъ in their alphabet is never pronounced, and instead used to modify the pronunciation of the preceding letter.
Not the best source of information, but Yahoo answers would say otherwise:

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070715142605A...
Firstly, the problems he raises would be hard even if the native speakers of a given language were the first to develop computers. In fact I read a fascinating argument (from a link on HN?.. I forget) about Japanese computers developing into "appliances" (a gaming machine and a separate more expensive word processing machine for professionals) because early computers were too under-powered to support the Japanese character set. And that it was because lacking these problems that Americans developed "general" computing first, with the Japanese stuck in the "appliance" mindset until the late nineties.

Secondly, I'm not a native English speaker and I always had this sentiment; "why isn't all computing in English", "why do we have i18n", etc. For one, I don't think everyone studying a standard foreign language is bad, and while English is probably not the best option (Spanish is reportedly easier), it's there, it's as close or closer to being lingua franca as any other, and it's certainly easier than the language with the largest number of native speakers (Chinese). And then even someone with bad English might benefit from at least having File and Edit menus instead of often crazy translations of these things. A little bit of English and a little bit of standardization can't hurt.

Of course ultimately computers ought to display text in all those languages - if not in menus, etc. then certainly in the content itself - so this sentiment of mine isn't very helpful at all. But I wasn't offended by the article in the slightest.
The RxJS author here. This was meant to be training for Netflix team members to become familiar with RxJS as they use Rx for pretty much all of their systems, whether front end or back end.

We've made great strides recently making Rx more accessible including making it easier to pull in only the things you want/need: https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions/RxJS/releases/tag/v2....
> transparently capturing traffic in a Yosemite VM so that we can start nailing down exactly what is being sent from the myriad of daemons

I'd love to see this.
The handset used for "call" icons should probably be rethought soon too.
We have lots of shitty representations. Try delving into DateTime sometime. Korean (Hangul) does not suck, btw.

The languages have been around hundreds of years, how long has your machine representation been around? Give it time. It just shows the software is still immature relative to the problem.
OP should be thankful to the Greek, Roman and Arab ancient civilizations for sane-to-compute-with languages. Basically all other languages are so fucked up and mind-fucking that it's no wonder modern mathematics, science, engineering and then computer science developed so fast in particular regions of the world... not to be a cultural bigot, but Sapir-Whorf ftw :)
RxJS author here. We on the RxJS team have never called RxJS FRP as we do not have a continuous notion of time, instead we have a notion of virtual time. That and we do not distinguish between events and behaviors as they all are Observable objects.
I enjoyed the article and found it refreshing in this apocalyptic politically correct world.
They should, but they don't. That's the problem.

Every time I get a crappy text version of an email, I try to contact the company (via email or Twitter) to get them to care about text emails. Usually, I've received encouraging replies. It seems like marketing email services don't optimise text versions and companies don't even realise that. Probably because fewer people care about text versions.

I encourage you too, to send requests for better text emails if you care about this.
This article is interesting in that, while it's not the intention of the writer, it seems to point out some technical underpinnings for how language might impact culture. 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.

I recall reading some discussion of this concept in the field of International Relations' Constructivist theory, but any salient links escape me now.
Can You Guess the Best Colleges for Programmers?
Yahoo Answers is correct for Switzerland, wrong for Germany and Austria, and wrong for historical uses of ß.
Activation Lock Bypass iOS 8.0.2 – 8.1 iCloud Apple iDevices
RxJS author here. I'll make sure that it's more cross platform as I do actually work for Microsoft. This has been a Netflix only training platform, but in order for us to teach more, we have to be better about supporting all browsers.
Marc Andreessen Is Long on Bitcoin and Short on Apple Pay
Japan and China have had some kind of computing machinery since the 1980s at least, as well as digital typesetting, so you cannot say "They never had typewriters, that's why their encoding is so messed up".

Hangeul has very simple rules, and is generally simple, but if you want Hangul Jamo (i.e., archaic letters that don't compose neatly into "standardized" syllables), you'll be in a similar place as if you want to produce mediaeval ligatures or thorn letters. Þis is hardly ever neſceſʒary in modern text.
I am somewhat amused by the multiple studies and articles on Bilingualism. Simply because I happen to be just one of the many pentalingual (if that's a term) people I know. My entire family speaks five languages. English, Hindi, Marathi, Kutcchi and Gujarati. Kutcchi and Gujarati are what I was born into. The rest are mandatory through school here (Mumbai, India). So anyone who went to school is at least trilingual. In fact most students are fluent in at least 3 languages by the time they are 6 or so.

If there is any good at all in being bilingual, what does it mean to be trilingual? Let alone pentalingual? Does the law of diminishing returns apply?
@jhusain not only that but we did introduce a CLI which allows you to bring in only what you need:
https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions/RxJS/releases/tag/v2....

Still in its early days but is very promising for making RxJS as small as you wish.
> The article may have been written in anger, and thus it provokes anger. Good! Programmers who don't get angry while solving hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable problems are, in my experience, unlikely to truly solve those problems --- sweeping issues under the rug, or passing the problem to someone else is more likely.

That's a really interesting point and it makes me think of a developer that I've worked with (in a company of non-developers) who cared more about 'inconveniences' than I did.

It occurs to me that he did a much better job of engaging with these 'inconveniences' and fixing them.

Perhaps I should get a bit angrier?
Scaling the vector images is technically doable, but having them look good is another matter. Traditionally a lot of low-sized icons are hand massaged, otherwise due to the scaling you inevitably have most of the boundaries sitting across pixels and everything is quite fuzzy. I found with these that when they dropped sub 128px I was struggling to determine what they were attempting to describe without resorting to the captions. I know that this is less and less of a deal with high resolution displays, but it's still worth considering just how easy to parse an icon is at small size.
You can hit cmd+q from the screen where it's doing the install and it will quit out and let you reboot back into your OS.
Interesting thought: It's possible that computers would inevitably be invented in the US/UK/Russia or some other country with a relative simple character set, because the doing something like Chinese, first would posse a hindrance.

If you need 32bit to do Chinese, just to store the characters then your first step into computing is going to be harder, compared to the American that can do with 8bit.
> If you're unhappy with anything enough to leave, then leave.

I wasn't unhappy enough to leave. That's why I didn't leave.
Numbers: Men's Rights
ß is equivalent to ss for the purpose of determining alphabetic order, same as ä is equivalent to ae, etc.
The author is someone who is trying to apply a simple and consistent set of rules to non-perfect systems.

The author of course gets 'angry' with the super-non-perfect systems.

Those languages are very difficult to deal with, and he is expressing his frustration. That doesn't mean he's being condescending nor arrogant.
Even if it's tongue-in-cheek, I take issue with the general sentiment. If supporting languages spoken in the real world sucks, then we need better approaches to dealing with text. Not more whining about how unicode is hard.
RxJS author here and creator of some of those exercises. This was meant as a hands on lab where we proctor the event. We've given this at a number of conferences including QCon, CodeMesh, among others to great success. If you have suggestions, please do file an issue and I'll make sure we get them addressed: https://github.com/jhusain/learnrx
I understand it's important to have plenty of intuition, but as an adult I do want to speed up the learning process. That's one of reasons I set out to learn the theories. My main goal is to be able write songs of quality at least slightly above total crap.

Maybe I have not found the right learning materials or correct way, or maybe because I am the type of persons who need to have lots of hands-on exercises to be able to grasp new concepts.

Sure, programmers also need to know all sorts of things you listed, but armed with only a few concepts, a newbie can start to write simple programs from the very beginning, in the forms of piecemeal topic-focused little exercises. The result of each exercise is a fully functioning program. I wish I can find a similarly structured music theory course that uses the same approach. Also, are there projects in music which are similar to ProjectEuler.net or the likes, where you can do focused practice on specific topic? I would be happy to pay for those services.
> In a web application, keep an eye out for suddenly changing IP addresses. If the user's IP address for a session changes, terminate the session immediately and force the user to authenticate again.

If your on a mobile device this may happen often. If you are connected to WiFi and travel out of range you will transition to cellular data, with a new IP. I frequently walk to my sister's house which is ~30 seconds away, looking at a website or app on my phone. During this walk I will transition from my WiFi, to cell, then to her WiFi. It also doesn't protect against your example threat of having your session stolen in a coffee shop, as all users on the same NAT subnet will all have the same public IP, so the server can't distinguish between them.
You should replace "non-perfect" with "non-English" in your comment. That would fit just as well.
This is an extremely cool project, but calling it a tourbillon movement is disingenuous at best. With a tourbillon movement, the escapement rotates relative to the rest of the movement (the front plate, back plate, drive train, etc). This is only an escapement, lacking even a mainspring. In fact, in the displays pictured, the escapement rests on the framework in such a way that the escapement remains stationary when powered externally. This is, unquestionably, no where close to a tourbillon movement.

Kudos to the author for building a 3D printed escapement, but he's abused the language of horology in a way that really put me off.
This article is speaking clearly from the encoding and sorting view, not the easiness to learn or the logic of pronounciation.
yup, the talks for the most part were of the inspirational sort by those who had won the startup lottery and had tidbits (but not 8 hours' worth) of useful advice to share. as others have noted, they was less about the content (since that could be had online) and more about absorbing the energy of the group, getting a sense of the character and approach of the speakers, and feeling kinship with everyone there.

i'd also traveled for startup school and would say it was just worth it for me. if i'd been local, it certainly would have been worth it, just for meeting people like the guy who created tarsnap with whom i shared a power outlet until the ushers scolded us. =)

(to be fair to the ushers, the cords were in the aisles, which could be a hazard)

one of the lytro engineers taught me a bit more about light field photography, and an arduino hacker and i chatted about locomotive robotics. on the other end of the spectrum, there were discussions about ad tech business models. so to me, it seemed to be a good mix of people with all kinds of technical skills.
> The not-icky reason is that he doesn't want to.

Eight hundred million photos and all their comments. That's historical record. That's our historical record. No one jerk gets to destroy all of that. The "hurr, well, don't use it" is completely bonkers--I don't use it, but my history is on there, too. It's a record I didn't put there but matters to me as a citizen and as a member of society. Destroying a major part of the historical record for everybody is indefensibly shitty, full-stop, you don't get to say "well it's mine" when it's not.

It's ours. Twitpic was allowed to profit by holding onto it awhile. Now it's time to do the right thing.
This doesn't get me nearly as much as the fact that smartphones are called phones, and probably will be for the forseeable future.

The save icon may be anachronistic, but a hardware drive is still an accurate representation of what's happening. Today's phones are about as much about phoning as computers are about word processing.
English pronunciation leads to algorithms like Soundex [1], which just wouldn't seem necessary if words were written purely phonetically. Hangul gets closer, in a way. It seems hard to make rhymes with words like 'reprise' and avoid 'despise'. Not all languages need to be so ambiguous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
Only seems to show news submissions by a user, not their comments.
Yup, both ъ and ь either modify the preceding constant (тварь) or insert a sort of separation between letters (подъезд).

There are also some non-phonetic aspects to the language, which I didn't really think about until taking Russian in college (sort of native speaker, took the class to make some friends.) For instance, "o" is frequently pronounced as "ah" (хорошо - horosho - is usually pronounced as 'harasho'.)

Every language has quirks.
Use recruiters to get the best deal.

If your a web designer, developer or software engineer I'm sure your getting one recruiter a day to a week offering you X job.

A lot of ppl don't like to deal with recruiters but for me I'm flattered and think I don't need them now they need me. Thus when they ask how much I seek for their opportunity I significantly jack up my rate. Doing this has led from going from one company(every 2 years) to another each time making significantly more money. Though one company I worked for learned I was going to take a better offer and matched it.
How to Build and Use a Multi GPU System for Deep Learning
Penguin 3 Released – Google Killed Your Site While You Slept
The article, and this comment thread, is definitely heavy on the money factor, but there's also the everything-other-than-money compensation aspect mentioned in the article as well.

I find it really hard to try and figure out what other benefits, aside from a salary hike, you might get from a new job. Realistically, I think you need to make your way right up until the point where they do or don't offer you something. Everything about the interview process is as much of the company seeing if they like you as it is you seeing if you like the company.

Sure, if you have no intention of changing your employment situation, well, yeah, you're wasting a bit of someone else's time... but there's also the flipside that you might not even notice that there's something more interesting, or something intrinsically more valuable, about a new job until you actually get to the point where you're being offered it.
Your username is "zeek" and your password is "BR549".

100% of the people who view this page are now one of my registered viewers.
These are all complaints about orthography, not language.
Let's not forget the horrible mm/dd/yyyy format.

I need y'all to just use U.S English combined with ISO dates and metric units. Thanks.
16. Hyphenation in your language is context dependent.

English, your rules for deciding how to hyphen words are JUST HORRIBLY BROKEN! Hyphenation should at most depend on the word to be hyphenated, not on the semantics of the whole sentence.