Not open source, but https://fluen.ai does a good job at translating subs, while using your own or standards style guides for the target language - ie. reading speed, max characters, "chunking" sentences where it grammatically makes sense, re-adapting them etc.
I think the step from books->TV was much more dramatic that TV->SocialMedia. the delta of stimulation is much greater in the former, imho.
In any case, 1hr of iPhone/day is way too strict for a teenager nowadays. I was lucky to be the 3rd child, and my parents didn’t really paid attention to how I was spending my time. I overdosed on a bunch of things as a kid: TV, videogames, my computer, the internet when I got it (I’m in my late 30s), but then I got over them, except computers, which became my profession.
On the other hand, people my age that were only allowed one hour of Nintendo per day as kids, are still craving the next PlayStation like grown up junkies. Last time I played a videogame I was maybe.. 22.
>On the other hand, people my age that were only allowed one hour of Nintendo per day as kids, are still craving the next PlayStation like grown up junkies. Last time I played a videogame I was maybe.. 22.
This is awfully close to gatekeeping. All hobbies are fine in moderation. One is not inherently 'better' than any other.
Yes, I’ll give you that.
I think the point I was trying to make was that being denied some activities ( or have them severely restricted) as a young kid, may have repercussions later in life that ends up being the opposite of what the parents wished for.
Shouldn't this account for a round trip, and the speed through copper (~ 2/3rd of the speed of light)? That would lower the radius to much more than 500 miles.
I had this thought when reading this before as well. I imagine that the "3 milliseconds" they determined from testing was a typical number, maybe the median/mean, and that the actual timeout varied considerably depending on CPU load at that particular moment. Add in a number of retries for the server to attempt sending each email, and the effective timeout might have been a few milliseconds more... or at least it must have been, because `(2 * 500 miles) / (2/3 speed of light)` works out to about 8 milliseconds (where the 2X is for the round trip, and 2/3 is a rough multiplier for the speed of light traveling in either copper or optical fiber).
I felt for the author as I got deeper into the faq, and recognized this pattern of cynicism, then decided the author was so generous and thorough, not out of obligation (make the emails stop!), but because that is the type of detailed person he is -- and good at dinner parties too!
Writing stories for a technical audience is tricky. I've been doing it for going on 10 years now, and I'm still not very good at it.
A critical rule, however, is to omit detail, (a reader is unlikely to question an explanation they make up themselves) and most importantly, to omit details you know to be wrong. (It is impossible to nitpick a statement that is never said)
An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting
the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a
lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
incidental router delays.
He knew this was largely wrong, and didn't really improve the story, yet he said it anyway. It should have been summarized in a single sentence, leaving out all the problematic assertions that the slashdot trolls leaped on.
Hi, ceequof, the original author here. I agree with you completely in concept; it was a stupid thing to include and I should have cut it.
But as I wrote in the FAQ, I fired off that email in under an hour in reply to a fast-moving thread on an email list where people knew me by reputation and wouldn't question my skills; the totality of my "research" was trying to reproduce the original numbers from memory ("500 miles" stuck in my head, but the distances to the places I remembered pinging did not); and I didn't ask anyone else to edit it for me.
All of that would have been ridiculously unprofessional of me as a writer for something intended for as wide an audience as it went to. But I had no idea it would be forwarded so much and so often (nor so many years later, now decades after the original event!).
Reminds me of the old saying, "it's better to stay silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and confirm it."
It's also a reason why short business emails are better than longer ones. You can always go more in depth. It takes skilled restraint to touch on only the most relevant details without losing the larger point.
Yes, I found this to be one of the most refreshing technical anecdotes I've ever read. The tone and style actually put a smile on my face as I read. I enjoyed how the author guided us through the process of discovery, one which we all know so well, driven by an insatiable curiosity to go continually deeper down the rabbit hole until we find the bottom.
Harumph. :/ Yes, I'm a terrible story-teller for this reason. To me, the details (especially in making sure the numbers line up with reality) are important.
In Real Life, I totally agree the details are important. And I think I have evidence of this: at Google, where they had peer bonuses where one engineer could give money to another as a pat-on-the-back, I got dozens for my post-mortems.
Post-mortems are a case where you must have both story and correct details: lack the first, and you won't create change because the people who need to know in order to implement the required recommendations won't read the whole thing (or retain it later); lack the second, and really, how can anyone trust your recommendations?
Here, I was just trying to quickly bang out a funny anecdote. The things that stuck in my mind I could use to reverse-engineer numbers. I did this because—at the time I worked the incident—I was working with real numbers, so the story needed them for verisimilitude, to give a sense of what I was wrestling with. If I'd had any clue this mail would have taken on such a life of its own, I would have been more careful with them and gotten a tech reviewer and copy editor before posting.
This gets posted on some forum or another several times a year; for a long time I had a Google Alert on it and would hop in threads whenever it happened, since it always followed a common pattern:
1. Someone posts a link to the story, but not my canonical copy with a link to the FAQ.
2. More trusting and/or less-technical respondents upvote or forward or Like or +1 or quasisuperplauditize or whatever the medium has until it gets notice from...
3 ... less trusting and/or more-technical types, who expose the "flaws", most of which are covered in the FAQ.
4. Someone thinks to do a Google on "500 mile email", which returns as the top two results my canonical copy and the FAQ, and posts a link.
5. Most people lose interest while a few continue to squabble over ever-finer details.
Depending on at what point I jumped in, I could affect the speed of the above cycle, but it never changed the cycle itself. The fun of the story is following me through my own emotional cycle I felt when I worked the issue, starting with the initial "no way" to "you're having me on, right?" to "maybe...", to "dear God, this is actually happening", to "I must be going crazy", and finally to "Eureka!"
My intervention in the above cycle really wasn't adding that much to the enjoyment of the story, so I stopped doing it. (I'm not sure it's adding anything today, either, but Hacker News is an important enough forum for people I respect and care about that I thought I'd break vow and rejoin the fray this once.)
I agree, except for the 'common political entity' bit. EU, till now, has been mostly a financial institution, rather than a political one. We will be a political union only when all of us will speak a common language, and all of us will be allowed to vote on the same set of politicians/leaders.
Obviously, there's no well-intentioned advice from Soros, and we all know it.
How about all those people who learned english as a second language and then went to live in various english speaking countries? My accent is a weird mix of Italian/Irish/Northern UK sounds, it wouldn't fit anywhere in that list..
This is like the 3rd time a similar question get posted on HN this week. BTW for mainstream news I use my own app: http://newspo.st
It's a iPhone news aggregator that works in the opposite way of traditional news reading apps. It uses Twitter as a sort of enhanced RSS feed and ranks news stories based on how much they are shared in real-time, laying them down in a newspaper-like format specifically designed for mobile devices.
It's really interesting because it lets you find what's important for people rather then what matters to newsroom's editors, and it puts you in a whole different point of view.
The bare bone MVP is currently available in US, UK and Italy. I'll soon release a new version with categorization and custom topics.
For tech news: here, verge, gigaom, TNW, lifehacker, venturebeat and various subreddits.
When I have time to read for a little longer and non-techie: The economist, guardian, the atlantic and other stuff in my mother tongue.
And of course if I want to read mainstream news I use my app http://newspo.st : it magically guess what news are trending on Twitter so you get what people are reading the most, which is surprisingly interesting. Still an early version, I'll soon introduce categories and custom topics as well. At the moment it's only available for iOS in US, UK and Italy.
