jdmitch

I had a Ludlow, but sadly only have the mats now! Do you have any idea how easy they are to come across in the US these days (specifically NE)?

There are lots of Linotypes in use by hobbyists, and even commercial printers who don't do newspapers, but less regular, higher margin projects. DWRI letterpress in Rhode Island has a 'Linotype Daily' (https://dwriletterpress.net/the-linotype-daily-1) which is no longer daily, but still semi-regular. Definitely not the same vibe as the Saguache Crescent though!

I hesitate to wade into this, since I have a lot of admiration for these two men, and I am only a mediocre speaker of Pulaar, the western dialect spoken by Fulani, whose eastern dialect is Fulfulde. I have seen several variations of this story making the rounds over the last few years, and it is full of misconceptions about the Fulani communities across the Sahel, and more generally about linguistics (and language politics) of trans-national communities. It is unfortunate that in this particular article Microsoft repeats many of the errors of the Atlantic[1], and the Letterform Archive [2], and adds its own self-congratulatory spin to it.

The first misconception is that Pulaar/Fulfulde is/was rarely written. Despite the experiences of the Barry brothers, the language has been written for hundreds of years. There are manuscripts in Arabic script that attest to this - unfortunately these are generally poorly catalogued, but BU's African Ajami Library lists 25 [3] and the British Library has several collections [4]. There is a strong historical argument that the Fulani were actually the primary instigators of literacy in pre-colonial West Africa, from the 15th and 16th centuries. The practice of writing Pulaar/Fulfulde with Arabic script did without question wane in the 20th c. - particularly among the more educated and urban communities which the Barry brothers come from. This led to decreased standardisation of the language as written in the Arabic script, especially as Fulani communities came to have stronger ties to national identities than to their transnational identity as Fulani. At the same time, the general push for literacy in languages written with Latin script in the region (mostly French and English) led to a loss in language prestige for Pulaar/Fulfulde as it had less utility as a lingua franca, and was not the language of religion, trade or politics, in the way it had been.

By the 1990's, however there was substantial linguistic work done on Pulaar/Fulfulde and a modified Latin alphabet was widely in use in the linguistic and academic community, which is currently seen on almost all Wikipedia articles on the subject. This is marked by 'hooked' letters for plosives, as in Fulɓe, which this Microsoft article writes "Fulbhe." The fact that this was not widely enough known that the Barry brothers came across it before developing a new standard for writing is testament to the fragmentation within the Fulani community, but I think it also reflects the fact that they did not come at the issue from a linguistics background. Nonetheless, this pre-existing writing standard does accurately represent all of the sounds in Pulaar/Fulfulde (and also is not much different from many other African languages in the region written with a Latin alphabet). It also was used for printing a number of books in the early 2000s, and I knew of a handful of companies regularly printing books in Pulaar in Dakar, Senegal (where it is also a minority language). I once picked up an order for 10,000 books printed in Pulaar in 2005, typeset in this commonly accepted script adapted from the Latin Alphabet.

The second major misconception of the article, is that a language needs to have its own script to be accurately represented, or that having its own script enhances the literacy rate of a language. Other comments have touched on this, so I won't dwell, but from a linguistic perspective (or even from a software language perspective) the opposite is more likely to be the case. The answer to the proliferation of different standards should almost never be to create a new standard - especially one that is not at all based on the previous standards (as Adlam is based on neither Arabic or Latin abjads/alphabets). Literacy in Pulaar/Fulfulde is almost certainly better served by doubling down on an existing standard that is accessible to those who most want to access it, rather than a new standard. There are 100-150 million Pulaar/Fulfulde speakers, so even success in the range of thousands of Fulani who recognise Adlam doesn't mean it is likely to overtake the actual pragmatic literacy of those hundreds of millions who already ready on a daily basis in Latin scripts, and could easily recognise the adapted letters.

From a political perspective, there might be a value in a new unifying standard that underscores the uniqueness of Fulɓe from their neighbours in Mauritania to Sudan. But in every one of those countries, the Fulɓe are a minority, and many of their communities are nomadic/transhumant as well, further undermining their ability to integrate or oppose existing political structures. While I applaud Adlam as a commendable assertion of identity, and a valuable potential contribution to the linguistics and typography of West African languages (should it engage constructively with the field), it is politically doomed, and unfortunately lends credence to the dictum that "a language is a dialect with an army."

Pulaar/Fulfulde is an incredibly important language, but it hasn't had an army since the fall of the Empire of Sokoto in 1903 to colonial powers. It has largely been seen as a dialect because of that, despite being one of the most widely spoken in Africa (Swahili is the only other African language with a claim to have more than 100 million native speakers).

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-a... [2] https://letterformarchive.org/events/inventing-the-adlam-scr... [3] https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/18688 [4] https://eap.bl.uk/collection/EAP387-1

the linked article in french from an Algerian website has more pictures: https://www.tsa-algerie.com/la-neige-tombe-a-ain-sefra-pour-... and the link to the page of the photographer who took most of them: https://www.facebook.com/kbouchetata

I don't think it's that obscure in British english usage, even outside of cycling contexts (source: American living in the UK)

I just got back from Ghana, where I was evaluating an ICT in education project, and one of the people on the team that was implementing the project had this phone. At first I thought he just had an old phone, then I learned he had downgraded from a smartphone. Then I thought maybe he was doing it for ironic retro style points (which is not really "a thing" in rural northern Ghana in the way it is in London or New York). He did acknowledge a certain smugness about the "anti-style." At the end of the day, it seemed like the practical durability and the long battery life were the clinchers for his decision to "downgrade".

This is a follow-up post by the author: https://medium.com/@alicezielinski/afterword-mit-blonde-engi...

how did they do this!?!

As an avid, but fairly aggressive cyclist, I have gotten into a fair number of accidents. Some of the injuries sustained, and the ways in which other injuries would have been likely without a helmet in those situations, have convinced me that many of these studies don't take into account some very common situations in accidents. Direct head impacts are relatively uncommon, due to natural instincts to protect oneself. More common are:

- Side impact from vehicles turning across the bicycle lane. This is the most common cause of fatalities in road accidents in London, and if the vehicle is going at speed, nothing can be done with or without a helmet. Usually, however, the vehicle is slowing to turn, or just clips the rider who hasn't had time to react. When this happened to me, I banged into the side of the van which was cutting me off, and my helmet kept my head from hitting the vehicle, likely right at the temple, which could have caused significant damage.

- Unintended dismount. I find a huge number of "accidents" are really accidents that were just barely prevented by a quick manoeuver, which often leaves the cyclist on the ground. I have avoided collisions quite frequently, but still ended up doing a little barrel roll off the bike. In these cases, I may not be moving fast, but it is nice knowing my helmet will keep me from a kerb to the head.

-Scrapes and abrasions. This is the most painful injury, and one of my most gruesome accidents involved a nasty abrasion on my face - had I not been wearing a helmet, it would have probably meant about half of my scalp was rubbed off as well, so very happy to have been wearing a helmet in that instance.

The "crash test dummy" proof that we don't need helmets doesn't stack up in my experience because I think a confident cyclist is more likely to have oblique and "minor" accidents rather than major direct collisions, and major head trauma is just not going to be prevented by a $40 piece of foam and plastic.

I definitely had a friend once who was told she had received too high a score for the police job she had applied for. I thought I remember at the time some mention of the rationale being that the police force didn't want people who were too independent-thinking to simply follow orders. Maybe that was just my friend's interpretation though!

How is this not a problem for Apple's recent announcement that another company is already called "Apple Pay"?

Sorry - that was my fault putting in the "n" in the posting - here is a particularly elucidating article on the linguistic/ethnic/geographical differences of the use of the word Maya/Mayan: http://www.osea-cite.org/program/maya_or_mayans.php

Andresen has an alternative explanation for why there won’t be big changes in the way Bitcoin works. After the transaction issue is resolved, the work of looking after its code will increasingly be a job for caretakers, not master builders, he says.

Doesn't Andresen's response reflect more of how Bitcoin status quo will be maintained rather than actually addressing why it won't change much?

This also seems to ignore the ways in which so-called "Bitcoin 2.0" uses of the Bitcoin-platform-as-ledger will affect the actual nature of the platform, as these uses have yet to be employed on any large scale yet.

more detail from krebs here:

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/07/hackers-plundered-israeli...

summary of changes from macrumors.com:

The new notebooks feature faster versions of Intel's Haswell processors, as all 13-inch models now come with 8GB of RAM standard while all 15-inch models now feature 16GB of RAM. The high end 15-inch model also received a $100 price cut, going from $2599 to $2499.

and this analysis:

Today's minor refresh is primarily a stopgap measure until Apple can launch a more significant update to its Retina MacBook Pro line once Intel's next-generation Broadwell processors hit the market.

This seems to be pretty one-sided, with lines like:

Even on their worst day, the Israelis act with greater care and compassion and self-criticism than Muslim combatants have anywhere, ever.

and:

What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want stifle every freedom that decent, educated, secular people care about.

While Israel and others consider Hamas a terrorist organisation, this is in reference to the armed wing rather than the political party, which most people would not consider in the same category as ISIS and al-Qa'eda.

This was originally posted in 2012 here: http://www.techyville.com/2012/11/news/unemployed-black-woma...

and posted on HN (got to 99 points) here, about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6034800

and again before that (though it went dead, with 57 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5528772

and worst of all: It's just as messed up and unfair now as it was then!

I wonder how the decisions for inclusion of languages were made, as there are some very odd decisions. For example, Osmanya is a script created for the Somali language that was hardly ever used (Somali literacy was only widespread after the latin alphabet was adopted - previously Arabic was commonly used). The population of actual users of this script is pretty indisputably 0. 100,000 would be a wildly ambitious estimate of the number of people who had ever actually even seen the script.

On the other hand, Oriya, which has over 33 million native speakers, including 80% of India's Odisha state, does not appear to be supported.

full article here:

ftp://213.176.96.142/aps8b0dfb6b-e773-20140502092553.pdf

just a minor correction - the script is naskh from the triliteral root n-s-kh (نسج - copy) not naksh from the root n-k-sh(نقش - engrave)

The article mentions language processing, interpreting audio and visual material, and playing games as goals that have been set for AI, and then suggests as an alternative goals that "can expand with our own abilities and desires."

But there is little mention of creativity, empathy or emotion - aren't these the types of dynamic, responsive cognitive abilities that are uniquely human? Certainly there's an ethical dimension to the question of whether we should strive to recreate these in AI, but they seem like the type of goals that depend on complex and dynamic intelligence, that would be the most difficult types of tests for computers to pass.

“Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter — rambling the streets of London.

This also happens with slinkies - I've ruined more good slinkies that way!

Why are private universities subject to the FOIA? Or am I wrong in thinking that Oxford and Cambridge are private?

Growth does not happen in the lab, it happens in the markets over long period [sic] of time in a slow process of diffusion, improvement, and recombination.

This is an interesting observation, but doesn't square with my experience (and I expect that of many HN readers), because he is obviously talking about two different types of growth (incubation vs evolution? blossoming vs mature development?) but doesn't specify what they are either within the biological metaphor, or the business paradigm.

I always thought the explanation I heard as a kid ("The stripes help them blend in to the tall grass of the savannah") was a bit lacking - this makes much more sense!

This is pretty amazing - it is probably going to get out of hand very quickly and become as epic as "Time" (xkcd.com/1190)

Avoiding the cucumber test trap is hard. It’s easy to keep adding scenarios which give you a false confidence that your application is working correctly. It’s easy to just add some more code to make those scenarios pass.

Instead we need to keep focusing on the conversations. Find the scenarios that matter, that are important to document, that are worth automating and push everything else down into lower level, isolated tests.

How then do you prioritise which tests are actually important to document, or better still edit out the ones that aren't? It seems like it would be difficult to be consistent.

The thing I first paid attention to was that there is no longer a mad dash to sign up in the first 10 seconds, but they pick people at random from those who apply in the first 2 days. I might actually make it for once!

great story: “I think I went to sleep at four, I slept till six, I got on a flight at seven to Orange County where Boost was. And I just got to that office and sat there, and the guy was like, ‘Weird, you’re in my office.’ I said, ‘Just meet me for 10 minutes, and let me know what you think.’ He said no a few times, but I showed it to him, and I could tell he was really impressed.”