maoeurk

Stop working? It never even started working for me, I tried it and always just got errors or lack of quota.

Glad you're enjoying it!

Currently the best way is just that there's a "mark known" button at the bottom of articles to mark all remaining words as known. Also on the wordlist view you can select many words and mark them all known at once. But we're also working on integrations now to help make the on-boarding experience easier and leverage existing study workflows.

The main challenge is that in Polyglatte a word is defined as (lemma [the root word], part of speech, language) and most other systems don't use part of speech, so there's often not a 1 to 1 mapping when importing. So we've delayed having much here so far, but it is definitely a solvable problem. Is there a specific place/format you would want to import that data from? If not then perhaps we can add a "mark wordlist known" button and add some French word lists.

I’m at an intermediate level, and don’t really want to tell the program that I know all the rather simple words.. or does that not really matter?

That's a good question, due to the way typical word frequency distributions are, the problem becomes less annoying pretty quickly if you mark words as you see them. But solving this problem is also an important part of making Polyglatte fun and a smooth experience for new users. And helping people to spend more time enjoying and using their languages is one of our major goals with Polyglatte -- bulk marking words you already know isn't very fun.

Feel free to reach out on Discord or our new community forum (https://community.polyglatte.com/) for help or for feature requests by the way -- we'd love to make Polyglatte better for you and everyone else.

I’m building https://polyglatte.com a language learning website (and app) for learning with real content like YouTube videos, subtitles, and text articles. Ideal for intermediate and advanced learners.

Some neat features are that we fully parse the text and part of speech tag it, we have a system to prepare for difficult articles/videos with clips from easier ones, and the core idea scales really well to more types of content like chat messages and images (not public yet).

Our focus is now shifting to on-boarding and marketing. We have a few users that have figured out how to really use Polyglatte and they love it and use it a lot but for the most part, many users leave without seeing most of the value we can provide.

It’s a self-funded 2 person project and we haven’t monetized it at all yet.

I have no problem charging for it but I need to figure out how to help people really understand the value we provide and reach more people before it would make sense to do so.

Thanks!

Yeah we have JLPT word lists available and you can set them as a focus and learn the words from the JLPT word lists from clips / snippets of videos and articles -- perhaps there's deeper integration we could do there too.

I agree with JLPT being a useful tool, I personally used their word lists as a core vocab builder when I was studying a lot of Japanese.

I'm useless at learning languages, basically foreign language dyslexic.

Don't be too hard on yourself! If you were able to pass the JLPT at any level, I think you're doing great.

One of the motivating ideas of Polyglatte is to make language learning more fun. I'm a big believer in mass exposure and quality time spent with the language. I think for most people, most of the time, just being able to have fun with the language will give you great results.

If you're looking for new ways to improve your listening, consider watching some YouTube videos, not with the intention of understanding everything but with the intention of having a good time. For me, listening skill is something that largely came out of nowhere. I gave my brain a bunch of stimulus (Japanese YouTube videos I'd watch for hours every day, even if I didn't really understand it) and then I woke up one day and I just understood most of it or it felt like my brain was suddenly able to keep pace at the very least.

Anyways, the most important part of that system is finding videos you want to watch even if you don't fully understand them and that you'd want to watch even if it wasn't helping you develop a skill.

Thanks for the feedback! I did originally write it myself in a rush using the English as the basis but have since had it rewritten by a native Japanese speaker -- I will have that done again.

(tango o suru, seriously what does that mean?)

Thanks for pointing this out, there's actually a mismatch between the JSON fixture used to load this article into the DB and the raw text from which that JSON should have been generated: there's a missing token there. Frankly it's just good (or perhaps bad) fortune that it broke in such a way that it kind of made sense without that word there.

I will get that fixed up along with a general rephrasing/look over by a native again.

I’m working on a website for intermediate learners to practice by reading and listening, including Japanese, and Japanese is my strongest second language so I can answer a bit about why it’s so uncommon.

Japanese is just really, really hard for computers to deal with. The only reason I got parsing and word segmentation to be pretty good was because I was so familiar with the language and wrote a 3000 line post-processing function on the tokens to get reasonable results. We have a few similar post processing steps like one to better handle separated verbs in German but it’s nothing compared to what we needed for Japanese.

Additionally Japanese kind of breaks our word model, despite being aware of it and planning for it from the start and every part of the app needs special logic to support Japanese properly.

It’s a lovely language, honestly my favorite language I’ve spent time with, but it’s non-trivial to handle it in general with code.

Happy to answer any questions and also, self-promo: https://polyglatte.com for my project. Happy to make improvements to better support you / the intermediate reader use case, just let me know.

Ukraine has captured a lot of Russian equipment during the recent Russian retreats.

I’ve even seen it claimed in the past few months that Russia was, at points, the number 1 supplier of Ukraine in terms of equipment due to how much they left behind. [1]

If you’re interested in this topic and have some time, I’d recommend https://youtu.be/sNLTE75B0Os

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraines-new-offensive-is-fuele...

I've been wanting to make a datalog tagging system for a few things for a while now but don't have the energy to actually do it. Essentially the idea is to encode relationships allowing for very specific queries like: "show me pictures of a person wearing a green hat looking at another person" which is not something most tagging systems could reasonably do.

Breaking that down, that'd be something like:

  wearing(person1, hat), is_hat(hat), is_green(hat), is_person(person1), is_person(person2), looking_at(person1, person2).

Most of the effort and value around a system like this would be building a community of people to tag the data and tools to make that tagging easy... and perhaps a more user friendly query UI.

There are two issues -- (1) feeding copyrighted material in to an AI model, and (2) getting copyrighted material out.

The latter is obviously a violation of copyright, full stop.

It's not obvious to me that (2) is a violation of copyright. Unlike patents, copyright violation is not as simple to prove. My understanding is that, at least in the US, independent creation is a valid defense against copyright infringement. For example if 2 people independently write the same story and can prove that they did, they can both hold copyright over that story.

The analogue to this does exist without AI, when creating something that looks like copyright infringement, clean room design (don't look at similar things) is often done to ensure that "independent creation" can be used as a valid defense in court. Given that, I think (1) is probably not safe to do at all if you can't prevent (2).

Yeah it's pretty much exclusively used incorrectly. The original meaning was that an exception to a rule proves that such a rule exists. For example, "no parking on Sunday" is an exception that implies that parking on any day except Sunday is okay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

It honestly doesn't bother me as much as when people incorrectly say "begs the question" when they mean "raises the question" but I think we're long past the point of us ever correcting any of these.

I'm working on a B2C product as an indie founder and I run into this quite a lot. Though from my perspective a lot of the "physical vs non-physical" disconnect is also about the fact that people who have not had direct experience in the creation of a software product are unable to extrapolate from what they're currently seeing.

I think that's actually completely reasonable though; people take things at face value. But what that means is that all the potential in the world means nothing unless you can show via features how that's a good thing and what the impacts are.

This impacts the product I'm working on because there's a lot of stuff on a base level that seems like similar products in the space but the real value is the integration of systems and data to fundamentally change the interactions. And until recently, we didn't have much of the "Big Picture Ideas" on display for our users.

I’m actively working on language learning software through immersion at https://polyglatte.com . It’s currently completely free with no way to pay for it but I still feel some amount of guilt about self-promotion even though I get lots of positive feedback and it’s already helping people.

I find marketing to be very uncomfortable so I’ve been neglecting it, but I know it’s the only way to any kind of success.

In Taipei, and Taiwanese cities as far as I've seen, it's the same! The main benefit is just how convenient they are. For example there's a place in Taipei where you can walk to 72 different 7-11s with a 10 minute walk [1] -- and that's just the 7-11 there's tons of FamilyMarts and some smaller stores too.

My personal favorite food to get there is the chicken breast and protein drink with 45g or so of protein for about $3.50 USD, great on the way home from the gym.

The biggest and strangest difference I've noticed about the difference between Taiwanese and Japanese konbini are that you can't buy vegetarian or vegan onigiri in Taiwan despite there being a ton of vegetarian and vegan people here. My favorite flavors, which are vegan, are only sold in Japan.

Also to give more context for the function of konbini in Taiwan (and probably Japan), they're for a lot more than just food: I pay my bills there at the counter, occasionally pick up packages (they act like PO boxes), and print out documents there when I need a printer. So really it's a multi-function store that's open 24/7 with pretty decent food and is on every street.

[1] https://international.thenewslens.com/article/68424

Just an anecdote but I live in Taiwan (Taipei proper) and haven't noticed or been affected by any power issues today

Perhaps that's true on average, but there are some very cold places in Japan and the housing is the same there as I understand it: built to last 20-30 years.

For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahikawa#Climate

You do know that Tibet and Taiwan wasn't any better for the poorer part of the people

I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to, but Taiwan is generally considered a much nicer place to live than China for the average person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_in_Asia_and_...

Assuming this was run on a 64bit system, the Rust version seems to be allocating and zeroing twice as much memory as the Go version.

edit: this has been pointed out as incorrect, Go ints are 8 bytes on 64bit systems -- thanks for the correction!

  let mut cache: Vec<usize> = (0..=target.chars().count()).collect();

  let mut cache: Vec<usize> = vec![0; target.len()];

  cache := make([]int, len(target)+1)
  for i := 0; i < len(target)+1; i++ {
    cache[i] = i
  }

So between doing more work and worse cache usage, it wouldn't be surprising if the Rust version was slower even with the faster allocator.

I got extremely sick with the flu (confirmed influenza type A by test) at the end of January/early February this year in San Francisco despite being vaccinated. I've had the flu once or twice before but I don't remember it being this bad.

It lasted about 5-7 days and came with a high fever, full body pain and soreness to the extent that any type of movement was difficult, delirium and confusion, difficulty eating, and vomiting for 1-2 days (which isn't typical of the flu as I understand it).

I'm 24 and generally in very good health and felt that without modern medicine and sanitation I could have easily died from this. I lost about 5% of my body weight and a lot of muscle.

The reaction to COVID-19 makes me wish we, as a society, took preventative health more seriously in general as the common diseases can be extremely nasty too.

In fact from everything I've heard about COVID-19, it sounds like it wouldn't have been nearly as bad for someone my age as the flu was for me this year.

Except that you load code from multiple sources and one could eventually have a piece of JavaScript code that makes use of such behaviour to have access to some feature that by default is not accessible.

With all due respect, that doesn't make WebAssembly unsafe in any way.

By the same logic, any program that takes any kind of user input is unsafe because the program could trust data it should not trust and then execute incorrectly.

If a program does not validate (untrusted) input then it is the program's fault. Not the input's fault or the input-producing-method's fault.

I agree with where you're coming from though. People are going to make mistakes and if the average developer has to interpret blobs of bits as meaningful data structures just to get things done, then we are going to see a lot of these types of problems. However, there are already projects in the works that are automating the $LANGUAGE to Wasm glue code which should completely mitigate this issue.

I'd love to hear more about this. Have you considered writing a blog post about this and sharing it here? Or if you happen to know of any good resources you can share, I'd appreciate those too.

The reason I ask is that I imagine a small or solo startup that's not focusing on massive growth but is optimizing for quality of life has a different set of challenges than the more traditional startups that people on HN are used to.

If non-English languages are also considered, are there any where naming things is easier? Have to keep in mind that a "good" name maintains a balance between descriptiveness and brevity.

As a native English speaker with a relatively very weak understanding of Chinese, I find Chinese names to be generally understandable and English names to be completely opaque.

This is most pronounced when dealing with technical topics:

For example, because I know essentially no Latin or Greek, a name like "Bilirubin" means absolutely nothing to me. Whereas the Chinese word, 膽紅素 (膽 - gall bladder, 紅 - red, 素 - essence), is actually something I can break down and have any idea at all what it is.

Japanese is also generally better than English in this regard in my experience, but unfortunately it often borrows words from other languages. In this case, ビリルビン (birirubin), so it can be even more opaque than English.

In the case of "functor", I also find the Chinese (函子) more obvious than the Japanese (関手) or English.

IIRC SQLite's test suite has 3x as many lines of code as the code being tested

Actually it has a shocking 662x as many lines of tests as it has code[1].

I agree though, SQLite is an amazing piece of software.

[1] https://sqlite.org/testing.html

The author raises a good point that I agree with: math provides more direct value than learning a foreign language to native English speakers. The author talks about what children should be learning and I don't know enough about children's education to disagree, but if you're an adult, I think it's a good idea to learn at least one second language.

Language study and math are not mutually exclusive for me.

When I've learned math it's through focused effort, sitting down and doing math problems, thinking really hard, and talking to people with a whiteboard.

When I start study languages I'm mostly filling time, things like listening to podcasts in the language, going through Anki flashcards while waiting in line or on the subway, or reading things about the language.

Learning the foundations of a foreign language is closer to brushing my teeth or going to the gym than it is to learning math. You just do some mundane things every day for a long time and suddenly you wake up with new skills.

Once you have a solid foundation, then it's closer to having fun than studying. You just chat with people or read things you're interested in, the same as you probably already do for fun in your first languages.

Anyways, my point is that if you have even a little free time or some downtime (like a commute), you can probably fit in time to learn a new language and not take anything away from your other pursuits like actively studying.

That said, I don't think learning a new language is easy, but it's rewarding and the improved cultural understanding, of both your target language and culture and your first culture and languages, it brings makes it worth it to people who live in a globally connected society.

I think that's more to do with how we teach it and expect it be learned than the subject itself. I took 4 years of German in school and have almost nothing to show for it. I went to Germany for the first time recently and was only able to barely perform basic transactions, granted it's been 6 years since I've used it. But I started self-studying Japanese (and later Chinese) on the order of 30 minutes a day and was able to have conversations that lasted hours with multiple people at a bar in Taiwan after studying for just 2.5 years.

I went to "one of the best public schools" in America and have heard that college level language education isn't much better, so I think this is universally true of language learning classes in America.

The truth is that learning a foreign language is very "hard", where "hard" means requiring daily effort and willpower while often feeling confused and looking stupid while seeing little or no results for extended periods of time.

Generalizing this, I also thought I didn't like math until I went to university because all my math classes had been extremely boring and uninspiring. On a personal level, public school past the age of 14 was a massive waste of time and money.

I happened to be looking through some N64 technical documents including a list of patents[1] and noticed that many of them seemed to have expired today!

including ones related to:

Z-buffering[2]

Starfox 64[3]

and Mario 64[4]

[1] https://forums.cen64.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=7

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6414678

[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6540612

[4] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6331146

Increased battery life for one. It used to be easier to toggle on older Android phones because there was a default shortcut in the slide-down menu, now it requires going through the settings at least on Google Android.

edit: Huh, turns out you can add a toggle. I can't believe I never noticed that, thanks!

Hmm, that's a very good question. I'm not exactly sure, I don't have access to either right now, so I'll have to guess.

I think it's probably in how sophisticated it is. The bird example seems analogous to something like a handshake. A handshake has a sort of grammar to it, has to learned by observation/instruction, and if you scrambled it, people would be confused. However, I don't think the ceremony of handshaking qualifies as a language.

The dolphin example as well, while more sophisticated, isn't very when compared to what humans nearly universally do without effort. Though that could be a limitation of the study. Given enough time we may discover a dolphin language or teach them one comparable to what we can do.

Take what I said with a grain of salt though, I don't really know what I'm talking about here.

I bought a physical copy of this book through Lulu about a year ago; it presents some really neat algorithms and ideas. Unfortunately I haven't had the opportunity to apply any of them to any real problems. That said, they seem like the kind of algorithms that, by having them in your back-pocket, would allow you to solve seemingly unsolvable problems.

I've been thinking about applying some of the algorithms to procedural content generation for a toy game that I've been working on. Specifically tweaking knobs and evaluating quality.

animal languages

When I took a Linguistics course at university, both the professor and text book were very emphatic that animals do not have (read: have never been observed using) language, they have communication. They went as far as to say that language was the defining characteristic of humans.

About 2-3 years ago. Thank you! I had not seen either of these; I'll look into them and start a deep dive trying them out this weekend!