shughes

Unfortunately, I haven't come across much.

However, a good option, which is similar in principle, is Lingq (https://www.lingq.com/en/). The designer of it has recently become interested in comprehensible input and I've noticed he's adding more and more similar concepts into the app. He also knows 20+ languages, and much of the app was designed based on the approaches he's applied over the years.

Anyway, the app has stories written and spoken in Dutch (as well as other languages), and you can stop and click individual words if you're not able to figure out their meaning.

Also, a YouTube series that I find useful for Spanish (EasySpanish) has recently added a Dutch channel: https://youtube.com/c/EasyDutch.

Lastly, a free chrome extension that I find quite useful for all languages is Language Reactor, which adds easy playback handling and quick translations when needed. It works for YouTube and Netflix: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-reactor/h...

I wish there were more options for Dutch, but once you pick up on the comprehensible input methodology, you'll see how you can adapt apps like Lingq and Language Reactor into a similar method.

The approach that has seemed most effective for me (for Dutch and Spanish), and I can also rationalize it from my logical side, is "comprehensible input" method.

The idea is that you're learning like a kid, but in a more focused and efficient way. E.g., someone tells you a story, and while doing so, they'll motion or point to the things they're talking about, but they do so entirely in the foreign language. However, since they're doing so in a comprehensible way, you can easily figure out what they're saying.

It's meant to trigger the connection in your mind between the objects/actions and the corresponding words in the foreign language, and it's meant to bypass the translation phase which language learners often start with.

This is the YouTube channel that really opened my eyes to the model: https://youtu.be/t4CAdmquJsY

Pattern 12 was something I learned early (fortunately) in my software development journey. I think the article I was reading was something to do with how to properly partition your disk (it was about 15 years ago, so fuzzy details, but I remember it was a topic that directly impacted disk storage). Anyway, it listed a series of steps that he followed, which I had printed out and began following (again, 15 years ago).

The paragraph following his series of steps then said, "I soon realized that this was not what I wanted, and in fact, it made for a cleaned out disk. No good. So next.."

And yes, it wiped my disk clean too. The light-hearted way in which he wrote this infuriated me. I just wiped clean my computer because of his article. Granted, I should not have blindly followed the article, and it was a good lesson that has prevented me from ever making the same mistake again. But the way he listed the steps in a very procedural, "this should be followed" format; it felt very deceptive, and the result was irreversible.

I always liked the concept behind BitShares, but I never hear much about it. Conceptually, it seems like it targets the third-party concern.

Anyway, the idea of BitShares is (was?) to ensure stability of their crypto currency through futures contracts. You buy/sell futures contracts that peg their coin to another asset. This guarantees a certain payout at expiration.

For example, you can buy a contract that guarantees you receive (or must pay) the bitshares-equivalent of X USD when the futures contract expires. (You can also have contracts that guarantee the bitshares-equivalent of X ounces of gold, etc.)

So the future (smart) contract itself acts like the fungible stablecoin, even though it's not backed by the actual asset. And it doesn't rely on a trusted third-party. Rather, its stability relies on the futures speculator market that trades these futures contracts.

Such a concept seems like it doesn't have to be limited to bitshares, but can be generalized into a smart contract traded on blockchains like Ethereum, etc.

Did anyone else notice the recent Evernote update in Mac's App Store have a lot of suspicious positive reviews? Most of them were by accounts that had only submitted that one review.

When you compare it to the reviews of their past updates and the fact the current update just fixes minor bugs, their image improvement campaign seems a little over the top.

I completely agree on the technical observation.

My trade is definitely computer science first, but every once in a while, I get in an artsy mood: https://picasaweb.google.com/samuel.jennings/Art.

My philosophy with art is that it is more technical than "artsy," and that the artistic aspect comes from the layers of logic. The more layers of logic applied, the more artsy it appears.

Art is largely a matter of identifying and mimicking color gradients, angles, proportions, etc., and then learning/practicing the various ways to apply the abstract objects to a certain medium (e.g., oil paint on canvas, charcoal on paper, clay for sculpture).

Then you apply additional logic on top of that by learning (and ultimately extending) various "rules" that make something appealing. For example: rule of thirds, color contrast, and studying what stimulates the brain.

There was some study I read about in Scientific American magazine about how people enjoy impressionistic painting because the effort used by their brain to combine the various individual shapes (i.e., thick paint strokes) into an understandable picture is kind of like solving a puzzle on a subconscious level. That can be stimulating and exciting to the brain even though people may not realize it's happening.

I think Brian dated my sister back at Rice.. haha. So strange to stumble upon him here. Anyway, impressive startup resume. I'm familiar with a lot of his projects, but never connected the dots.

Too bad my comment contributes nothing to the post and it's gonna go to the bottom. Oh well..

I'm software developer working as a tech consultant at Accenture. But I'm also an artist: http://picasaweb.google.com/samuel.jennings/Art.

I think art and math are entirely connected. You combine enough logical statements together, you produce creativity.

In fact, I get a bigger creative rush while solving an algorithmic problem than I do producing physical art.

If you always repeat the same steps, why can't you abstract them into a single method that takes name and text as arguments. You shouldn't ever have to repeat the same set of steps in multiple locations.

He uses emacs because he likes the benefit of slime when he's programming with Clojure. But he's not opposed to using vim once a vim Clojure environment becomes more mature.

This is financial, but good move on my part. I invested in Apple the day before the release of the first iPhone ($120 a share). I then recently used some of it to buy a car way out of my league ($270 a share).

A few years ago, I signed a contract with an awful web startup. At the time, I was laughing on the inside because I thought it was funny how much they (two brothers) wanted to pretend they were a legitimate company. One brother was the "CEO," and the other brother was "Vice President." So like a CEO, a VP, and then no employees..

Looking at the Ceglia/Zuckerberg contract, I got chills, and began digging into my old documents, looking for that contract. The last thing I want is to find out I signed 50% of earnings away.

I discovered that I did sign 50% of my earnings away! Fortunately, the agreement was between their company and my now deceased startup. I'm glad my startup failed..

That is not always the case. When I have to present programming technical designs to a room of clients and upper management, I know that it matters. I completely know that it matters. But I research to the point I'm convinced I know more than everyone in the room. Therefore, I go into the meeting confident. And it's nothing to do with, "realizing it doesn't matter."

Convincing yourself it doesn't matter and then having confidence, is much more difficult to do than knowing and understanding each scenario and then having confidence. And that accounts for almost all scenarios. A social situation, presenting in front of clients, dating a girl.

Take them as extremes, using a speech as an example. Let's say all you think about is realizing it doesn't matter. Then you stand up to present and you are convinced it doesn't matter, but you start to realize you forgot to think about the speech. So you don't know what to talk about. Your heart starts racing, and your voice starts cracking, and all you can think about is your nerves.

Now let's say all you think about is the content of the speech. You stand up to give your speech, and realize you know everything there is to know about the topic. So your mind becomes engaged in the topic, and you forget any nerves that you may have had.

More confidence? I guess it not so simple since you're interpreting it in a different way than I am.

If you're overly confident, assume you're just average. If you lack confidence, assume you're better than everyone else.

I think it's a matter of knowing where you stand in the range of low to high confidence, and then trying to balance it out.

Ask HN: I'm going on my first date with a real girl. But my only formal attire is a Red Voyager Star Trek uniform. Should I spend money on formal clothing, or will my Star Trek uni be reasonable?

Dear Apple,

Congratulations on doing well over the past few years while still maintaining an air of marketing discipline. You could make more money by taking the high volume, low quality route, or the cheaper JIT route. But instead, you continue to take pride in the quality of your hardware and software.

I don't miss you because nothing's changed. Steve Jobs has always been cocky, with the intent to have strong control over the quality of your image. But people have built him up as the antithesis of Bill Gates and Microsoft's revenue model, since Jobs is historically the underdog in the battle. But that shouldn't distract from his true intentions. He's not a proponent of openness and open dialogue. He's a proponent of high quality products and high quality image.

Using "Dear Apple" feels very dramatic.

By trying to incorporate programming into trading.

If you get an account with a company like Interactive Brokers, they offer an API. They also only charge $0.005 per share.

You can study a trading method called momentum trading, which is the idea of riding the curve for a very short period of time. For example, right after a financial statement is released, the company's stock is going to go up or down, depending on the statements results. You can write a program that immediately determines the direction the share price is going at the time in which the statement is public, then buy long or short depending on its direction. Then do the opposite when the program determines the up or down curve is leveling off.

Pretty interesting stuff, and it'll get you engaged.

As far as books, google momentum trading.

Sigh..

Really, why was I down voted? I'm not sure what was wrong with the comment. I think anyone would agree with the idea of tort reform, just like anyone would agree with the idea of health care reform. But even if you don't, I thought that with Hacker news, you only down vote people when they aren't insightful or off-topic. So, a differing opinion also accounts for down voting now? Like on Digg?

I think we should show a chart of each country's health care costs relative to how much their lawyers make on health care related malpractice cases. Because in America, it's out of control, and probably the largest reason health care costs so much.

Honestly, a good first step in taming the health care and health insurance costs should be to cap how much lawyers make on malpractice cases.

Why do people rarely talk about tort reform? I apologize if you did, but I just did a quick browser search for "tort" and "lawyer" and got no results.

I live on Earth. Also, North Korea uses the Korea Exchange: http://www.mapsofworld.com/north-korea/economy/stock-exchang...

My point is that North Koreans, like anyone else in the world, communist or capitalist, have very little of their value in the form of paper currency. Whether it be goats, rice, gold, stock, bank accounts, etc.. They may value themselves based on a nationally recognized currency (the won?), but that doesn't mean that most of their value is in the form of liquid cash.

The theory of currency recognizes the value of a currency based on its level of trust (to be paid back). Soo in a country like North Korea (ESPECIALLY), citizens probably rarely maintain their worth in the form of paper currency. Because they don't trust it (whether they consciously realize it or not). If Americans don't trust the US dollar, you can imagine that North Koreans don't trust their own currency. Educated or not, brain washed or not, that's common sense.

Another example. I personally trust the American dollar very much. But how much do I have in the form of liquid cash? About $50 in my wallet. The rest of my worth is in assets, stock, savings, 401k, car, tv, intellect, etc. Just not liquid cash. So if America changed currencies all of the sudden, I'd say, "Rats, I just lost $50."

Sooo, again, my point is that this probably doesn't change much for North Koreans. Especially since most of them probably have very little personal wealth anyway (paper cash or other forms of value).

Heavens.

This only affects paper cash though, right? So assuming they have most of their value in a bank, savings, stock, physical assets, or whatever it is they do in "DPRK," then they should be sort of okay.

But I have nooo idea how the banking thing works in DPRK. For all I know, everyone's "bank" is a box filled with cash. Which would make this currency switch suck a lot.

I guess, if you want to only know basic stuff. But engineers, programmers, physicists (etc..) can benefit from maintaining a large knowledge base of stuff that they wouldn't find interesting or have a conversation about. If you only try to remember stuff that interests you, you probably won't be as successful as someone who can remember even the uninteresting stuff.

Besides, knowledge is a VERY powerful thing.

The only thing that kind of bothered me was that Bitbucket focused too much on blaming Amazon. Here's a sports example. Let's say a team loses because the left tackle messes up and the quarterback gets sacked. After the game, during a press conference, does the quarterback say that they lost, but it's the left tackle's fault? No. Even if the quarterback believes he himself performed great, he'll still take part of the blame. That's because it's the professional thing to do, and people respect him more for it.

You could say that Amazon and Bitbucket aren't on the same team, so it's different. But Bitbucket is paying Amazon to perform better just like a football team pays a player to make the team perform better. In other words, based on the concept of a team recruiting players for better team performance, Bitbucket recruits Amazon for better company performance, so they're basically on the same team.

That said, Bitbucket should focus less on singling out Amazon, and focus more on trying to figure out what they could have done better. It's the professional thing to do, and I'll respect them more for it.

I think something like this could be ideal for a hosting company's client interface.

I remember him from the show, "Secret Millionaire," where millionaires dress as poor people for a week, then give away money to citizens that helped them out.

While I respected him for doing the show, I remember thinking at the time that he was way too into himself. He'd wear v-neck, designer shirts even though he was supposed to look homeless.

Then he'd cry a lot, and say, "And I normally never cry, but this has gotten me so emotional.." Which means he probably cries all the time to make himself look sensitive.

And he spread out his giveaway, which made the episode boring. Where other millionaires gave $100,000 per person, he'd give multiple people, $10,000.

All around bad episode. Now I'm mad..

Sigh.. That joke sucked.

URLs for Twitter are facing the same problem that transistors are facing. People are going to have to start parallel tweeting.

  Haiku in Java:
  System.out.println(
  "My little pony...");