RWeaver

Source?

Thanks for the link.

He definitely did quite a good job with the fitness function (bigrams, finger priority, etc), I just didn't see quite how he came up with the workman layout specifically. If he manually evaluated a few layouts and made tweaks, then surely there is further optimisation to be done for any given body of text. For something as central as a keyboard layout it seems like even those small gains could have huge effects.

It sounds like all of these layouts are just people taking guesses and reporting on their anecdotal experience.

Has anyone ever tried determining a fitness function (travel distance, priority finger use, sequential characters on nearby fingers) and running random layouts through a genetic algorithm?

For sample data use english, romance languages, open source code, etc, for a good general purpose layout.

If you're going to relearn a layout it might as well be the optimum one.

I bet the tourism companies inside the USA are over the moon with where this is going.

It's because they're procured based on verifiable requirements, and yet there's no way to specify a verifiable requirement for user interaction.

Security is almost the same. 'Must be secure!'. Unless they procure and schedule independent penetration testing and code audit (if they even get the code), the vendor is able to deliver insecure code with a horrible UI and still be 100% within the terms of the contract.

The reason government doesn't do more agile is because the politics of the stakeholders can get crazy, with the end result being constantly shifting goal posts and nothing delivered. So they require Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS - give us something that already works), and yet due to the requirements... there's always significant customization required. I wish someone in government understood this : P

What if you have a laptop? I often have some crappy tv show over on the right hand side of my screen with the code editor taking up the other 3 quarters. Or two notepads in semi different places to be able to type text from one to the other with different formatting (eg eg brainstorm notes into DB query).

Not going to give those options up

I liked nReduce, but I think a lot of the ideas could have used some feedback (including mine at the time), or early pivots, some were very obviously not that great

It might have been good to incorporate some sort of acceptance gateway or idea validation phase.

Maybe something like you create iterations of your landing page and the software auto A/B tests them for you. Once you have X signups for one you can join the others at the next stage. Video posts can also go on your home page to keep your fans informed.

They probably should have taken some small amount of money from users at some point also, even if just to keep the service going

I'm probably still very uninformed about Japanese society (it's complex), but they are probably more prone to suicide than others. From what I understand there is a huge emphasis on obligations to others, perfection, and the shame of failure. Traditional Japanese culture frowns on entrepreneurship, preferring obligation to a large corporation (who is in turn loyal to you), where it can sometimes be hard being so disconnected from the value you provide to society.

Most of hacker news will be lucky in this regard. Despite the occasional existential crisis, as entrepreneurs we're self selected eternal optimists. Sadly not everyone turns out so lucky.

Hopefully as batteries improve we can push into the new paradigms of compact wearable computing (watches, raspberry pi rings?) and augmented reality.

The premise that we're all done innovating is completely flawed, and there are no doubt entire companies yet to exist that will rule the market at points in the future.

Credit cards are privately owned though. You don't -have- to use them and if you stop the surveillance stops, so it's a choice.

With government surveillance you have no choice, not even by moving overseas.

Minimal frills I would think

And then there's machine code - industrial alcohol

Or pirate party!

The leader of the opposition is a devout Catholic. As the minister for health he tried to block abortion treatments until overruled by his party, and nearly became a priest before settling for lifetime politician.

He became the leader of the opposition by one vote (internal votes) after a debate between him and the previous leader over climate change (which he successfully argued to his party wasn't occurring, later changing his mind to satisfy the polls)

I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. It's great documentation, about documentation.

I wonder if it would be worth encouraging people to put their names on official documentation that they write. They'll take some pride in it, and get some benefit in that they're recognized as an expert, and everyone else gets a whole bunch more well written documentation (hopefully)

It's a service to society if the grandmother would otherwise be taken care of by the government (at enormous expense probably)

I can imagine other fulfilling activities like helping less fortunate people get back on their feet, which could provide a giant boost to the economy but aren't really directly profitable (as the poor have no money)

So train them. Give them a general aptitude test, tell them you're taking a chance and hope they'll stay for at least three years and give them mentors and a couple of months to come up to speed or they'll be let go

Unless you think of a dynamic ad market as an efficient market signals system critical to the economy.

Ie get the most interesting market messages to the right people, while not bothering the rest.

Not that I do anything related to advertising, but when done intelligently it can actually be a pretty important.

No doubt. If China had done this, the USA would be at the brink of war right now. They would be 'terrorists', or 'information terrorists' or something bizarre for undermining the 'international government'.

So over the USA.

Remember MS-Java? As I recall it was a superset of Java. So you could migrate your java programs effortlessly towards MS, but couldn't get away!

I'm glad they lost that lawsuit

And Angular directives are pretty self contained, with their own scope, template, functions, etc. You need angular.js obviously, but that's just the generic library.

Don't forget corporate secrets.

What are your profit margins? What is the maximum/minimum you're willing to pay for all of your current negotiations? What is the design/strategy for your latest products? What is your exact security plan + policy? Who are your best employees, and how much should they really be getting paid?

We probably won't share it with your competitors, promise, probably even if you're a foreign company, but regardless you won't know either way

Society gets to decide the rules though, and we can't all do that when only a tiny fraction know what the rules are, and anyone that tries to talks gets prosecuted under the espionage act.

Obama really needed to keep his transparency promise, mission failed on that one.

The data retention laws in Australia haven't been approved yet to my knowledge, but as part of the Echelon program they're not safe either. Although at least they announced the intention to make those changes to let democracy work and, and didn't use gag orders for spurious reasons.

I'm expecting something in Europe (ThePirateBay crew seem pretty trustworthy), or some self sufficient island? (New Zealand?)

Definitely, I'm on the lookout for any kind of service that operates in a country with transparent law enforcement and accountability.

I trust Google not to share my sensitive information (product strategies, negotiating positions) with competitors on request, I can't trust some random agent who knows he won't be held accountable if he looks up and sends that information to his cousin.

There's the potential here to 'disrupt' the whole of silicon valley.

And they make a big song and dance about every request having judge approval and being overseen by the court, we already know that they just rubber stamp the collection of 'everything' and gag the companies not to talk about it.

Could it be both? Most network monitoring systems specifically don't want to modify the network data, so "direct access" is undesirable anyway. It seems Google, FB and others are compelled to duplicate all data (including real time data) specified in the FISA, which is basically everything, into these special portals. Then the agencies can access whatever they want carte blanche from the duplicate environments without alerting sysadmins on the production servers. And the CEOs can say they don't have direct access and haven't heard the word PRISM before.

The thing is "no comment" would basically confirm that 'something' is happening that's secret. Everyone would go conspiracy wild and pull everything they have away from Google.

They probably want to confirm it, but in a completely open and transparent way that assures people there's nothing they should fear here, which they can't do because it's all cloaked in secrecy.

The thing is we can't trust any statement by anyone because of the gagging component of NSLs. I've heard it said that the above information is for FBI requests under the patriot act and doesn't include NSLs. For all we know NSL gags could explicitly forbid that kind of reporting and may even compel the recipients to lie if asked.

The last sentence he made, that the government needs to be far more transparent about what they're doing is the only sentence I can really trust as honest, especially given that the alternative to lying could be being thrown into Guantanamo for 'assisting terrorists'.

My Galaxy Nexus worked really, really well when I first bought it. A couple of updates later it's running like molasses despite lots of spare HD space and no random services eating RAM. The culprit is the Google services I can't uninstall and can't stop from connecting, that eat up RAM when reception is poor trying (and failing) to connect.

I wish they'd test their new OSs on old Nexus models at the very least, and why the hell can't I uninstall Google Currents..

Not to mention the organs it's nearest to in your pocket