flymasterv

At GOOG you’re required to, by policy.

Language detection (where “language”== one of the 200 languages that are actually used), IS trivial, given a paragraph of text.

And the fact is that the author of the web page doesn’t know the language of the content, if there’s anything user contributed. Should you have to label every comment on HN as “English”? That’s a huge burden on literally every internet user. Other written language has never specified its language. Imposing data-entry requirements on humans to satisfy a computer is never the ideal solution.

It states the cargo culted reasons, but not the actual truth.

1) Pronounciation is either solved by a) automatic language detection, or b) doesn't matter. If I am reading a book, and I see text in a language I recognize, I will pronounce it correctly, just like the screen reader will. If I see text in a language I don't recognize, I won't pronounce it correctly, and neither will the screen reader. There's no benefit to my screen reader pronouncing Hungarian correctly to me, a person who doesn't speak Hungarian. On the off chance that the screen reader gets it wrong, even though I do speak Hungarian, I can certainly tell that I'm hearing english-pronounced hungarian. But there's no reason that the screen reader will get it wrong, because "Mit csináljunk, hogy boldogok legyünk?" isn't ambiguous. It's just simply Hungarian, and if I have a Hungarian screen reader installed, it's trivial to figure that out.

2) Again, if you can translate it, you already know what language it is in. If you don't know what language it is in, then you can't read it from a book, either.

3) See above. Locale is mildly useful, but the example linked in the article was strictly language, and spell checking will either a) fail, in the case of en-US/en-UK, or b) be obvious, in the case of 1) above.

The lang attribute adds nothing to the process.

I still don’t understand what people think they’re accomplishing with the lang attribute. It’s trivial to determine the language, and in the cases where it isn’t, it’s not trivial for the reader, either.

This is great, but it’s entirely disqualifying that it isn’t called Purl.

Stuff like Space Fence.

Lil is such a beautiful language. It’s so much fun for little data tasks like this.

I had my first internship at Groove. I did a ton of the I18n work, and something with the chess demo.

I love this, but how do you end up with 739 users? That's both a lot of users, implying that this isn't just a total hobby, and also not a lot of users, which means it hasn't been marketed THAT heavily. What's your secret? Where do you find that niche?

Yeah, there’s no way Domino’s doesn’t appear on that chart.

Orbitz.com has done this for 20 years.

The helicopter intro was the best.

Who put the bomp…

It’s so bad, still.

I am not worried about missing posts, on my own reader. I specifically only grab the single newest post, so I may be missing posts by design.

That said, I think 3 or 4 days seems reasonable.

My strategy is to have an exponential backoff. I start a new feed set to query every 30 minutes, and if there’s no new post, I double the period. If there’s is a new post, I halve it. My reader goes through every feed every half hour, and randomizes which feeds it checks: a 1/4 chance for a 2 hour feed, a 1/48 chance for a 24 hour feed, etc.

This is a fantastic essay and project, but the chances of getting anyone to play an actual game with it are basically zero.

Mutices.

eBay has new-in-box Zires for $10.

HTML 3.2 is still out there! Just use it.

A solid 70% of pop up ads in 1999 were for X-10 systems.

That’s not what media mail is. Media mail cannot contain advertising.

I have been intentionally spending Sundays at the command line only: Browsing using various TUI site-specific clients, and elinks with my own customizations for sites that I use a lot. I write code in a console editor, and I just don't use GUIs for anything. Having an arbitrary set of constraints has made me more mindful of my use of technology, and has given me reason to delve into lots of random projects to scratch an itch.

There’s a reason xor interface buttons are called “radio buttons“.

And this is a flaw of Perforce: in a Git/Mercurial system, the presubmit can stack the changes into two commits. In P4, one CL has to contain both changes.

And Google uses P4(ish) because monorepo, so they build further abstractions over P4 to enable git and hg in user space which erases most of the potential benefits of either which is also all really, really good software, but it’s all effort necessitated by monorepo. CitC is a work of art, but it is also something necessitated by a stack of other choices that forced their hand into inventing something miraculous to keep hacking around a previous limitation that nobody else has.

I don’t understand why they had to format 100k files. You enforce the format with a presubmit and let the code get formatted in the next change.

I have long felt that Google’s strength has always been making a bad architectural choice and then executing on it flawlessly. So many systems are designed in ways that require incredible technical execution to make them workable, and they do it.

It does, now! If you build from source and turn on the Danger Zone, you can call out to the shell, including curl.

https://itch.io/post/9447223

https://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#thedangerzone

Decker

https://beyondloom.com/decker/

It's not guaranteed, because McDonald's has to stop serving breakfast sometime. Whatever they choose becomes the defacto local time zone. And so, what have you saved over just using UTC when you need to talk to someone on the other side of the world?