Thanks for sharing these links. Honestly, charity isn't something I think much about, but have a poor opinion of. Nice to be reminded that good applications of it exist, and that it's measurable and assessable. The 80,000 Hours site in particular looks like a great resource.
Also quite a recommendation coming from you - never fails to amaze me the people you find posting on here.
This looks beautiful, but it doesn't release my mouse click on Chrome; i.e. when I click on the globe to click & drag, the rotation of the globe keeps following my mouse, and I can't click the "play" button.
Nice project though, as a geo guy who's been meaning to play with D3, it's inspiring.
That blog post was fascinating — I had no idea the Fan community was so mobilised (nor that they were even a community cohesive enough to have a name, nor that the name was Fans).
I wonder how many other comprehensive communities exist like this, somewhat under the radar, serving themselves.
99% of the time, if I need to find something I've read before, I'll just search for it & find it.
The exception to this is when I was working support and had several product spec sheets & other reference pages bookmarked for quick access to email links to customers. Even while I was at Uni, I'd download articles to PDF.
On the rare occasion that I like or am interested in something enough to want to bookmark it, I find I rarely actually come back to it. Just looking now, in my Bookmarks menu I have a couple of folders — apparently the result of me saying "save all open tabs as bookmarks" in the hope of coming back to it later — but never having done so.
Long-form articles I come across while I should be doing something else go to Instapaper to be read later (is this what people use bookmarks for?). Even then realistically I only actually read 20% of them.
Anything I really think a friend of mine should read, I email a link there & then. This is a 1- or 2- click operation.
Anything that I think is just too interesting/funny/important to keep to one or two friends, I put on Twitter, or here on HN. (I guess that ends up being a kind of bookmark service; I have scoured my submitted stories (and upvoted stories) to find them again.)
For my frequently visited sites without RSS, the browser URL bar is my friend - just start typing & it autocompletes. The only bookmark in my bookmark bar is the "Instapaper: Read Later" bookmarklet.
What does everyone else use bookmarks for? Is there some awesome use case I've been ignorant to since 1996? Am I just a freak for never wanting to revisit things?
Is this code that you can put online somewhere? This kind of thing would a) likely be really handy for lots of people and b) is the kind of thing I'd like to be able to make myself (using browser as a readymade UI), so having an existing reference would be helpful.
At the risk of being pedantic, it's worth noting that some things benefit from memorisation (e.g. the alphabet) and some things benefit from "higher" learning (e.g. understanding the concepts of programming). I don't think patio11 is necessarily saying "something is better than nothing"; sometimes it is _better_ to teach someone 'if you see the shape O, you say "oh"'.
I saw Damian Conway present about this, and it was absolutely fascinating. It started as a practice of removing syntax from code position and instead encoding it in variable/function names, like Latin does.
"The paper also explains the special source filtering and parsing techniques required to efficiently interpret a programming language in which the syntax is (largely) non-positional."
Here's the Sieve of Eratosthenes:
#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.
meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da.
da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
dum listis decapitamentum damentum nexto
fac sic
nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis.
cis.
I'm supposed to be teaching a class on introductory Python (students are doing their exercises now) and I want to scrap the rest of the day to talk about how phenomenally awesome this news is.
I'll settle for a strange, quiet sense of elation.
I see these are built on the Australian Bureau of Statistics "approximate" postcodes which are matched to census districts and therefore more useful for demographic analysis; no CDs cross postcodes in this dataset. There are a bunch of similar geographic datasets available from the ABS, including electoral boundaries, local government areas and so on: http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3110124.NSF/24e5997b9bf2ef...
All of that data is approximated by the ABS from whatever body controls the "real" versions, but is 99% good enough for anything you'd want to do with it.
Australia Post, on the other hand, don't really use postcodes to deliver mail anyway, I've been told. They're a vestigal construct which are very prominent in people's minds but so fraught in the implementation that any systems which analyse them (including Australia Post's) work against them rather than with them. I didn't know about Canada's system — that sounds like a much better idea!
Hangul, the Korean writing system, is at once phonetic and syllabic. Each "symbol" represents a syllable, but each sub-symbol represents a particular sound in the syllable; and each sub-sub-symbol encodes phonetic information about how it should be pronounced. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design for a better explanation.
A binary representation of the Hangul system could be very interesting. Use the symbol 1 for "vowel base" and +1 for "high", +2 for "high front", +3 for "high back"… You could eventually have each byte represent a syllable. It'd be like chmod commands + phonetics.
I can see this being applied in labels etc. for computer vision. Some kind of control/orientation character could make it similar to a QR code but actually readable by humans.
Generally, though, if something's going to be read by both, you may as well just have a label with plain English + a QR code. No reason why it has to be readable by both.
Also quite a recommendation coming from you - never fails to amaze me the people you find posting on here.