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.
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).
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.
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
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'.
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.