"...According to a European Parliament report, published in 2001, America's National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted faxes and phone calls between Airbus, Saudi Arabian Airlines and the Saudi government in early 1994..."
Not saying that Airbus was the good guy btw. Also, if they help one firm why not another, and so on?
The article doesn't support the claim that the NSA is for hire, or even the Boeing knew what was going on. You can only take from it that the NSA may act in US corporate interests.
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.
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's not just guessing. The Carpalx does have algorithms for scoring various characteristics like finger bigrams, finger travel, and outputs the optimal results based on scores for key presses and bigrams, etc.
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.
Did you just suggest that Japanese are committing suicide because they can't be entrepreneurs? (o_O)
In general, if you're wondering what causes high suicide rates, it's a lot more useful to look at societal motivators than race. As everywhere, there's a strong correlation between depression and suicide, and it's not hard to find the main causes. In Japan's particular case, the largest group committing suicide are the elderly, who have devoted their lives to their company and feel they have nothing left when they retire. The second-largest group is the unemployed, particularly those who have fallen into debt traps that very often ensnare family and friends as guarantors, with life insurance providing an "easy" way out. And the final group is students, who commit suicide to escape bullying or the immense pressure of their final exams.
What I find shocking is life insurance companies paying out the family of the insured if he/she commits suicide. As far as I know, there is no such clause on life insurance contracts in the Europe (and I believe the U.S. as well).
Surely , as one of the first steps towards reducing the suicide rate in Japan, insurance companies should stop incentivizing suicide.
When I was going through a dark period financially and emotionally, I specifically looked for life insurance policies that did not exclude suicide and had only a two year exclusion period. They do indeed exist in the US; I hold such a term life policy at the moment.
I get why you're saying this, but it bugs me when people tell those with an inclination to commit suicide to not do it.
It's not your life, and your judgments about its current and future value are meaningless. The person living the life, and that person alone, can meaningfully judge the value of continuing to be alive. It's arrogant and dickish to tell a person about the value that continuing to live has, even if well intentioned, and doubly so in the case of a person you (likely) do not know.
Naturally, you are correct, when taken to logical extreme. However, the bread and butter of communication is assumption (shared meaning of words, etc.). It's probably fair to assume that most people within this community can look forward to some relative happiness and achievement in life, and I don't think it's bad to support one another in "powering through" bad times. I'm no hard-line pro-lifer: if my grandma asked me to help her suicide, like she quietly mentioned she might many years earlier as the two of us watched her mother die, I'd certainly consider it.
Oh no no no no no, those plans are well past. I was just commenting that life insurance plans do exist where they pay out in the event of suicide (although they're conditional).
I think he's saying that their culture is very different from the American/Western European culture in some ways, which has nothing to do with race. That perhaps the elements of their culture that make them relatively prone to suicide are related to the ones that make them less interested in entrepreneurship.
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.
