skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The best was to master English grammar is to master a highly inflected language such as Latin and to work backward from that to the "analytic" rules that govern English.

I agree with everything you said until you got to here. There are reasons to learn Latin, and it will certainly help for writing English, but putting the time in to master Latin is hardly the “best” way to master English grammar, which differs from Latin grammar in as many ways as it agrees. My guess is that learning to read 3 or 4 other languages moderately fluently, or just putting that time into careful analytic reading and writing in English would be just as useful. (Of course, without evidence, both of our comments here are speculative. I’d like to see some comparative studies – though to do them properly would be difficult, so I’m not sure any have been done that would really settle the matter.)

Personally, I think grammar is one of those subjects whose formal study should be delayed as long as possible, assuming that students are spending time reading and writing and carefully analyzing rhetoric and logic of what they read and hear. The emphasis on tools over content, in language just as much as in mathematics, has the potential to devalue creativity and engagement, and lends itself to the kind of rote instruction that leaves humans bored out of their skulls.

> This is akin to learning to do algorithms after having mastered deep principles of mathematics.

Weak analogy. The particularities of Latin grammar are not of the same kind as the “deep principles of mathematics.” Maybe studying syntax in a linguistics course or two could be compared, but I still think it’s a stretch.

> no substitute for plain hard work and perseverance.

With the rest of this paragraph out of the way, you’re right again with this final statement, though it’s a bit of a platitude.
Well there is the prototype programming model, which in terms of power of expression can be considered an advance over class based models.
Exactly, like game developers starting to write their 3D engine in Lua. I don't get it.
> Why? If dark matter is 90+% of the mass of 'everything', then surely many more anomalies would occur without us having to be hit by a chunk of dark matter. It would simply have to be anywhere near us (or a nearby body we could observe carefully) to observe weird gravitational effects. Nearby ones, not 'out there in other galaxies' ones.

two reasons.

1 - dark matter doesn't interact much with normal matter. so even though there's lots of it, most of the time it doesn't actually collide with anything.

2 - the "clumps" of dark matter are at much larger scales than our local system. variations are spread out at something like the size of galaxies; locally it is very smooth / uniform. if you're inside a uniform distribution of mass then you don't feel the gravitational effects (for example, at the centre of the earth you would weigh nothing).

disclaimer: i was an astronomer, but have been doing real work for many years now.
Java code optimization project
Here you go:

http://github.com/richhickey/clojure/blob/1.1.x/changes.txt
I think most of the criticism revolves around the (sometimes record) bonuses they have received while also receiving bailout funds. That is what they are damned for. If they had not paid out such decadent sums of money, I don't think anyone would be criticizing them for paying back their debt.
I'd make sure Mobile Safari were up to snuff. Palm w/ WebOS has already made the bet that in the long term, the web is the OS. People will always buy iPhones, with all the money I've poured into the industrial design, so no worries there, and while we've hit also 20% market penetration world wide, it has surprised even me, and I realize that smart phones were around before me, and that I've roused more than one sleeping giant. I think, initially, web apps was my long term plan. In the original announcement, that /was/ the goal. The 'app' should be just a special webpage and the browser is just the engine.

It's unavoidable, actually. How many apps are in the app store? Now, how many web pages are there? One of those is numbers is much, much bigger. As the media-rich, javascript-heavy web becomes more and more of what users do on a full computer, Mobile Safari is, at least, going to have to play catch-up with the rest of the internet.

So while, in today's market, your usage of your phone, your facebook, your rememberthemilk, your twitter each has their own iPhone app(s) in the app store, the web page probably has more features because it is a larger market.

I would take the app store and remove the distinction between a web app and a native app, turning web apps into first class citizens, allowing people to buy a web app for $.99 for Facebook-ing. I would slacken the app store approval process for web apps to encourage development on that platform, and I'd make sure that licensing were such that developers could sell an iPhone web app while having the same javascript on their full website.
Fewer things bother me more than pseudo-intellectual jackasses bothered by grammar.
Assuming its a feature conceptualized and implemented by Indians in Google's India office, its a good example of innovation happening in India that might have a global impact.
Interesting, especially in comparison with SNOBOL. Although I am always wary of claims like a typical program in Refal is on average two or three times shorter and more readable than a Lisp analog. That might be true of programs written in Refal because it suits the domain, but I would be surprised to the core if general-purpose Lisp programs could be rewritten in Refal and become 2-3 times shorter and become more readable.
Ask HN: please review Socially - my FB+TW+LI app for Nokia S60
Not one use of the word "eldritch"! I smell a fake.
BBC news website asks users: 'Should homosexuals face execution?'
http://cyberspeak.libsyn.org/index.php?post_id=561335
"Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, ... (1) ... (2) ..."

When I try to eliminate parentheses and similar parentheticals, I write separate sentences if possible.
2. We're assuming from that 10 minutes that there isn't a lot of semi-automated testing that does not involve a live internet connection, and I'm willing to bet theres a large amount of static testing against the binary. </respectful>

3. Why even hide behind a re-review? The fully covering NDA on the SDK has been lifted, but Apple still has contracts in place to use and publish apps. If publishing an unknown reviewer's (presumed) home address fits under a clause in the contract, Apple will most likely straight up revoke the app's approval. </cynical>
46 minutes in.
Photo tour of New York startups: Foursquare, Curbed and Hard Candy Shell
Here is Economist's take on it (albeit more technology-oriented) :
http://www.economist.com/search/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15...
Glint of sunlight seen off lake on Saturn's moon Titan.
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For more than two decades, Kettler Forlines has built superior homes in the exceptional communities of Northern Virginia, suburban Maryland and West Virginia.
The prejudice is not in me, but in the author of the original essay.

There are entrepreneurs who have led companies to provide great value for their customers, employees, and stockholders, and entrepreneurs who have led companies straight into the ground. There are doctors who work heroically and insightfully to save lives and there are doctors who are more interested in satisfying their God complex than actually caring for patients. There are lawyers who help right the injustices of the world and lawyers who just look for excuses to run up their bills.

I don’t see why we should assume, a priori, that fewer bright and ambitious people in business and more in law or medicine will be a net social loss.
Only responding to the first part of your treatise, but have you actually used a Nook at the B&N kiosk?

I used to think the Kindle was slow and chincy until I used a Nook, which feels like its ink display is powered by three blind, drunken gnomes. Agonizing pain is the only way I can describe a device that takes twice the time to turn a page that a third grader reads it.
Those sorts of constraints are what sets hard sci-fi apart from space opera. And in the hands of a skilled writer, economic and technological constraints are powerful tools for storytelling. In Star Trek how does Starfleet know how many starships it can build!?
Any sources for that? I know Lua is often used as a scripting language in 3D games since it is very easy to embed a Lua interpreter into your game. If you haven't seen it, you should take a look at the lua source code. It's beautiful.

Essentially, you are making a nice internal API to your engine objects that you can manipulate, and experiment with, on a higher level without recompiling your application all the time. Python is also nice for this purpose (see OGRE 3D), but it's not as lightweight as Lua.

So in a sense, it's better to use Lua for parts of your engine that will change a lot, depending on what aspect of the engine you are a focusing on at the moment (like tweaking how the enemy A.I. works, for example). This is especially useful at the prototype stage of your application.

Is that what you had in mind, or am I mistaken?
This sort of thing will be made obsolete by e-books.
Former Microsoft evangelist Don Dodge on Google vs. Microsoft
"Do not explain too much."
See also:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1002246
SUPERAntiSpyware Portable - Free Malware Scanner Without Installation
I dont buy that "less context switching using the same language client and server-side" nonsense. Are you storing data in a database? Context switch. Are you outputting HTML? Context switch.

I also dont buy that it makes client-side Javascript better because you are using it on the server as well. The client-side Javascript is probably going to send and receive JSON. When it gets that JSON, it has no clue (and doesnt care) what language or framework generated it.

On a side note - I have been lurking on the node.js mailing list for a while now. Why do people think writing a MVC framework is apropriate? Isn't there something more exciting you can do with node.js?
Google wants to buy Yelp
No, she owns Men with Pens.
Oh. Well that's a lot less interesting. I'd much rather have a better way to market my services to users.
How can you blame them? Game developers typically have insane deadlines. More power to them.
...then effectively making players be within black culture rightly wouldn't be acceptable.

The analogy is not that basketball forces people to adopt black cultural traits. Certainly computing does not force you to enjoy Star Trek. According to the original article, women have negative views about geeks and don't wish to associate with them.

The analogy is that people who don't like black cultural traits might avoid a moneymaking career in the NBA because they don't wish to be exposed to black people. Here is a paragraph from the article, with "black" replacing "geek":

Cheryan's research offers an explanation: White people don't identify with the archetypal image of basketball players. Cheryan's subjects describe this image as "loud, trash talkin, complaining about their babymommas, drinking 40's and eating fried chicken." The black room conjures this picture in our minds, Cheryan says, based only on the stuff we find lying around (such as posters of Malcolm X and Obama).
As far as I remember, BOSH is just built on long polling, and uses an XML-based syntax to define its protocol. The general idea is the same. The main differences: (0) perhaps most importantly it’s not immediately obvious how to send messages that aren’t XML-based over BOSH, because the protocol is defined in terms of XML payloads, meaning that if you have some protocol that wants to send arbitrary messages you’ll have to do something like putting your messages inside a CDATA block or escaping special characters, and your server-side code will need to come up with some way to do that, (1) Orbited’s design is a bit more general, accommodating transports other than long-polling, (2) Orbited has a bit less overhead, even in long polling mode, because it doesn't include a bunch of extra XML, (3) everything on the client end related to the particularities of Comet communication is designed to be treated as a black box by client-side JavaScript, which can just load Orbited’s JavaScript and then deal with its API – your in-browser code can roughly pretend it has a TCP socket, (4) Orbited operates as a proxy, speaking actual TCP out the back end, which means that your server code can just be written against a TCP socket and doesn’t need to implement anything special to communicate with browsers, or import any libraries, etc.
Not that I disagree with your premise about makers and business folks, but Steve Jobs didn't have an MBA or a college degree.
You see the Nook is good, real good...

The NYT begs to differ:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/technology/personaltech/10...
> 1) If it's really prestigious, I shouldn't have to mention that fact.

If the context for prestige is obvious but unfamiliar, for example if you are telling a fictional story and establishing background, then we don't have to assume prestige should be evident. Also, if the proper name of the subject is unknown then it would be impossible for the prestige to be evident.

> 2) If I want you to think it's prestigious, I should show, not tell. It was given 3 michelin stars and won best film at cannes, or whatever the case may be.

The subject may not be so important that it deserves so much attention. If the use of the word 'prestige' and its subject are secondary to the point of the sentence or paragraph, elaborating may distract from the main point. Such is the case with many abstract words that people interpret differently. If it's the main point then I agree.

> edit: not to mention, prestige is subjective. Some people think a glowing writeup in a particular publication is prestigious. Others think it's noise. It's hard to claim either group is wrong.

Many abstract words are subjective. I think that finding the balance between detail and abstraction is a core writing skill. Too much detail can be tedious, condescending, unnecessary and can obscure or confuse the main point. Too much abstraction and people will misunderstand the message without realizing they've misunderstood the message.
I sometimes wonder why Lua when Tcl already existed, but I've never used Lua.
With Moneybookers, you'll have the problem that they'll be flagged by US banks as a gambling site. Repeatedly. One of my customers in Europe uses Moneybookers to pay me, because their fees are really quite attractive in comparison to PayPal. But because Moneybookers are in the UK and we all know what a gambling haven the UK is, I have to keep a constant eye on my bank.

(But my bank bounces every other payment to joker.com for the same reason. Amateurs.)
Personally I didn't like the Economist article as I believe it focuses on the wrong issues. For example, there's absolutely no need for an e-book reader to play video. It's just not required. No one wants to watch videos on e-book readers. This is a not existing problem.
I think we can safely toss out Sayres Law (the "intensity" of academic squabbles [is] a function of the "triviality" of the issue at hand):

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/18/nyregion/education-lessons...
"In government, people know how to disagree gracefully, and you never scorch the earth because you know that today's opponent is someone with whom you may have to make common agreement tomorrow," said Donald Kennedy, the president of Stanford and a former Commmissioner of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. "Academics find it difficult to have disagreement without alienation."
Well, have you ever tried to program in javascript? It's a fantastic language for prototyping. If you want to try an algorithm, you sit down, write an astonishly small quantity of code and it just works. That's just one of the reason why I use javascript.

Another is, that it's a fantastic language to use for hobby projects, because you don't need to think too much beforehand, thanks to the dynamically typed variables, methods and objects.

And last but not least, you don't have any GUI to manage. HTML does it for you, which simplifies matters a bit. You want to dynamically create HTML? No problem. You prefer to prepare the HTML beforehand? No problem at all.

So to answer your question, I use it because it's refreshingly easy to use, more so than richer languages who are sometimes simply too heavy.
How the United States Lost the Naval War of 2015
The word "than" is not a preposition. It is a conjunction after which a verb and sometimes a subject are commonly omitted, but understood, because they are the same verb or subject as in the preceding sentence.

Therefore all you really need to do is understand that the portion of the sentence following "than" is itself a sentence. Just supply the missing words, and the correct case will shine forth.

"I run faster than he."

is really:

"I run faster than he runs."

and not:

"I run faster than him runs."

Therefore "he" is correct.
http://www.wowowbiz.com
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Facebook Data Team: How Diverse is Facebook?
They day Apple releases an e-book reader that provides such a good experience as reading a dead tree book will be The Day I Convert To Apple.

I think the key of the solution for making a good e-book reader is simplicity. Really, a book is not a very complicated thing. What you need is a device that gets out of the way of the content of the book. A good e-book reader is an e-book reader I can't notice while reading.
Celebrate Geometric Shapes, and how we use them to solve problems
C Craft
As web developers everywhere fall to their knees and give thanks.
How Do Marketers Define a Conversion?
He certainly fits the mold of a microeconomist, but he revolutionized the study of management in the US. I don't think it's at all disingenuous to say that he drove management science to what it is today.

And to sum up his teachings as "What gets measured gets managed" is fairly trite when he wrote 30+ books on the subject of organizations and management.

So yes, I think "management as a science" guy is totally appropriate. Or as he is described so often on book covers - "Managment Guru"

My point is, we have MBA's coming out of programs which rely a great deal on the teaching of Peter Drucker, and companies are starting to wake up to the realization that Drucker's "Knowledge worker"/MBA doesn't possess the generalizable skills that he argued for.

Drucker argued for large corporations and layering, giving rise to the current bought of middle management that make up the majority of cruft in a today's organization.

And yes, I was required to read Drucker my my management classes.
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What about that other company with the closed operating system and a bundled browser?

Why haven't they been taken to court as well?
Yup. Just like no one wants to take pictures, or answer email, using their mobile phone.

We should stop thinking about products as being this or that -- rather, we should see them as a collection of features.
It's more of a Ruby and JavaScript top ten. This is clearly subjective, and a personal top ten. This should be made clearer in the title.
I disagree. Given a choice between two e-book readers I'll choose the one that makes it easier for me to read what I want to read. Given a choice between two e-book readers that both solve the above problem, I'll definitely choose the one that also plays video. Being able to quickly switch from reading a book to watching a movie without having to change device seems like a feature at least I'd want. Also imagine books and newspapers with embedded video clips to help illustrate their point. Most news websites contain at least some video or motion graphics, why not extend that to the ebook reader?
Prototypes vs classes is a matter of taste, and I don't think "power of expression" can be measured.
Isn't "monopoly" supposed to refer to a market where there is only one seller? I know that MS is still the biggest, but clearly there are alternatives. I feel that these trials made more sense 10 years ago.
Sometimes it's not rejection that's the issue but the employers laziness to explain why the applicant failed. It is fair to let all applicants know so they can stop making the same mistakes or just know in general what to improve on.
Great post James, please blog it up for other eyes :)
Yes, ebooks are assuming known formats to ease transitions to one giant page layout. We can skip through the pages in a book, but this is approximated by search for ereaders.

I primarily use my iPhone as an ereader since it's portable and functional. The original book format is lost in translation and yet I get the essence of a book, the authors well thought formulation of concepts all bundled together. Newspapers and magazines are just weaker aggregators though so they mesh well with the evolving web layouts we experience now.

I think I see the great value of posting your thoughts directly here now. You invite an entire community to share their feedback without the barrier of a page load, well done!
2. Our app is "In review" right now. For the first round our app reported back to us that it was active for about 55 seconds.
I think I did overstate the case for Latin in this context. It is a good way to help with English grammar, mainly because (in my view) it forces you to think about and apply important grammatical principles in ways that a rules-based approach to teaching English grammar often does not. But, point well taken, it likely is not the best way to make use of one's limited time for this purpose.

I like your other points about grammar as well - very thoughtful.
"Bankers, especially investment bankers, aren't interested particularly in long-term shareholder returns or even in providing capital to businesses. They're interested making money and getting paid. If you want to do God's work, you don't work at a bank.."

vs.

"Bank of America ... raised $20 billion from the public"
and
"Citi raised $20.5 billion of capital..."

How do they raise so much capital if the investors know that it's just to change their TARP structure to enable the execs to get high bonuses?
What's more, different servers can focus on different language syntax highlighting.
Besides using JS on the server with Helma for some time, I even wrote a Lisp->JS compiler (CyberLisp) in JS. This project finally showed me that I don't want to use JS anymore.

I agree with your point about prototyping, but I don't see why one would use a language that's good for prototyping, but sucks in the greater scheme, for web apps.
This is an important debate and the internet can play a vital role in preventing such laws from being passed. I applaud BBC for raising such a question and bringing awareness to such a barbaric notion.

Only problem is that this really doesn't belong on HN. Flagged.
A lot of providers extend the TTL, despite what you have it set at.

...which is very annoying when you're moving a business site. :/
Because Apple doesn't have a dominant position in the market. (that is the reason MS was sued, stated in the article).
'Coldest place' found on the Moon @ 26 Kelvin
"I suggest all gays are put on a remote island somewhere and left for a generation - after which, theoretically there should be none left!"

We can marginalize bigots, but sometimes it's better just to expose them as the idiots they are. Nick Griffin and Chris from Guildford seem to have demonstrated this point most ably.