skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds".

I remember that when I began speaking English coloquially my maxilar muscles and tongue would get very tired. That was when I realized that English is way more oral than my native nasal Portuguese.

> A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely.

Portuguese and Spanish have 2 different verbs to entail the meaning of the verb "to be"; they are the verbs "ser" and "estar", with very different meanings. Depending on where and how you use it can mean very different things. E.g.: "estar" sick means that you have a temporary desease like stomach sickness, a cold or a flu; "ser" sick means that you either have an incurable genetic desease or you are a psycopath.

Also, when it comes to the grammar I totally agree: English grammar is a blessing, a wonder of simplicity. Portuguese and Spanish have lots of tenses for past and future, each with a different verb conjugation.
Angel investors becoming dominant force in consumer Internet venture capital
I believe all these companies were European. Crunchpad was Asian-American, and now Asian.
it's probably 250 tons / year for a 1 gigawatt plant
Doh. Well that is good then!
Finally this is getting attention! The politics of nuclear energy are so messed up that thorium reactor technology got buried under radioactive piles of propaganda, because, you know, if it's nuclear it must be bad.
> Opera is and was the fastest browser on limited memory/cpu machines

I used Opera 5 on my 50 MHz 486 when no other browser was truly up to the task. Continued using it on other machines until Safari 2 hit on the Mac.

I've always thought that Opera was by far the best browser out there, but Safari integrates so well with Mac OS X and ends up being quite good with SafariStand and Saft (now using Glims). I might go back to Opera someday though.
This perspective may be correct for well educated upper middle class and above. But thats a small part of the U.S. and an even smaller part of the world. The vast majority do not have jobs they love and have little choice in the matter and also do not have a large house, cars, etc.
A couple of possibilities:

1. Having too many open file handles

2. HTTP timeouts.
Next step in those companies is that the managers start having meetings in fancy hotels costing a lot more than that small saving.
I think that's the idea. Certain cities and regions become poles for similar, but competing industries. Finance in Manhattan, technology in Silicon Valley, insurance in Connecticut, etc. Other cities try to emulate these places but usually have partial or no success. Even if they put fiber in every building and give it away for free they still lack the human network that could take advantage of it.

Also, these types of networks take decades to build up. Most people don't have that much time to wait. It took money from the Manhattan project (70 years) to get SV to where it is today.
That's a very large function for an experienced programmer. In my opinion, each function should do one thing and that thing should be the name of the function.
10 Expert IT Management Predictions For 2010
Monetizing the Realtime Web (realtime adsense)
Ask HN: Review my app - Wallet Garden
Hi all. This isn't a revenue-generating app, just a side project for me to work on my programming and to put something useful out there.

The idea is pretty simple: If your wallet gets stolen, you need to put your cards on hold ... but if you don't have your wallet, you don't know who to call. Wallet Garden solves that problem.

I'd love your thoughts and suggestions, if you have any. And I hope that, if you're traveling over the next few days, that if you lose your wallet, that Wallet Garden helps you out.
Different browsers have different defaults for things like checkbox padding & margin, line-height, etc.

A reset stylesheeet gets rid of those. I don't start a site w/o one.
The Concept of Work and Reward
How To Rise Fast At Work: A True Story
Multi-DB support just got checked in to Django (for v1.2) - here are the docs
If you're interested, you can view the full 2.8 MB changeset here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2434252/2009/multidb.txt

The ticket that tracked the feature (opened way back in 2006) is here: http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/1142
First thought: seems like Mechanical Turk is popular in India.
FTP is plaintext. You'd be surprised how easy it often is to become a middleman to a transmission on the open internet. Just always assume all ftp passwords to be released to the world when you transmit them. (Or, just don't use it.)
I think you failed in your objective to say 'hi' to that actress, instead you have made lots of other people say 'hi'.
Have you used chrome recently? While they might have borrowed ideas from other UI designs, never before did Firefox look more like chrome.

Not that its a bad thing. Throughout its history FF have taken design ideas from IE, Opera extensively. For all we know, FF most likely wouldn't even consider such a drastic UI change if chrome wasn't in the picture. FF UI changes has always been incremental and subtle.
Andy Baio did this last year with the additional task of including "why do you turk?"

http://waxy.org/2008/11/the_faces_of_mechanical_turk/

Interesting to see how the demographic has shifted in that time period.

Regarding the bit about crowd-sourcing ideas; Andrew Hyde used Turk to solicit startup-ideas:
http://andrewhy.de/using-mechanical-turk-for-ideas/
thanks for the link, i hadn't run across it til now. google has a game thats similar also called matchin (http://www.gwap.com/gwap/gamesPreview/matchin) is likebetter still maintained? i wasn't able to sign up. i wanted to see if what kind of rating they give the photo.
There also appear to be MTurk "shops"--some of the people are clearly sitting at the same computer (some even used the exact same sign...)
Is it common for Turkers to repeat tasks? These people used the same sign: http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=1 and http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=9
Ask HN: Make one prediction for 2010. 
Ask HN: Make one (or a few) prediction(s) for 2010.
I think you think I want to destroy the upper class. I don't. I just think that FU money should be taxed more heavily than regular money. When Warren Buffett's janitor pays a higher effective tax rate than he does, something is wrong. But that doesn't mean it's right to pauperize Warren Buffett.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2007/06/warren-buffe...

I am in pretty good company with this argument I think. We should have a more progressive tax system. There is a lot of room to make it more progressive without damaging incentives to become rich.

There are so many incentives to become rich that it's laughable to say that you could destroy them all through a carefully calculated welfare program.
That's absurd. Why would anyone publish a list of upcoming features and then mention which competitor they're borrowing them from?
The only criteria in the title were that it was from 2009.

There is at least one company from Korea in that list.

From the article by the way:

> Don’t start beating the PR drum loudly until you can show a product publicly.

Hilarious given the crunchpad story, techcrunch should take a taste of its own medicine.
Yeah, it is. There were a lot of bad submissions. I'm just experimenting with Mechanical Turk right now. Initial impressions. . . 1) a lot of fraud (about half sent in pictures of their cat or something) 2) most people are from india 3) Most of your replies come in the first 3 hours or so. After that it wains. You have to resubmit after this 4) There were repeat submissions. Three of them looked like they are from the same room, same camera. But people claimed different locations.
+1

If I have to choose between being broke and happy or being rich and unhappy, I'd choose the former every time.
Old HN thread about this essay: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113244
This is not nice: "I'm offering a $50 reward to the guy with the best photo, so have fun and be creative" They thought they had a chance of winning.

Blows my mind how 4 out of 50 (8%) did not even complete the stated requirements.

Also crazy how all many of these people are Indian.
4 out of 50 is 8% not 12%.
Yeah I noticed that too. There's also some location inconsistencies!

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=35
It's certainly not unheard of in the open source world to say that you've been inspired by another project.

I recently watched an official video by Googlers about the Chrome extensions, and they mention Firefox by name many times.
Cool experiment. Thinking of using Turk for photo approvals on my site, but the accuracy issue leaves me slightly hesitant. Has anyone had experience doing this?
So who won the $50 bonus?
It's a YC company, and a possible reason for your rejection. After all the ideas are pretty similar.

Probably, before pitching to a VC/incubator it would be good to know who they've already invested in.
Only because of comments, an indentation style that pairs function argument on lines, etc. It's not a big function in the sense you're thinking, and breaking it up further may be counterproductive.
Alarmanlagen für Gewerbe und Privat
The plot was the weakest part of Avatar, partly because Cameron has shown himself capable of creating good stories that engage the audience.
Life's too short to work for clowns
I think he paid them all $1 for the task, with the added bonus of possibly getting $50 if they win. Why is that not nice? They got paid, and entered a contest. $1 for a HIT on Mechanical Turk is pretty good, especially considering the amount of work they needed to do here (which is not much).
Good point, I had in mind that all things being otherwise equal and being occupied with more or less the same stuff for the duration of the existence of said list.

And I don't play the lottery ;)
After that it wains

wanes
Finding someone to sell a company?
My company has spent the last year developing a framework for creating games on Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. While we had originally planned to release the product to the public and take a percent of the revenue, we have realized that we can make more money by selling the application to a funded company entering the social gaming space. Our problem is we don't have many other contacts in the social gaming space and would like to find someone to manage selling the company for us (in exchange for a percent of the sale.) Where can we go about finding someone with the skills and contacts to sell a product like this? What experiences have others had trying to sell a company that we can learn from?
I'm always amused when I read comments like this, becuase they are so blatantly incorrect. I'm not sure where you got your MBA from, but I can tell you the following about my class:

- At least 1/3 already have an advanced degree in another subject. (Masters or PhD) Many of these are in engineering, sciences, psychology, medicine, etc.

- At least 95% have worked for at least 3 years, most of them have lead a team.

So these two items provide them with technical, domain-specific, and experiential knowledge upon which to use in bschool.

I dont think many MBA's would argue with you about the content of the degree; it is very different from a masters in computer science or physics. But it is also not intended to be the same.

One gets an MBA for 3 reasons: Networking, Skill Building, and Career Switching. Most degrees focus on just the skill-building aspect. Personally, for me, coming to a top ranked program and access to its huge alumni network was critical to my decision.

Please, before you knee jerk respond about how stupid all MBA's are, it might make sense to think about why so many smart, talented people continue to get them.
Well, superficially it sounds like pure economic democracy - anyone who has a good idea that would benefit people proposes it, and resources are allocated to them by consensus. That's the seductive part, but it takes no account of the variations in intelligence, foresight and altruism, which is why it only works in Star Trek.

I don't think communism is evil so much as fundamentally naive, its proponents assume the mass of people think alike and that selfishness is a learned behavior imposed from above by wicked capitalists. It lasted as long as it did in the USSR because both military and scientific folk are into the idea of setting aside individual gain for a greater purpose, such as patriotism or the advancement of knowledge.

Communism is bad if you look at it from the perspective of a democracy with a functioning market. Then again, that perspective is a luxury if you have the misfortune to be stuck in a feudal society - most places where it took root were extremely dysfunctional monarchies prior to turning communist. Aristcracies aren't what we'd call ideal societies either; even here in the west, the replacement of aristocracy by parliamentary government was viewed by traditionalists as a form of godless mob rule.

And it's not that long ago that people were complaining that GPL represented a kind of license tyranny which would undermine proprietary innovation.
From what I read the standard technique seems to be let two people review everything. When there's a discrepancy you can add more manpower (and take the majority view or so) or look at it yourself.
2009: The year tech blogging died
Mashable doesn't seem to enjoy giving others credit. The only link to the author is just a tiny link with the word "share". Even the name isn't mentioned. The original author deserves more than that.
Or time of the day?
There's a big difference between "what"/"how" and "why" comments. "This increments a variable" is a stupid comment because the code already says it, but a note such as "I'm using this particular data structure/algorithm/etc. because ..., even though ... seems like a better choice" can speak volumes. It's hard to make code itself clearly convey intent (careful naming is the main way), and it's the first thing to get buried by verbose code.

If you have documentation about the design of the system and write reasonably clear code, you can document sparsely. (Having fewer comments also gives those present added emphasis.) As with most engineering, it's more about trade-offs than hard-and-fast rules, though.
Comparison shopping by ISBN
A wain is a kind of wagon or chariot.

Can someone please tell me why this submission is interesting to HN? (Obviously it is, I just can't figure out why.)
To anybody questioning what the next level of DNS could be, think of this way: infrastructure services like EC2 or Slicehost enable us to move/copy/build out images quite easily. But if this flexibility is not matched by API-driven networking surrounding our servers, there will always be a ceiling of flexibility that our servers cannot realize.

I don't quite know what dnsworks has in mind, but anything that aims to make DNS as flexible as other stuff is becoming, will be quite useful.

Related reading (not by me):
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/12/19/NetworkingTheLas...
http://www.bretpiatt.com/blog/2009/12/20/public-clouds-and-t...
http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog/?p=1603
It won't load.
That makes sense. $1 is 40 Indian Rupees, and $50 (the prize money) is 2339 Indian Rupees at current rates. Neither amount is an insignificant amount of money in India.
I cant speak about other schools, but where I'm currently attending, the students get honestly excited about economic theory, buying behavior, business valuation models, forecasting algorithms, and most importantly - new venture ideas.

There are the career-only people, but their populations are shrinking.
This, along with electric power, is the real future of transportation in lower-density areas. People want to be able to go where they want, when they want, without the delays and inconvenience of public transit. So we need to find ways of making individual transportation cleaner and safer.
Brittany Murphy Autopsy Update
We are here again with the updates on Brittany Murphy Autopsy. Yesterday it was unclear that how much time it will take after Simon’s request for not conducting Brittany Murphy Autopsy but the investigating authorities haven’t wasted any time and they carried out the Brittany Murphy autopsy within the 36 hours of her death, may be, little early for the Simon………..
It could have something to do with the time the job was created. As the author mentioned in a comment, after 3 hours the job kinda died. So If he posted it in peak hours for India, than it's not surprising that most of the respondents were Indian, while the fellow from your link may have posted it in peek hours for a more "white" timezone.

What we really need I supposed is one of these every hour for 24 hours. Then we'll get a better idea of the demographics of MTurk.
This is also a great video (google talk) about the technology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk&sn - shortened to 16 minutes, very well worth watching.
Project Canvas to push Internet TV or why the market doesn’t always know best
Yup, even on chrome blog, on recent videos they have mentioned webkit/safari/apple contributions several times.
After reading the article, it seems like the point isn't so much about coding fast or slow, but that there's a great deal of benefit to being able and willing to do some exploratory coding to try out aspects of your solution before committing to a particular solution approach.

IMHO, this is why fans of "dynamic languages" (an ill defined term, I realize) tend to be so highly enthusiastic about them. For many people, programming in a language like Python, Ruby, etc. is their first real exposure to exploratory, incremental coding.

And those languages are very well suited for that kind of approach, though clearly exploratory coding can be done in pretty much any language.
An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy
Andy Baio's project took place over the course of 3 days; it's not explicitly stated how long this task took to complete though given how high the pay was (relatively) I could see this job filling up in an hour.

(Edit: or 3 hours - pay seems to be a large factor, I wonder if by paying less one gets more people who do the task out of boredom rather than necessity and how that correlates to quality of results.)
"Nerd" and "Geek" Should Be Banned, Professor Says
Dismal or corrective?

Dismal.

Right now is a bad time to graduate with an MBA. Or a degree in Engineering, Architecture, Physics, or pretty much anything else.
I wonder how many wind/solar/bio energy proponents are even aware of this.
How is this saving space? How is this Chrome-ish?

Chrome saved space by getting rid of the title bar (a bar that would just say "Chrome"). From these pictures, Firefox still has a whole bar that just says "Firefox." Why?

Mozilla, please allow us to place tabs on the Title bar!

And if you really want to blow Chrome out of the water, explore innovative vertical tab options. Tree style tabs is an immensely popular extension for a reason.
"I had in mind that all things being otherwise equal and being occupied with more or less the same stuff for the duration of the existence of said list."

Fair enough.

"And I don't play the lottery ;)"

Nor do I; 'twas just a thought experiment :)
It helps to be very specific in what your HIT is and reject submissions that don't complete the job.
Perhaps I like being a coder/doer too much, but there's an assumption that the ideal to strive for is to move up the chain into management as quickly as possible. What fun is that?
How does this beat emailing the information to yourself?
Mechnical Turk is kind of interesting. It's one of those things that I'd really like try out, but have no immediate use for. I'm sure I'm not the only one. (In fact, most of the cool projects I've seen using MTurk are of the Gee Whiz variety)

Also, people like to look at pictures.
I've used the same reason for avoiding Google Chrome. However, there is hope! I found an excellent "urlfilter.ini" list for Opera this morning.

http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/

I'm happily using Opera instead of FireFox now. It's FAST and I have more screen space available.
That doesn't indicate a formal "shop" to me.

If you're getting $1 for each picture of a person holding a sign you submit, you might as well have everyone else in the room take a turn.
I'm not a big fan of lots of comments in the code itself, but I very much so advocate design documentation.

I once had the pleasure of rewriting an Ada avionics subsystem in C. The code was very tersely commented, and the only documentation I could find on the subsystem was a requirement to the effect of "such-and-such subsystem shall exist". So I was left to figuring out what the subsystem worked from the code itself.

That's possible to do, but things would have gone a lot faster if I would have had a few pages describing what the goals and overall architecture of the software was.
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When it's your own money on the line it takes on a different aspect than dropping junior off at the gate

More so than the fact that it's your own kid? I'd think that that would be the ultimate motivation for parental involvement...
Nothing says "I would never want to work there" more than a giant bronze compass with corpspeak at the cardinal points and a sword wielding maniac riding a spiky cat in the center.
I wonder if it runs on Cedega. This looks like a game I would definitely have a blast with.
Yup. There are a couple of language translation services that use techniques like that.
exactly, its' not necessarily the work, it's everything that surrounds the work that makes doing quality work impossible.
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=4

I am writing her now.
Over 50% did not do the required task. A lot of people sent me a picture of their cat or something.
It's an insidious problem, because ultimately in most organizations hiring decisions are made by people who do believe that (i.e. they control the budget), and believe that doing so counts as "success". Which is why you can be a 40-something with 20 years experience as a hands-on programmer and can't get hired, because you are viewed by these people as a "failure" for not having made it into management in your 20s.
I think if you are ambiguous in your request then it is unfair to reject submissions that follow the letter of your request but not the intent.

That's making other people pay with their time for your own lack of specificness.
I think DVCS can also help here because you have context switches fast using many throwaway topic branches and you can discard a branch that did not work out the way you like. Only pushing the one that worked up after you cleaned up the history a bit. I would guess that a majority of coders that have to work with svn in a corporate environment do not like to go off on branches that may or may not work out for fear of messing up the blessed repository. (that and branching was not the easiest thing to do in subversion.)
Simon Willison: Django | Multiple Databases
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I can deal with the fact that the tech company I work for doesn't have anywhere near the cool stuff that Blizzard HQ does... but the grass, really? Does the grass have to be so green? I want to eat a sandwich in that grass.