skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, French is the second language learned in Flanders. English is the third.

Flanders uses subtitles, Wallonia dubs.
Instead of learning Dutch as their second language most Walloons learn English. This is anecdotal, but I've noticed their English is worse than most people in Flanders. I think this is where the whole dubbing/subtitles also plays a part.
I think critical thinking is not necessary, depending of your personal circumstances you can be better off with a great net of friends that can help you to find a good job. For example, my wife found a good job because she, besides being wonderful at work, has a really splendid net of friends who can speak wonders of her. I don't think that being critical or having critical thinking skills is going to help you in your career, sometimes is better to be quiet and let the powers be. I remember a story of a very good broker with wonderful ability that didn't follow the herb, he make very good predictions but he lost his clients, financial markets are not for critical thinking, is like a beauty contest (in due context by Samuelson).
PacketFence v5.5 released
So I agree with all your points, except that the subtitling/dubbing issue is the cause of all this. The subtitling/dubbing is an effect, not a cause. Mere exposure does not make you learn/enjoy a language. The status/prestige/coolness is a cultural thing, and this is what explains the difference in motivation to learn languages.
Why polygamy is bad:

Shorter versions:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/01/the_p...

http://huntergatherer.com/good-reasons-why-polygamy-is-a-bad...

Much longer, more academic and legal arguments:

http://news.ubc.ca/2012/01/23/monogamy-reduces-major-social-...

Court of British Colombia's 355 pg reasoning:

http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/11/15/2011BCSC1588.ht...
In 1949 the federal government built a test facility at Idaho National Laboratory to study and evaluate new nuclear reactor designs. We owe our nuclear power industry to the foresight of those New Dealers, and we need their openness to innovation again today.

Thiel is a self-described conservative libertarian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Political_activiti...
It certainly didn't stop around Windows 7, I was playing it quite happily, modulo the lack of understanding widescreens.
>I should point out that it is by no means clear that critical thinking is a coherent skill that is readily taught.[1]

Critical thinking is domain dependent. Just because someone is good at breaking down CS problems doesn't mean they will be able to generalize those analytical skills to their relationships, politics, nutrition, etc... It's not enough to teach people to think critically. They need to think critically in a way that is domain independent or in the domains that are important for them as individuals and society at large.
Could you provide some textbook reference? I'd really appreciate it.
My micro bot is basically generating heuristics in the form of if/then statements and testing them in against itself playing the other side. It already has found hit&run on 1 level on its own, but it still isn't good enough vs human players.

Contact me on TeamLiquid for the bot + code and for any future micro tournaments:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/profile.php?user=LetaBot
Bomb Damaged Cities: London
And on even number days you will argue the people don't have the right to create unbreakable privacy for themselves, and that a search warrant has to be a guarantee of being able to read what the searcher finds.
That analysis uses solar panels with 10% efficiency in its calculations...
I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English.

Nope, there is something intrinsically 'wrong' with modern English: the lack of a central language authority plus the Great Vowel Shift[1] caused the massive spelling inconsistencies of today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
Added reproduction of surviving humans. Sometimes it fuels the apocalypse and the world dies. Sometimes an isolated population repopulates the world. And sometimes it takes one infected idiot to ruin all the things.

http://ncase.me/emoji-prototype/?remote=-K4ED-VB3jb7Mhbpj_e4
It was at the bottom of the hill. One can imagine a more dense or solid layer sitting on top of a looser layer of soil or sediment beneath it, plus the road acts to hold it all in place like a suture. As the land slide from above pushes downwards into the lower layer, the firmer layer above will move upwards until it breaks.

It's unusual, but hardly something that boggles the mind or deserves the headline provided.
If you (or your bot) play on the private server ICCUP, you don't need the disks. Just download the ICCUP version from:
http://iccup.com/en/starcraft/sc_start.html
Inline SVG as Google Maps Marker
As a fellow Austrian I have to strongly disagree. Outside of the frequently-english-using circle (higher management positions, software devs, language students...), English proficiency is terrible. Generation 40+ more likely answers in French or Latin rather understand the difference between beef and pork.

I'd place myself in the 90% percentile of fluency in English here, but as soon as a native speaker forgets I'm participating I understand jack shit. Nada. Instant game over. Grammar, vocab, pronounciation, emotional expression, speed, comprehension, etc. -- everything takes a 50% hit compared to German.

My coworkers are from Austria, US, Slovenia, Serbia etc. -- often the only shared language is English. It makes meetings excrutiatingly slow and painful (non-fluent talking bringing back memories of 1st year elementary school reading).

And that is the experience in an highly educated multinational team in the software industry. Calling it "best-case" would overstretch it (that still goes to EU interpreters meeting at lunch), but compared to large parts of the population...

If that is "pretty good", what is "mediocre"? Or "bad"? The inability to say hello?
I think the fundamental thing is that it is not a rational fear--nuclear is associated with bombs that flatten cities and radiation is, to many people, a simply scary unknown that they can't touch, smell, or see, but which might kill them. (Many of the people I've met who were against nuclear power didn't really emotionally understand radiation as something you get some of every day anyways--it's a bogeyman that gives you either cancer or superpowers.)

Smoke/smog, in comparison, is something you can see and can expect to interact with daily if you're in a city. Despite the fact that it's much more dangerous, people don't perceive it as such.
It took me a while to realize how broken the process at my company is. You have to write your own review, review your coworkers, write your own goals. There is never any feedback from management if the goals are realistic or what their expectations are. At the end it's always "Keep doing what you are doing".
Apache Tomcat 8.0.29 available (new security features)
> No that is simply not true, seg faults provide useful debug info in any potential core dump they provide.

I'm not sure I understand this. Can't you get a backtrace out of a JavaScript exception just as well as you can get one out of a segfault? The segfault itself doesn't carry any information other than at best the faulting instruction and the nature of the fault, and you can surely get that out of a JavaScript exception.

Furthermore, a segfault is very often a sign of memory corruption that has already happened, possibly in the stack frames themselves. "undefined is not a function" is not. JS code that crashes with that error is in a much more debuggable state than native code that crashes with a segfault. And you can certainly configure your interpreter to take a coredump on an uncaught JS exception, which will definitely be more debuggable than a coredump post-memory corruption.

(Your personal attack is not an argument.)
1) And for every wrong that is brought to light there are thousands more than go unnoticed because they effect poor people, or disadvantaged, or because someone doesn't decide to be a hero and potentially sacrifice their career and working relationship with prosecutors and judges to be a whistleblower.

2) This is the very definition of the job of the government. Why should we not expect this. You are simply telling us to stop trying to make things better; not acceptable.

3) No, we don't need to wait to be outraged until we are the targets of the justice system. This is truly terrible advice. We should be outraged when anyone is wronged because it could just as well be us next, not wait until it's too late.

4) A bar complaint and banning the person from ever practicing law again sounds like a good start (honestly how many prosecutors are disbarred in circumstances of abuse? The article discusses remedies and bar complaints are not the methods professional rights advocates are choosing to use. You need to tell us why before recommending them) but realistically these people should be in prison.
Yeah, I had one and have always been disappointed that the newer MBPs never went back to the thinner bezel. The hinges were indeed the weak point, they fell apart after a couple months.
Taking a quick look the examples are better out of the gate than slicks docs are after a couple of years. Great examples are worth a lot in my book.
Apache Commons net 3.4 released
Ask HN: Best way to donate my dev skills?
I have been wanting to contribute my time and skills to some charitable organizations and/or worthy causes lately. I feel like this could make a larger impact than, say, just throwing money at causes I believe in and hoping that those people do something other than give themselves a pay bump with it or some corrupt dictator buy himself a new gold helicopter.. The problem is that I have _zero_ idea where to start. For the time being I just want to dip my toe in the water so to speak to see how things go. I have a family so I only have so much extra time to give. My main areas of expertise lie in JavaScript/NodeJS but have a ton of experience in a lot of other parts of the stack and am comfortable working with languages like PHP. Are there organizations out there that are in dire need of someone with good web development skills?
I'm from a small Europen country. I watched a loot of English cartoons and movies when I was in primary school. I never really put time into studying English, and my grades were below average. But I was always able to understand and communicate in English better than my friends. I still struggle with spelling and forming proper sentences. Sometimes I found myself stutter, or I get lost in the middle of a sentence. I work for an English-speaking remote company, and I communicate with coworkers on a daily basis. I think I'm pretty introverted in my native language. Usually, I just don't pay enough attention when speaking to people. But when I use English, I have to put that little extra effort into following a conversation that is showing up as me asking more questions and being a more active participant in the discussion. This is no a 100% rule, but something a noticed over the years.
Coming from Belgium, petke is also right about the influence of small language community. In example, in the flamish part (where belgian speak dutch), a lot of tv program and cinema is dub from english and even some cartoon. Where in the Walloons part (where belgian speak only french), we have access to the big tv network from France so we never watch anything in English.

But I remember reading that different languages use different sounds spectrum and hearing/understanding languages outside your spectrum is harder. Some languages have overlapping sounds spectrum which make learning different language easier. Now you have also the languages sharing the same roots and as you said somebody who know a germanic language then will have easier to guess/learn new vocabulary.
I wouldn't call it a misfeature. I think especially in math stuff it would be useful. I've used Δ in my math for Color module and it both has the natural mathematical meaning and must not change after I calculate it: https://github.com/zoffixznet/perl6-Color/blob/master/lib/Co...

What is a mis-feature is you can't assign-create to these variables when they're part with sigil-bearing variables, so, for example, here I ended up using a sigiled-Δ, which isn't as pretty :) https://github.com/zoffixznet/perl6-Color/blob/master/lib/Co...
Which link? I read the ArsTechnica article and the JWZ article linked but none explained his HN aversion. Though the JWZ tweet that detaro posted explained a little
And use what instead? Serious question.
Scalajs looks so much better.
That's a good comparison. My wife is from Asia Minor, and despite being a modern career woman in other respects, gets very weirded out if I cook for myself. Cooking for both of us is fine, oddly enough, but she'll insist on doing it if it's just for me.

Everybody has their hang ups.
Probably that Finland, Poland and Estonia are right behind the small Germanic language countries on the English Proficiency Index[1], and above Germany and Austria.

1. http://www.ef.edu/epi/
If it works at all that would be a breakthrough of truly epic proportions. So I'd be more than fine with that.
From what I can tell, some Celeron/Pentium/i3 SKUs support it because AMD was killing Intel in certain NAS applications thanks to the fact that their low-end chips had ECC.
> They don't get to run a legal swamp in isolation.

Arguably they should get to do that, if that's what the people want. After all, framers never intended for the federal government to impose uniform standards on state justice systems.
> Is fission even (economically) competitive?

Remember that he's talking about a new generation of reactor designs. Also remember that a key driver of the high cost of nuclear energy is lawsuits based on irrational overestimates of the risk of nuclear energy compared to other energy sources. Coal has killed orders of magnitude more people than nuclear, yet nobody ever brings a NIMBY lawsuit to prevent a coal plant from being built.

> Wouldn't a profit oriented insurance company cover these risks, of these were really as low and controllable as people say here?

The technical risks are not the risks the insurance companies are worried about.
If you could be Harry Callahan, Darth Wader, Captain Kirk, Terminator, 007, Blad Runner's Roy Batty and The king lion's Mufasa, all in one lifetime, you might look like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantino_Romero

Talking about interesting lives...
I must confess that I didn't read the original post, and I am being down voted. Perhaps there is something interesting beyond the title, but I would be grateful people down-voting me could give a hint about what they are thinking about, what their argument is. I know that is easier to move your finger than to make a real or sound argument, also I am awared that you must not ask why the down voting (a question of etiquette it seems). But anyway, some feedback is always welcome.
> I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English.

ough:

Bough (ow), Though (oh), through (oo), thorough (uh), rough (uff), cough (off), hiccough (up)

That's broken.
I teach high school math and science, and I often give students assignments that ask them to develop their own questions. I make a point of telling them we won't be answering all of these questions; some of the best questions would take a lifetime to answer. This helps break students out of the mindset that every question asked in school needs to be answered, and the answer needs to be evaluated as right or wrong.

Many students don't know how to craft a good question, but given the space and time to do so many of them can develop the skill. Classroom conversations change significantly when the guiding questions we're focusing on have been thoughtfully crafted by students.
I’m sure there are. Just ask around at organizations that look interesting to you.

In my city there was a ferry for NGOs some time ago so anyone could find an engagement they enjoy.
> Nobody is going to put up billions of dollars unless there is some predictability in terms of cost and schedule.

The lack of predictability comes from lawsuits, not technical problems in construction. Plants that were completed and ready to go online on schedule were stopped at the last minute by lawsuits, and in many cases were never started up.
More info: https://ponyfoo.com/articles/javascript-developer-survey
You can filter the output of coal plants and that does help a lot. In the US coal only kills 15 people per terawatt-hour compared to 150 in China. But a coal plant generating as much power as Fukushima did will still tend to kill about 20 people even with safer US style plants. If you add up all the coal power in the US that's about 20,000 deaths per year. More or less the same order of magnitude as the damage from Chernobyl. But of course that's normal and doesn't make the news.
Totally Tooling Tips: Build Processes (Which Tool Will Die Next?)
How does this compare to what Elon Musk says about solar power? In this presentation he shows that a reasonable amount of area could power the entire US (if we used roof tops etc for solar panels).

Is that not feasible?

https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187
> PS: Photovoltaic panels with 20% efficiency are already close to the theoretical limit (see this chapter’s endnotes Current, world record for concentrated solar is 46%.

They are likely referring to the theoretical limit for crystalline silicon based cells (~30% IIRC). This is due to silicon's particular band gap. The record is held by multi-junction cells, which don't suffer from this limitation (which is part of their problem, as they use materials far more expensive than silicon).
We have 4x more Thorium on Earth than Uran, 1 gram Thorium gives 3x more energy than Uran and has a shorter halft-time, this means it produces less radioctive waste. The problem is, that a Th-plant can not be used to produce nuclear weapons. That shows that we have a political crisis and not an energy crisis. If Japan wouldn't be afraid to build his nuclear plants on the west-coast (protected from tsunamis but easy to get hit by a chinese rocket), Fokushima still would be a nice place to live.
> With coal power you will have a few dead mine workers.

Actually, most of the risk of coal power is soot in the air, causing respiratory problems. This has killed far more people than coal mining. But most people don't know that, as your comment illustrates. So part of the problem is that the risks of other power sources are not accurately represented.

(Also, btw, there is radioactivity in coal ash--more than in some types of nuclear waste.)
That is probably Subotica.
Coincidence that this article is released at the same time as the youtube/google petition campaign?
I can related with the OP. I guess most non-native English speakers can.

> Before 1950, when the "TV Language Unification" happened, everybody was still taking with their dialects and italian was only mastered by a small percentage of people. Sicilian itself, the language talked the most by my family, predates Italian by centuries.

For a hands-on example about what he is talking about, those of you who learned Italian try to understand what this song[1] says, without actually studying the lyrics. It's an awesome Sicilian tune by an ethnic group Messinese[2] group called Kunsertu (concert).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXQSoTGwun4

[2] Messina is the port-city that gates the most beautiful island in the world: Sicily! :-)
Here in Germany we used a salt mine to dispose of our nuclear waste, which backfired, to say the least. [1]

How big the eventual costs (the article speaks of "at least €4 billion ($5.3 billion), but more likely somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion") will be is uncertain, and I can't back this up by any real evidence, but my guess is that those who profited from the waste disposal might not be the ones paying for the clean-up.

This all makes me think of the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage" [2]:

>The others quickly dismiss Leela's concerns that the new garbage ball will return and destroy a future generation. Professor Farnsworth replies that it will not be for hundreds of years, presumably by the year 4000, prompting Fry to say "That's the 20th Century spirit!"

[1]http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-weighs-o...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Big_Piece_of_Garbage
I think this is a great thing to do. I've donated development time to a few different non-profits. The small ones, in particular, are often extremely in need of help and the benefit gained can be enormous.

The biggest thing to consider up front is -- of course -- maintenance. It's not that helpful to come in and bang out some code and then disappear. Find a topic area that you really care about, and then find one small non-profit that you think is doing great work in that area. Then, if you possibly can, build a long-term relationship with them. It doesn't have to be a big time commitment. But it probably does need to be an ongoing commitment. At least for a reasonable length of time.
>I'd like to do more public outreach but the knowledge gap seems insurmountable

You're not giving people enough credit. You can explain DNA from a functional standpoint to children. The problem is bandwidth - there are many things a given person will possibly might want to know that have big consequences. However, it's not clear that everyone should know how GMO's work compared with, say, nuclear energy, encryption, general food production techniques, banking, medicine, global politics, and whatever they need to do for their current occupation. Clearly a substantial number should, but everyone?

Like, imagine someone from the intelligence community saying they'd like there to be a public discussion about terrorism, but they're skeptical it could ever happen because 80% of Americans don't know where Boko Haram is located. The answer isn't to throw your hands up and say that the knowledge gap is insurmountable, it's to provide the opportunity for dialogue so that enough people can engage the issue.
Building Resilient Web Apps
>>Perhaps you missed the whole obvious joke thing?

What's remarkable about HN is that most jokes are heavily voted down with responses like "go back to reddit", and jokers regularly complain that HN has no sense of humor. And yet every now and then a joke gets voted to the top. I've yet to wrap my mind around this phenomenon, personally...
Which Open Source libraries does Mozilla depend on the most?
I had a similar experience. And event after living in a UK/US for 6y and my partner being a native english speaker, sometimes I struggle. One other frustration that I had, when you have to argue for your case. If you have to justify a solution against a native english speaker that can create some frustration as finding the right wording for the arguments can be sometimes a challenge.
When I was in my teens I read "Straight and crooked thinking", it seems to be online here: https://www.divinetruth.com/www/en/pdf/People/Other/Robert%2...
The Top Healthiest Foods
I'm sure that you could use a high level language like Java or Python for some non-critical tasks. For more critical software you likely have hard real-time requirements, and you need to be able to reason about memory use and time in ways that obviously isn't suitable for anything that could "pause the world" for an arbitrary amount of time to collect garbage.
Native English speaker here with some corrections, if you like! :)

police are

50-year-old

lives of those people are

sharp sounds

long-term
>* framers never intended for the federal government to impose uniform standards on state justice systems*

Technically correct, but you have to ignore the XIIIth and XIVth to make that relevant to today.