skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People who learned english mostly via text rather than speech 20 years ago do have a bit of an excuse though: it was _a lot_ easier to find english content to read than to listen.

These days you can just get "south park" with subtitles off some torrent site, but non-dubbed content was quite harder to come by in Italy when I was a kid.

Sadly, this is not necessarily the same when trying to learn something other than english.
I agree that the bigger gains came from non-medical interventions and basic medicine. I also believe a lot of medicine is wasted.

In spite of this, I'd choose 2015 medicine at 2015 prices. I personally find walking, sitting, sex positions other than girl on top, and various more vigorous activities, to be a lot of fun. In 1970 those things probably wouldn't be available to me. It's definitely worth the $3k or so I paid in India for it and it'd be worth it at $1M.

Would you give up 1971+ medicine if you could pay 1970 prices?
I cannot tell you how much I love SloppyDevTypeCheckComfortBlankie, how much time/money it has saved my company (converting all our JavaScript to TypeScript), and how funny it is that some people take pride in writing code that isn't typed.
Currently only France, US, and Russia can build reactors for energy, but these are using U or Pu in different flavours. This fuel is hard to get. China can't afford that kind of fuel in quanities it will need. This is why China backs breakthrough research in Th fission, delivered by Norway. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.
I enjoy watching foreign movies with subtitles, and then trying to learn a few words in the language that way. I watched a French movie a few days ago that way, and was surprised at how many French words I already knew.

I've been told that's how the Dutch learn English. The country isn't big enough to make it worth dubbing the shows, so they are shown in English with Dutch subtitles.
What if somebody try to write 'flight control system' in node.js and 'settimeout' doesn't get fired on time !
Node.js seems to be popular only here.
http://cbcg.net/blog/2012/02/03/if-youre-using-nodejs-youre-...
>In my opinion one fact that made me so slow learning English is the fact that I started reading English without never ever listening to it.

The Italian practice of overdubbing English language movies and TV series doesn't help either.
(Side remark: it seems the comment has been edited, expanding it a lot. It was not clear to me initially. And anyway, it is good to have acronyms expanded for other readers.)
I can't see what kind of people/hour figures they're expecting, anyone seen that?
Multi-Bootable N-in-1 CD Howto (2002)
I am struggling with it right now.Some time I think my language part of my brain does not work.
After reading this, I still have mixed feelings about nuclear. On the one hand, we have an overhang of old-tech nuclear power that is dangerously obsolete, poorly run, and insanely expensive to build, run, and clean up after.

On the other hand, new-tech nuclear looks very attractive. The argument gets circular, because new-tech nuclear is speculative. Lots of old-tech nuclear should get shut before we get another Fukushima. So despite the theoretical ability to scale up faster, does nuclear really have an advantage over renewables?
Endless Accumulation, Endless (Unpaid) Work?
The UK relatively recently backed full cycle of Uranium fuel production in Kazakhstan. Tony Blair became personal advisor to Nazarbayev. And I ve heard, the UK is going to build new nuclear plants. Its supply is secured and the know how will be both French and USSR (Kazakhstan). Those interested can ask themselves, what Atomic Kitten was doing in Astana in 2010?
Dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10639838
This might look like a very traditional advice, but I think spending some time in the military is a pretty good thing to do. In particular, because it's really hard, and to someone who's more intellectually oriented, it's really alien and uncomfortable. You learn a lot about yourself when pushed to your limits, and then going back to normal life, everything looks very easy and achievable.

The author suggests doing something that makes you uncomfortable and makes you learn about yourself. He proposes a bunch of interesting things that have something lacking in common. They're all intrinsically good or semi-anarchistic things. I prefer my "go in the military" advice because it's completely opposite to one's anarchist penchant. And I think that's something important: to have a well formed perception, you need to experience things you don't necessarily agree with.

Note: here I assume that the reader is more prone to a free, somehow anarchist, anti-authoritarian point of view, and I suggest spending a decent effort in something contrarian to that.
Caleche – the only taxi app you'll ever need (seriously)
This Diagram Explains Why Good Ideas Fail and Why Certain Businesses Can Thrive
Retrofitting to legitimize.
Says the man taking a Straussian at face value.
Isn't this story just about the entertainment system? I don't think anybody would advocate using node.js for avionics.
Reminds me of

https://medium.com/matter/could-this-man-hold-the-secret-to-...

Don't mind the title, the article is good.

The article at the OP's link talks about proteins though, the one above talks about electricity.
> As much as I really like python, I find that calling system commands is a pain.. calling os.system is obviously far from great, and calling subprocess can get cumbersome.

Have a look at the 'sh' python module to ease your pain: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/sh
On a larger note, using JavaScript on the server-side seems kind of ridiculous. If Linden Labs came out with a server-side framework in LindenScript, would you use that? How about if Apple came out with a framework based on AppleScript?

Stopped reading right there. Well, actually, I read the next header "Callback spaghetti is about the last pattern with which you’d ever want to write anything" and realized that the author has absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
Don't use Php anyway.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/
One of the places where I disagree with the author is her choice to frame this as a response to any one individual. Her choice to submit it to HN with that as a title did a disservice to the potential for productive discussion.

For example, I wouldn’t and didn't click on a post with that title or a discussion about a post with that title, because I am sick and tired of discussing tin foil hat conspiracies.

Under this more neutral title, we might find more productive discourse.
Beware of anyone who says phrases like "kill a thread". The thread must have some cooperation in such a thing; the right design is for it to politely be asked to stop. Otherwise if it touches any shared objects, acquires any locks, etc., "kill the thread" becomes more like "make my address space into a death trap".
Do you mean "write it fluently"? Are you just skipping out on memorizing kanji and their onyomi an kunyomi? Surely to learn to speak, you need to learn grammar and that grammar is taught from a written source. I feel like you get another level of understanding what's being said out loud if you can imagine the kanji. For example, you might not know that みる has multiple forms with slightly differing meanings depending on how it's used ( i.e. 見る and 観る ). Speaking and reading/writing our two very distinct skills that need to be individually practiced. However, they benefit each other and should probably be practiced in tandem to progress as fast as possible.
What are the economics of Black Friday sales?
>Funny how the HN crowd gets riled up when it happens to programmers.

The author of the article doesn't care about run-of-the-mill torrenting. So I believe the average HN commenter doesn't get "riled up".

Quote from the article:
>When I ran Tekpub it would take (typically) a day or two (sometimes just a few hours) for the torrents to hit. It’s a price of doing business.

The problem in this case is that people are willing to pay for the courses but don't know that they are actually pirating them and Udemy is directly profiting from this.

>Movies cost tens of millions to make and employ hundreds if not thousands. Tv shows are maybe an order of magnitude smaller, records maybe one more. Any of those media products blow these aggrieved programmers out of the water, impact wise.

This is just my personal opinion but I'm not interested in either of those. They have no "impact" on me.

>But the founders of YouTube -- who played this little copyright game like a fiddle -- are heroes in the Valley.

They are actually taking action against copyright infringement. You can even claim the ad revenue from your works that the pirates would receive. Udemy does no such thing, even though they have enough employees to check the courses at a reasonable rate by hand and enough money since they take a cut for every sold course.

>I guess "move fast and break things" is a great motto until it's your stuff getting broken.

I don't mind getting my stuff "broken", whatever that is even supposed to mean. I want to receive their works for free in the same manner as I want them to receive my works for free. I don't see any inconsitency with that.
Hydro Dams cause immense catastrophe when they fail. They have killed far more people than Nuclear power. According to Wikipedia, the failure of a single Dam in China caused:

26,000 dead from flooding,
145,000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics,
11 million homeless

All forms of power generation have risks and tradeoffs. We should use the best available science to evaluate those risks - not emotion and fear. The future of our planet depends on it.
I sympathize, because I occasionally try to pair program in French, and yeah, it can be a struggle—and French spelling is far more rational than English spelling, despite the silent letters.

But if you're having trouble with listening comprehension, there's a fairly rapid way to improve that seems to work for many people: Watch lots of TV. A couple of years ago, I started buying DVD box sets in French, and just watching entire series straight through (both native French series, and dubbed US ones). My comprehension still isn't 100%, but it got a lot better, and I was pleasantly surprised when I started understanding a lot more people in Montréal, who tend to have strong accents related to European French speakers.

As a general rule of thumb, to improve a specific language skill (reading, listening, speaking), you're going to have to actually do a bunch of it. European programmers read a ton of English, so they can usually read it just fine. But unless your country shows a lot of subtitled US television, you're going to have much weaker listening skills.
Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy.

Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on.

Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont read but just listen, and automatically learn to understand English at home in front of the TV. By the time they get to study English at school, they already know how to speak it. English spelling is another thing though. Im still struggling with that.
Being an academic, I often hang out with people of various nationalities, usually each with it's own english-based language, slightly modified by grammar quirks and foreign vocabulary. A linguist friend call that "international english", which I like quite a lot. After a while, you can play "guess the nationality" based on the grammar quirks.

And everyone is still easier to understand than Scottish people. :)

I got lucky in that I learned english not only by reading, but also by watching a lot of series (both american and british). Watching english series with english subtitles was a huge help for me, and I think it's a decent way to learn nowadays, much more effective than english classes.
An interesting related article, English is not normal - https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-f...
For Inventor of Eudora, Great Fame, No Fortune (1997)
English is my third language; I've read and written English almost every day for 30 years, but I've only ever spent two weeks in English-speaking countries. I sometimes find myself unable to pronounce words that I've used for decades in writing – often, it's the type of more formal vocabulary that doesn't often come up in movies or TV series. For instance: cuticle, paean, echelon, emaciated, heinous, comely, disreputable, hearth, dearth, contumely, beatify, subsequent, etc.
Great read. This bit was especially interesting to me:

Still, guess what, nobody has issues understanding one of another region, or even from a Switzerland canton.

I learnt standard Italian (Tuscan) whilst I lived in Bologna, and achieved a reasonable level of fluency - though sadly quite rusty now, a decade later - but I really struggled with regional dialects, especially in Sicily and Venice. It's not just the differences in pronunciation: there are also vocabulary differences.

If it's any consolation, I understand that North Americans find Glaswegian quite challenging, especially when watching "Trainspotting" (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3E7UkIzt4).
> What effect does "making it bigger" have?

It makes the economy look better. In a nutshell, governments want people to think everything is alright, even when it's not.

There's a massive bubble in US stocks, for example, and when (not if) that bursts, it may well take the rest of the economy with it, and then it'll be worse than 2008.

As long as people can be manipulated into believing that the economy is recovering, having to face reality can be postponed.

As for "conspiracy theorists", you've been trained to point and laugh at them, but you shouldn't. For example, how does a hijacked passenger plane crash into the fucking Pentagon without the most powerful military in the world stopping it?

Not without the aforementioned military letting it happen, that's for sure.

Feel free to start questioning everything you're told by the mainstream media any time now..
Super Glue Built Planes, Nukes and Saved Soldiers’ Lives
As a native English speaker, I can understand pretty much every other native English speaker (though I may struggle a bit with Cockney or Nigerian english, the point gets across).

I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken? It, like Italian, has a very simple set of rules for pronouncing words. But even so, clearly different groups of people have different ideas about how these words should be interpreted (not to mention just straight up dropping syllables).

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. Yeah we have lots of whacky accents and exceptions to pronunciation rules, but if a language is spoken by huge swaths of people across the world there's going to be a lot of variety.
I am presupposing that you really want to get rid of fossil fuels. If the people making the decisions prefer to keep oil and coal in business for whatever reasons than the discussion is pretty pointless to begin with, no matter what alternative you are discussing.
For all the talk of non-tradeable sectors being undercounted, there has also been a vast overcounting of non-tradeable sectors that became tradeable (but not necessarily "better").

Child care, health care, senior care, security, and education are just some examples - to a much greater extent they used to be handled, untracked, within the context of a household, until they were commercialized.
Nuclear Fission is not a plug and play solution either. Unlike other possible solutions like a breakthrough in mass energy storage, we know that fission could satisfy our needs. But it will still require some 30 years of investment to figure out the new breed of reactors and where to source the fuel from.
> But the rapid advent of gene-edited animals threatens to outstrip public discussion of their risks and benefits, some scientists and bioethicists have warned.

I'm skeptical that an actual public discussion could ever occur. I have not met a single non-technical person who can explain what DNA is or what it does. All they know is that GMOs are different from what we had before and we're changing things that are natural, which is (quite reasonably) frightening to them.

I'd like to do more public outreach but the knowledge gap seems insurmountable. For example, 80% of Americans support labeling food that contains DNA [1]. Where do you even begin with a person like that?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Parrot VM hasn't been supported for quite some time. I'm pretty sure that it's been mostly abandoned.

The current VMs are MoarVM, JVM, and some are working on a JavaScript backend.
> Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on.

Counter argument: everything is dubbed in Austria and yet we're pretty good at English. Why? Education and a multi-cultural background in the last 30 years.
I think the big fear of nuclear power is because we don't know how to handle catastrophic risks.

With coal power you will have a few dead mine workers. It's only mine workers that are affected and they have a definite risk in front of their eyes. You can rise the worker protection regulations for making this safer. You have the problem of air pollution through fine particles and sulfur. You can solve this with filters. The CO2 Problem isn't caused by one coal plant alone, so that problem is ignored.

With nuclear on the other hand you have a history of failures that were tried to be covered up, while being told that nuclear is 100% safe. The failures were unforeseen and led to a few catastrophes we weren't prepared to handle. We're more scared of the things we don't know than of the things we do know. And then the effects were very far reaching. The area around Chernobyl still isn't habitable today, more than half of the boars caught in Bavaria still aren't deemed safe for consumption because of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl. Fukushima and Chernobyl had a huge effect on the people living around them and both were in relatively low populated areas, so effects at a catastrophe in a nuclear power plant more near to a big city would be far greater.

I'm not saying that nuclear power is creating more damage than coal power, I just want to show why people fear nuclear power more.
But I really like executing PHP code!
This old one again. As someone who's actually worked in the nuclear energy industry, it's a common but wrong refrain... diffusion of petrochem radioactivity is much less of a liability than the very real, concentrated dangers of radioisotopes, even factoring in all of the other many negatives of coal.
English is my first language, I've spoken it all of my 33 years, and I am an Engineer.

I have no idea what "contumely" means, or how to pronounce it. You're doing great :)
What I learned from this: modern copyright is so bizarre that to just post a copy of a prorgam online legally requires superhuman levels of patience, willingness to jump through hoops, unusual levels of corporate continuity for the tech field, and insiders championing your cause.

Or you could just take 1/10th the luck and time and energy and apply it to Archive Team projects and get 10x the results...
I'm not an economist, but could tax inversions cause this. Asset values rise, but capital stays offshore and doesn't circulate back into the economy thereby limiting saving.
This is used by many -

http://corpus.canterbury.ac.nz
It can be if it's standardized as Taylor Wilson suggests... build uniform, low pressure, high temp molten salt reactors in a factory.
Right, the idea would be to put the logic at the top of the main php file for wordpress, something like:

# oversimplified, but...
$key=md5(http_build_query($_GET));
$content=apc_fetch($key,$success);
if ($success === TRUE) {
echo $content;
return ;# never invoke wordpress
}
# wordpress here
# some logic at the bottom to store what wordpress
# just rendered into the cache
How to develop a metric to steer your startup
For some reason, I thought every country subtitles movies/tv-shows that are not produced in their own language.

When I moved abroad, to Spain, I found it amusing to play clips to movie fans in English and ask who is this? Based on the sound. Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio etc. - they didn't know any because the famous ones have even their personal voice doublants.
Airbus wants to build 'shipping container' cabins that detach from planes
Generative models strike again.
Hostnames and usernames to reserve (GH edition)
The Titanium G4 was a really aggressive design, and for the most part they pulled it off. There are a few pieces that don't hold up to rough daily use (the hinges).

The contemporary iBooks had much thicker bezels and were built much more durably, for a target market that probably included education.

Loved the ircle screenshot.
contumely means an insult, it almost exclusively comes up in Shakespeare. 99% of people on the street would not know that word
Yeah, what you noticed is correct, but the reason is completely wrong. edit: see the map on wiki[0]

The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important. People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that necessary, because they have a big country of their own, their own language should be the important one (and it partially is, although English has seemed to win as the international communication platform).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29
Just a cursory reading, but I noticed the author embeds the mutex in their structs. I'd recommend against doing that by default, because that mutex's methods become part of your API. Maybe in some cases you desire that, but I argue that in most case you don't.

The fact that your struct be concurrency-safe through mutex is an implementation detail. You want to keep the locking/unlocking internal to your type, you don't want to expose it to outsiders. Exporting the methods of the mutex in your struct suggests that somehow, it's ok for users of the type to lock/unlock it. I doubt that this is true. In practice, if your struct is "concurrency-safe", it means using its methods is sufficient to obtain a safe behavior. If a user of the type never requires access to the mutex, don't export it. Especially since mutexes aren't reentrant, in most case if a user of your struct attempted to Lock the struct before calling a method, they'd deadlock themselves.

TL;DR: for API design reasons, don't embed a mutex in your struct.
Critical Thinking: A Necessary Skill in the Age of Spin
Actually the late USSR had a technology of small fully automatic single loaded reactors for long-term supply of electric power in middle-size cities. Fully sealed unit. After use (decades) - you just cover it with a lawn. But back then the USSR had enough fuel in production. Right now the know how in Russia is lost and nuclear fuel generation is very weak. Also HMD generator by Oleg Gritckevitch was very promising. The town in Armenia was fed by electricity generated by a small prototype in 1988.
This is very eloquent. Thanks for articulating.
I'm fairly certain Spain dubs almost everything, at least when I lived there for 2 years, everything seemed to dubbed.