skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you underestimate yourself. IMO, had you not come right out and stated you were not a native speaker, I might have overlooked the couple of very minor mistakes you made. Seriously, go read some comments on digg, youtube, reddit, or slashdot to get an idea how far above the "average" English speaker you are already. You communicated your point effectively, which is a lot better than most writing on the internet does.

As for what you should do to continue to improve, you're on the right track with the reading program. But, you must supplement it with conversation (preferably with native speakers) and writing (which you should also preferably share with a native for critique). If you continue to do this, I can practically guarantee your English will improve.
Less than a fifth of companies have embraced Twitter for customer service
This happens because news.arc sends the login cookie as part of an HTTP redirect response. This isn't allowed by the HTTP spec, but most browsers handle it fine. Android doesn't.

Anyone familiar enough with news.arc to try and fix this? I've looked through the source, but I'd need to learn a bit more of Arc and its HTTP library to get to a solution.
I currently have an excellent front-end development team with an entrepreneurial background based in Latin America.

I was able recruit and partner up with the best in the region because I run blogs, communities and events around tech and entrepreneurship and by actually meeting them at conferences.

My suggestion would be for you to

1. Network and meet your developers personally
OR
2. Try your luck at elance.com, freelancer.com, rentacoder.com or odesk.com; be very careful though, many bidders will say they can do everything by tomorrow, and end up not delivering. It is very trial-and-error process to find the right provider

Finally for your budget, you can easily have the whole site redesigned and put in a CMS

If you'd like more help send me an email andres.barreto * socialatomgroup * com
Android 2.1 on ODroid Developer Edition
To be fair, if so many are so bad at relational databases, maybe it is best for the world that they just move away from it before they injure someone.
With multitouch and a big screen, my question is: do you really NEED an actual pizza, though?
5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted | Cracked.com
I know you are being a bit sarcastic, but being stressed in this manner can actually be a strength if you know how to turn it off. I am quite productive when I stress myself, and as long as I can easily relax when the time comes (when the work is done), I think I will remain healthy. (I still have my hair, after all.)
http://www.authenticjobs.com/ is another front-end/design job board (run by Cameron Moll).
Feedback, as somebody says, is important. Nagging from parents and teachers smoothed out the rough spots in the native speakers' English. If there's somebody you can trust to review your writing, ask him or her to do so. Conversation will get you a long way on the rest.
Barbarian Horde from Gladiator by Hans Zimmer
Reddit did a story about how they're scaling up on Amazon, and what struck me was how low the demand really was. They were serving up 100 hits per second.

I remember working on a solution in the 2000/2001 era that dynamically generated pages in the 300 renders per second range...on a low end desktop.

Scaling out for a lot of these guys allows them to manage to duct-tape something together in spite of their abilities, not because of it.
And you can add to that a source of inspiration. Ironically, I saw this post on HN after just submitting an "Ask HN" which came to me while watching a live performance of OK GO! on YouTube. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183847

The lot of them are such a great business case study by the way. The way they created their "brand", their marketing prowess and their ability to continually, continually, continually be so masterful in the art of word-of-mouth and virality.
At http://ukclasslist.com we just changed our search to use solr last night if you want to see how it works.
Another reason to oppose gay marriage: the stable straight marriage problem is solvable, and there is a fairly simple algorithm to solve it. It heavily uses the fact that preferences form a bipartite graph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem

In general, the stable roommate/gay marriage problem does not always have a solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_roommates_problem
So, let me get this straight, the author prefers using a USB cable to sync then the wireless also provided? Once again, all app developers should know not to use the private APIs (although, to be fair, some have got caught based on using a framework from a third party). Since the new iPad looks to have some sort of common file area and sync support for that, I think I see why those calls remain private and Apple is looking at them.

The rest of the article is stuff that would be good on the AMB podcast.
For anyone in the NYC area, Rob Carlson will be speaking at NYCR this Saturday (Mar 13).

http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/03/10/reminder-bioengineerin...
Mostly .NET errors that nobody care about.
I don't know any statistics but I would say that the number 1 problem here is Windows and the almost-mandatory need for an antivirus they are trying to enforce.

So on one hand you have a widely-used but broken product (Windows) that needs another usually costly product (the antivirus). Both need to be kinda up-to-date in order to have this run smoothly and virus free.

So I'm not certain the government could just "vaccinate computers" (by upgrading Windows/antivirus): just think of the user-level applications incompatibilities.

But the governments might think about what does it mean to have a critical global infrastructure product that depends only on one (foreign) company: Microsoft. I wouldn't like that... So while nationalizing stuff doesn't sound really nice, perhaps the government(s) should start defining some regulations on the quality of Windows as well as a control body. But this is an even less reliable, corruption-sensitive, bureaucratic situation.

In the end perhaps it's best we leave things the way they are.
Don't forget "OS X-compatible" and "Solaris compatible".
JSR-166: The Java fork/join Framework
I don't think you can say much more than "it's broke" in 140 characters.
At 25 dollars a day for a hotel room, with food, a car lease and a storage unit to pay for and paying for bottled water he's spending even more than I am on living expenses and I HAVE a job.

Yes, some parts of the country are more expensive than others and by strict definition he's 'homeless', I don't think that term applies in the same way to somebody who has a storage unit full of vintage wine and flat screen TV's.

I don't take issue with people living however they see fit, but come on, I'd love to drive a BMW but I buy clunkers with cash because that is what is practical. Don't expect me to feel sorry for you because you chose to make car payments and buy bottled water instead of paying your mortgage.
Slightly off topic, but I find the Python REPL to be the best calculator out there.
His preferred calculator seems fairly close to using ipython which is what I would do.
Configuration management: push vs. pull
Definitely go for HTML5, mostly h.264, since HTML5, Flash, and iPhone all use that standard (for the most part). Plus, Palm WebOS and Android.

But, if you have the resources, you might as well have an app. Think of the App Store as free advertising.
You completely missed the point. To access data from ZumoDrive (according to the article), all that you need is access to the EC2 instance that hosts the service. There's no need to break any encryption because ZumoDrive apparently uses SSL to provide link-level encryption, and then it encrypts the data that it gets onto the S3 storage. The fact that there is a cleartext copy of the data under the control of the service is the problem; anybody with access to ZumoDrive can get that cleartext data. With tarsnap, the data is encrypted on the client machine, and only the client ever sees the cleartext. That's the key difference.
I don't think anyone was accusing Microsoft of "conspiring". I think it's more about the amusement factor of the whole thing. It's more like Coke running an advertisement talking about Pepsi as "a major competing brand whose name rhymes with mepsi".
For an extremely weak version of "compliant," and definitely not out of the box. You'd have to grab Services for Unix, Cygwin, etc. to even get close.
HTML is doomed. Flash is way more powerful and installed on almost every computer in the world.

What, HTML isn't installed on almost every computer in the world?
The author’s a bit bitter, isn’t (s)he?
I just use the Google search-bar up over there on the right.
I think the guy in "The Essentials of User Interface Design" says the same thing somewhere in that book.
How about for startups that are not building the typical web app? What if you do need capital for manufacturing and prototyping and regulatory approval?

What's a decent 'runway' for that kind of deal? I can't see pushing our product out within 3 years, due to the above, and it will definitely take substantial capital investment.

Is taking as much as possible such a bad thing in that case?
>> "This is a critical reason why most tech startups in the UK go absolutely nowhere. You can’t legislate against it. It’s built straight into the culture."

[Citation needed]

This piece is fairly short on evidence+numbers, and overloaded with sweeping generalizations.

>> " If you’re starting a new tech business, the only place — the ONLY place — you should be is Silicon Valley."

If you need to schmooze VC/need to work for a big company for a while so you can schmooze their M&A department/etc, then probably Silicon Valley is the best bet.

But if you just want to build a tech company that makes money, it doesn't much matter where you are.

>> "That is a traffic warden putting a parking ticket on the Bugatti. That is also a crowd cheering on the traffic warden. Why? Well it’s because each of the people watching will never, ever, ever have the capacity to even think about buying an £800,000 Bugatti. They know it. They know their place. Why should someone else be allowed to be successful enough to blow almost a million quid on a car? Yeah. Fluck’em! Rich B’stards!"

They're cheering because the car is probably in the way.

Jeez what a stupid 'article'. The author just comes across as someone who has failed and is blaming it all squarely on the 'culture' rather than any fault of his own.

And FWIW, flying out for a couple of days every 3 months is hardly a big deal. If the US had universal healthcare I think it'd be more appealing.

(Caveat): I don't really care about 'the scene'. I just sit in my office, do my own thing. I don't really need a 'tech scene', I've got one online :/
Very cool project, but isn't this a yacht? I know the blog's headline is 'island' but I don't get it.
I think the lack of tact and kindness is wrong, but the sentiment may be fairly on par. Things are different in other parts of the country. A lot of people can't dream of affording a lease on a car like that job or not. I'd love to be able to afford 25 dollars a day for rent but the reality is a lot of us who are actually working are being far, far more frugal than this guy is when he is out of a job. The realities of life just aren't the same in the rest of the country.
Summary: Take a side in a polarized environment
Another excellent calculator (multi-platform, too): http://www.speedcrunch.org/en_US/index.html

By default, it has a keypad, but you can turn it off easily enough.
That's really not Another reason to oppose gay marriage :) (I assume your being as tongue in cheek as the article).

Because the pool of marital age humans is constantly growing (and changing) the stable straight marriage problem can pretty much be considered insoluble :)
"This is different from the stable marriage problem in that the stable roommates problem does not require that a set is broken up into male and female subsets. Any person can prefer anyone in the same set."

You know that not all gay people prefer all other gay people? If a gay man prefers a gay woman, we call them straight.
Super Meat Boy developer proves the App Store is "kind of sh*t"
There used to be a keyboard like that, called FingerWorks. Was acquired by Apple and was never heard of again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
Like you, I've tried to volunteer at places that I thought were doing good, only to find they weren't really interested. It may seem crazy, but most non-profits and other social-justice-minded orgs are not interested in efficiency or IT investment.

Competition drives efficiency and non-profits aren't really competing with each other that way. Even if you got a job in the field, you'd be supporting a number of nice but computer-phobic people who aren't interested in scaling their efforts. And that's the best case scenario. The worst is... well, consider that non-profits live or die based on how well they communicate with donors; achieving things is often a secondary goal. If you think that going into "social justice" is a way to stay more pure than your commercially-minded classmates, think again.

That said, there are a number of places doing real good where CS skills would be welcome, and are awesome places to work. One of them is my employer, the Wikimedia Foundation -- we support Wikipedia and its sister projects.

http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs

Watch this space: more jobs are likely to be posted in the coming months.

You might also try:

The Internet Archive - http://www.archive.org/about/jobs.php

Tor - http://www.torproject.org/open-positions.html.en
I remember playing the old Hollywood Stock Exchange (non-cash version) back in middle school. This seems like a fun idea, but how do you rule out the heaps of insider information that exist?
Just as MySpace made a real commitment to music, to have the best musicians and have the best content, we're now making the same type of commitment with games

Hopefully their game player won't be as nasty as their music player. I mean, yeah, it's great that they did that, and they made a big impact on music in that area, but wow was it nasty the last time I poked it with a stick.
It's a tough call on Twitter customer support: There's been some great success stories and campaigns (see:DELL), but you can't really do much more than help funnel people through your existing channels: "Sorry about your problem, e-mail support at xxx," and everytime you do that publicly, you're pointing those who do follow you to things going wrong. It takes a special skill and dedicated employee to do right, which may or may not result in a net payoff.

The thing that bothers me more about Twitter support is how all the sudden companies are expected to using one private protocol as an "official" channel, when it's a protocol they don't own nor control. Nobody blames their local grocery for not using AT&T instead of Verizon for their support calls, but all the sudden you're not on Twitter, Facebook, and GetSatisfaction (all private companies), and "you don't listen to your customers," even if you have a bevy of other avenues.

Does this bug anyone else?
Subtitle: Use a flamewar to generate comments on your blog.
This isn't quite fair to the original post. He makes at least two points you ignore:

The data is unencrypted some of the time on their servers.

You shouldn't use ZumoDrive if you're a Chinese dissident because it's presumptively insecure against your risks.
I'm not certain exactly where your incisive satire is aimed, but "this whole thread" was not the right phrase for me to have used - I was really referring to the portion of the discussion starting from the immediate parent to my first comment on this story. Hope that clears it up for you!
In Germany there have been some initiatives to use open source in the government.

If nothing else, more diversity is good against class action breaks.
Just make sure you don't get on this bus by mistake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_&_Teller%27s_Smoke_and... :)
I can definitely see an application for that.
The Google search bar is an excellent calculator, because it understands words too. You can do "50 million * 3%" and it will answer "one million five hundred thousand". That's easier to interpret than a whole bunch of zeros. It also interprets units "20 mph * 3 hours" = "96.56064 kilometers". "20 mph * 3 hours as miles" = "60 miles". Also the auto-suggest feature completes calculations so you don't even need to hit enter.
I found intriguing this part of what you said:

as a story unfolds it gets more context and is curated in one place

I've been dismayed in the past that we hear a news report, and the interest dies out before it's resolved, so we never learn what actually happened.

It seems that this is because the delivery mechanism for MSM is always serialized and episodic.

If a way could be found to communicate an issue, event, etc., as a single entity throughout its lifecycle, allowing us to watch developments, reaction, resolution, etc., so I could go back and see if, e.g., the corrupt legislator really got prison time, or how many Haitians remain homeless after the recent earthquake, I think I'd be a lot more satisfied.

I think that in one way, Google Wave can address some of this. But it's still lacking the indexing and discoverability aspects.
so... StumbleUpon?
I saw the same thing when reading one of the first book about C# that Microsoft published; it its introduction it spent all the time talking about C# and C and it managed to avoid ever mentioning Java when it's evident than C# is much closer to Java than to C.
My take on this when a friend mentioned it was: I don't need a new hard drive to run XP, and I mainly use external USB drives anyway.
I fail to understand how this can be useful. Seems an (inverse) application of an old method: to say something wise, first think of something foolish and then say the opposite.
As far as I know, something along these lines already exists in Canada. Not the "vaccinating computers" part, but I had a few friends in college who had their internet cut off until I ran a virus scan on their computer.

It was a pain in the ass, but I'm sure the ISPs appreciated being able to cut off infected PCs from their networks.
And it's probably not effective anyway. If there's an official security software, or even a small list of them, it creates an easy target for the bad guys to work around. They'll build their attack code with the knowledge of what they need to avoid.

Virus writers already do this today. They acquire a bunch of current AV programs, and test the virus on boxes with up-to-date AV. They don't ship the virus until it passes that test case.
Yes, spent all the article going on about how negative the British are ... kind of ironic really. Then this:

"Meanwhile to all British entrepreneurs reading, your head can go back in the sand now."

Oooh! Bitchy! I wonder what it's like being the only person in the UK with an ounce of entrepreneurial talent and ambition?

He's got some points and undoubtedly the optimism the US is famous for is a bit lacking here, but you'd think he was writing about North Korea rather than a G7 nation.
Built on a Lie: The Fundamental Flaw of Europe's Common Currency
Another case for NoSQL databases. (Actually I have no clue how to solve this but, I felt like no HN database discussion would be complete without it.)
The difference is that with a human you vaccinate at a much lower frequency. With a computer you have weekly anti-virus updates, many different software programs to patch (not just the OS), and all the complexity of running a huge variety of software on a huge variety of hardware.

The simplest solution would be to compel operating system manufacturers (not consumers) to provide adequate safeguards similar to what the FCC does to the airwaves.
That honestly to me seems to be a much larger problem in the London startup scene. I'm out there pretty often and it's not bad -- there are a lot of investors both VC and angel, a good smattering of startups and altogether a great environment for starting a company ... and all everybody does is complain about how bad it is.

At the last TechCrunch meetup I went to there, there was a whole talk with completely bat-shit reasons on why the UK had it so bad and the US was so much better (e.g. startups couldn't do well because Brown isn't as cool as Obama).
FCC Signals Changing Policy over ISPs and Pricing
Web Laureate Insight, "Fiverr:  I Offer 5 Dollar"
OT: Thank you for reminding me about this calculator. I had it installed on my old laptop and I forgot to install it on my new one. By the time I missed it, my old laptop was re-imaged and re-deployed. I could not remember its name and my google-fu was failing.
This is actually probably better than my original.
Can a Computer Mouse Cut the TV's Cable?
For Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier
Instacalc is another good one.

http://instacalc.com/
I have three issues with this post.

(1) It jumps on a company for talking about security in reasonable language that is meaningful to lay customers. Talking about security in rigorous technical terms in your marketing material is a terrible idea. When you yell at one startup for calling SSL and AES "military grade", you're making an untenable argument against most startup marketing.

(2) It makes the inane assertion that SSL/TLS is inferior to hand-rolled cryptography (paraphrased, "because when you own the client and the server you can pre-distribute keys and avoid all of SSL's complexity"). Hold two thoughts together in your head: first, that when Colin implements something like this, he's apt to be correct; and second, that when anybody else does it, they're apt to go catastrophically awry. If Zumodrive had done anything but TLS, they'd have me yelling at them, not Colin. And based on generalist developer crypto, I'm betting my yelling would be a lot scarier.

(3) It's sniping at a competitor about security. Talking up your own security is good. Talking down someone else's security is dangerous. It's bad marketing (it's turned me --- at least for the day --- from an advocate to a detractor) and it's bad business.

There's a lot of content in Colin's post I didn't feel the need to address. Am I wrong about any of those 3 points though? If not, I'm happy with my comment.
I thought surely this was a Photoshop job, but the Large size looks pretty legit.

Edison was a cut-throat businessman. The only thing that really surprises me about this is how similar the wording is to modern software Click-wrap agreements.
Looking at his preferred calculator, I really see no visual cues of what functions are supported. Is it a simple calculator or does it do complex formulas. The normal OS X calculator acts like the physical object and gives the clues of a physical object. This is not to say I think the translation of a physical object is the best solution, but I really think that some better visual hints need to be given then just a blank document for new users.

The page turning Apple built seems to me the right way to go because it is simple gesture we grasp instinctively, the content is paged, and it looks good.

We can do so much better then physical objects on computers (look at the interface to many puzzle games), but it really needs to assist the new users and get out of the way of the old.
Hero Phone Rep Meets Man She Saved
We're clear on the key difference between Colin's service and Zumodrive's. So clear that my comment actually acknowledges it, and recommends that he rewrite his post to talk up his own design instead of berating other companies.
Infection Defense May Spur Alzheimer’s
So I'm guessing apps will still be sandboxed and not able to interact - so no voice recorder for your phone calls, etc.
Communication with a CS representative requires a dialog. It has to be interactive and dynamic. That is not Twitter. Twitter is not chat. Chat is a back and forth exchange where people speak WITH each other. Twitter is directed speech where people speak AT each other.