skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to mention functionality - code the same thing in Flash and using Canvas and compare what is involved. Some things that are trivial in Flash/Flex are (as far as I can see) pretty difficult when using Canvas.

Note that I really want to use Canvas - but at the moment when it comes to interactive graphical applications I don't think the two are currently directly comparable.
Ask HN: How to excel in English?
I'm not a native English speaker. I'm good at English. I can write, easily understandable text. However, I didn't reach the point of excellence. The hard point is "How to reach it?"

Reading can be a way to that, but I'm actually reading a lot (around 20 articles per day and also active in few good forums and discussion sites). I started massive reading (20-25 articles per day and also printing PG, Joel and other interesting authors articles and read them offline) around 40 days ago.

I don't see a big difference from where I started. So is it just a time process, or are there other ways how I can become fluent in English?

Thanks for the advice.
The Dude.
Or 'CxO'.
Horses photo up in the mountains
I have fallen in love with this place instantly. The silence,the distance from the civilized world and the fact that you’re only sharing those moments with a few people gave me a special feeling…
In some ways that's true. Win XP is missing several features.

On the other hand I'd wager that XP has broader support for any driver or program in existence than any other version of any other OS. That's always nice.

As we're seeing, though, that's going to start changing real soon.
Dropping out to work on my business felt so right at the time. I was studying politics and hated it. Now I'm living with students and watching them enjoy a care-free life for a few years whilst I stress about wages, sales and tax-returns. The grass, it seems, is always greener.
Smoke Relief
The dependency emotionally is that without marijuana the worries about school, anxiety about home life, frustrations with a present or past partner and difficulties with friends seems overwhelming. There is a growing inability to deal with stressors through one's own resources.
Just a heads up, we don't all go to the same university as you do. What in the world are you talking about?
Ask HN: What steps should I take to find a front ender? (And not be ripped off)
Front end/graphics has always been my Achilles heel. This project that I'm working on (www.mgxcopy.com) is long overdue for a design refactoring, and I want to find someone/some-firm whom will (a) generate programmatically clean code that I can work with and be seo friendly and (b) I may be able to call upon for further work on the site.

I want to up the visual quality as well as the usability/functionality of the site tremendously, and I'm new to beauty in the front end. Basically, just graphics as well as cross-browser, seo-/programmer-friendly code would be great. But ideally, I'd get some snappy js-animation to the user experience.

I have already checked out Crowdspring, but am satisifed neither by the quality nor the prospect of getting good code. And in my mind the other options are Craigslist, and iterations of Google searches. I'm also considering posting on the 37signals Job Board or the Smashing Magazine Board, but I'd rather not spend the money till I'm sure I have no other options.

So: what are some venues you have used to find front end developers or--as a front-end developer--you use to find jobs? And as a bonus question: what can I expect for a budget of $3-5k?
What I like about Bubbles is that it manages to visualize the program more like how I think graphically. I've never been a text programmer. I see the code in a visual way in my head, far from typing on a keyboard. About the opposite of Emacs/Vim. I seldom remembers the names of classes and methods, but where they are in a code landscape where the code almost have different kind of colours and textures. Negative space and beautifulness of code is important to me, and it has nothing to do with the text itself. The less I need to use a keyboard the better.
dont you want flash to be doomed? In 5 years why should the web require a plugin to show video or vector graphics?
I would very seriously recommend reading the journal paper on Amazon Dynamo which is the predecessor to Apache Cassandra:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dyn...

PS: Why aren't we in the habit of citing papers like this? So many links are to websites rather than direct sources, and the info in papers is usually highly readable and extremely informative about the details.
How are they justifying this? The only answer I can think of is "to highlight the ways in which the internet is creating a difference in the world."

I hadn't noticed that the world is different due to the internet.
Is there a mean to combat the threat of biological warfare since we cannot stop the proliferation of this technology?

Perhaps, people will starts to inject themselves all manners of viruses and bacterias designed to combat totally unknown threats?
Five Ways to Heal American Capitalism
Functioning of an Air Compressor
An air compressor is a machine built to compress or consolidate air inside a container.
Air compressors work quite similar to our lungs when we hold our breathing and, perhaps,
blow up a balloon. The air is pulled and compacted in the tank like as air in our lungs,
mounting the air's pressure and decreasing its amount.
While using the device, the compressed air releases through a hose in a steady,
potent torrent - like from our lungs and out of our pursed lips in a full stream of air.
In compressors,
the air pressure inside the tank will go on to intensify until it reaches a stipulated pressure limit. The tool's pressure limit varies from high to low with the type and dimension
of compressor. Air compressors as well feature a regulator that is set to compliment the specific tools and application's required pressure.
I went to the same HS as Damien and knew him through sculpture class. Very smart, very funny and quite a gifted artist. He was also nice to me as a freshman when he was a senior. Most people were surprised when he broke out in the music industry b/c we thought he was going to be a painter or a sculptor. Then we saw the videos and said, "oh, yeah, that makes sense."
The package manager appears to be yet another single-app ghetto. From the docs:

> Note that for some packages, package.el requires you to have an external tar program.

My platform already has a package manager that knows whether I have tar, and it will quietly go get that as soon as I install anything that needs it. If package.el can't take advantage of a system that already works, it's part of the problem rather than the solution.
Writing may help you more than reading, especially if you can find somebody to give feedback. Maybe start a blog or contribute to a magazine?

I'm not a native English speaker, but here's some feedback for you: I would say "advice" (always singular) rather than "advices".
> dont you want flash to be doomed?

I don't.

> In 5 years why should the web require a plugin to show video or vector graphics?

It shouldn't, but both your questions seem quite unrelated.
Ian Bicking Joining Mozilla
How gracious of you.

But, I want my 0.0013 of an SEK.
There's a difference between "cute and fun" IDEA, and "cute and fun" end result.

"Let's build a startup on a bus!" <-- cute and fun IDEA

"Twitter for cars!" <-- cute and fun IDEA

"Let's have a shop full of disaffected and underemployed designers creating frighteningly adorable characters with no story or purpose other than to merchandise around the world and especially to produce in mass quantities in China!" <-- cute and fun RESULT (not so much the idea)

And don't forget, lolcats were invented on 4chan. The least cute and fun place on the internet.
So including 4chan?
>It's just geoip though, so it's accuracy is low.

I do hope so, there's a man 2 streets away from me, masturbating into the camera.

For the record, it seems that the UK is a world leader in this regard.
The job market is heating up dramatically here in London so a lot of people are finding it hard to find good developers. My company doesn't want to see me go so I've had many teams come to me to try to convince me to stay and join their team. The reasoning I've given is "I want to work in an entirely new environment with new technologies and with new people" but it's difficult when you're being offered more money to stay. Hopefully I'm making the right decision :)
New generation: leaked images of the new Mercedes-Bens E-Class 2010
> The thinnest lines of the capitals should in most cases be thinner than the widest lines of the small caps.

That's not what's happening here - open up an image editor and measure it: the thickest line of the small caps is thicker than the thickest line of the caps. Only LaTeX has this problem.
That only works if you want to have kids immediately, or want to never have kids. If, like me, you're a guy who wants to have kids in 5-10 years, late-30s women are just out of the running, no matter what great qualities they may have otherwise. Due to biology, the marriageable age range for women doesn't really change as a guy gets older, unless he's done having kids or doesn't want them.
If you measure fun as negative frustration, I had a lot more fun with XP than I ever have had with Windows 7. XP was so familiar it melted into the background, and incompatibilities were non-existent. Windows 7 has moved everything around and introduced nothing of value to me personally - my preference would be for XP shell, control panel layout etc. with the Windows 7 kernel and system libraries.
Now if only he got you to do a video testimonial...
Agreed. The keyboard shortcut in Eclipse (at least in C/C++ mode, not sure if that changes for other languages) is Ctrl-Shift-R.
Clickable link: http://www.nxdom.com/
Nobody said anything about threads.
The OP is going to the University of Washington, The ratio is 52.4% women, 47.6% men (http://admit.washington.edu/Numbers).
Chatroulette uses p2p for video. So, I guess this new app simulates a client by connecting to chatroulette server, getting a new peer, geolocating his IP and taking a screenshot.
>heard the theory that I founded two startups because I didn't find the right guy to marry and have kids with.

I generally flinch in the presence of feminist rhetoric (not saying that you were engaging in rhetoric, demonstrating my leaning), but that is crass and offensive. Why can't people just do what works for them?

Yeeeesh.
'Console killer' OnLive to launch in June
Personally I love Win 7, mostly because I can find any program I want by pressing the win key and then the name of the program. Programs I use often is just a [win]+numerical click away, I can use an external monitor with [win]+p and the windows can be arranged with [win]+[up],[down],[left],[right] and I can hover over any window group to see the different miniature windows so I don't have to haunt for them.
Tax Calculator 2010
Tax calculator 2010, calculate your 2009 taxes online and get fast tax refund. Calculate your taxes with tax calculator 2010 and prepare free online taxes. Estimate your 2009 taxes with tax calculator 2010.
Well, given that they're connecting through VMs that run in other countries...
2010 and i am bound to a company so i can have "proper" video on a web page.

Flash VS HTML5 is a no brainer for any sane person.

I almost forgot, FU Adobe i use FreeBSD.

Good riddance.
Sell web apps in Google Apps Marketplace
Im toying with proposing one here at work...

But I suspect that conversation will end "hey, if you want to make it.." and there is no way I can make it as sexy as some of these :(
It depends who you're targeting - suits, techs, artists? If you choose quirky, make sure it's smart quirky, and not glib quirky.
"Your web guy" sounds a bit... bland. It sounds too average, like "Mr Site".
Come back and let us know what you choose! And let's see your business cards too :)
Don't. The only thing I'd suggest is the disclaimer "I'm just the author of a competing service -- Tarsnap. [...]" belongs at the top. It doesn't invalidate your points but if there's any reason to perceive a conflict of interest, the sensible thing is to get it out of the way first, rather than as an aside at the end.
This Slim guy is an outstanding crook.

He runs this long-distance phone call biz in Mexico. Basically owns the country's phone system. Didn't pay for it, but he owns it.

Two guys come up with a way to make cheaper calls and start a competing business - magically, the govt passes a law to make their method illegal. They change the method and the govt passes ANOTHER law to make THAT illegal.

Show me a great fortune, I'll show you a great crime.
Oh dear, well-meaning extremists. Scary bunch of people the lot of you.
Hah, thx. Credit goes to my sister: http://evejweinberg.com/
Those sex tips will properly do more for peoples happiness than an article about Erlang.
Way more zero-click info, less spam, less clutter, more readable results etc. http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
Hey, it worked for Rousseau!
I CAN HAS DEFINISHUN of Soft ADC and vADC?
> Having some ecological sensitivity doesn't imply valuing trees (even 150'000 of them) more than human beings

I didn't say that, you misread me I'm afraid. My point was that trees (as an example) are no less NOR more valuable than humans.

> the only value of those 150'000 trees is to enable us to live better, happier lives

Well, the appeal to self-preservation is better than no appeal at all, if it drives you to do the right thing. That said, what 'the right thing' is in this case is not well understood and I believe we should err on the side of sharing the space we have rather than trying to own it all.

That said, if you can't see the beauty and intrinsic value in the natural world then you have my pity.
H.264 in Firefox? Chrome inside Internet Explorer inside Firefox
Ask HN: What should two geek tourists do in San Francisco?
Hi HN!

I guess the title explains itself, so: me and my brother are from Brazil, and we are going to MIX in Las Vegas, then we are going to spend 3 days in San Francisco.

The only thing we have scheduled to do is visit Alcatraz. What else should we do?

Thanks!
What a load of old boots.

To value a planet's worth of trees over some cockamany plan to save a single human life doesn't infer valuing trees more than human beings.

I have no doubt you'll get your fake plastic trees as we simply won't have time to wait for an organic one to emerge from whatever primordial soup our descendants crash into. But until then, I'll happily bear your cross.
Emacs is a scripting environment shell that comes with an editor. It's probably closer in philosophy to one of the old single-user operating systems that microcomputers used to come with.
That "something more important than people" is actually... well... still people. If there aren't any trees left on this planet there probably won't be any people left here either.
I love Flash, and the core problems people rant about boil down to crap Adobe can fix.

HTML5 has some amazing possibilities ahead of it but none of that eradicates Flash's future. Fantasizing and circlejerking about that possibility is just retarded -plugins fill a void the W3C and browser vendors can't do themselves - and that is keeping up.

What are your needs in 5 years and what makes you think HTML5 is somehow perfectly anticipating them? How about 10 years? How about even one year from now?

Are you going to upgrade any software at all you use over the next 5 years? Or did they all get it perfect too?
Start subscribing to the Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll), and click on links to previous posts, ad infinitum.

But what do you mean by "I don't see a big difference from where I started."? What are you doing to measure this?
I agree so much! Most blogs fail to sumarize such papers properly. And if I want a summary or introduction, I can get find those in the papers, too.

The same with RFCs and W3C documents. All that stuff is written very well, from the technical view as well as regarding their readability. Why putting a layer of blogs and websites around them, which actually lower the perceived quality?

Also, I'm frequently annoyed by articles that write about what some other people (e.g. RMS) wrote. These aren't much shorter than the source article, and aren't written nearly as clear as the original.

I appeciate it when an author just links to the source and elaborates on that topic, stating his own opinion, and perfers to quote rather than to paraphrase what's already clearly written in the source article.
Killing 150.000 to save a human life doesn't sound like any religion I ever heard of. Religions are more concerned with saving souls and no amount of trees cut has ever saved a soul.
This is going to give HR departments an extra method of determining who to employ, at least. And given the number of people exhibiting their penises, I'm foretelling another drop in employment.
Wirecard is a good option for Europe and parts of Asia. Not sure if they support India. Recurly also supports Wirecard APIs via the ActiveMerchant API.

Here's a list AM supports:
http://activemerchant.rubyforge.org/
I think all 13 of the pictures clustered in London are like that.
That's why I prefer Wmii, Ion2 and similar window managers. They really manage my windows, ensuring that they don't overlap and use the screen effectively.

In contrast, most other window managers just enable you to fiddle with the windows yourself, and that's all they do for you. You keep moving and resizing them, one by one, steadily. That's very annoying.

(In fact, I don't even have a desktop image, because most of the time, the desktop isn't visible anyway. I don't want to look at my desktop, I want to use that space for the application I'm working with!)
"pro in all web languages" should probably be rewritten and defined, it matters what language the site is written in.

Also, I thought it was kind of funny and an oxymoron to look for a programmer with style and fashion sense lol. Otherwise, cool opportunity and sounds fun.
Also, whoever runs this site, if he plays his cards right, is surely going to be a millionaire by next Monday.
> My point was that trees are no less NOR more valuable than humans

Through inference, you are saying that the value of humans and the value of trees are equal. So, now, you need to define value.

I cannot think of any consistent definition of value, applied to the entire 'natural world,' that would make humans and trees worth the same.

And there is no reason that this value needs to be 'intrinsic.' Or, I think you're using the word to mean 'obvious' and 'simple.' It is simply valuable, and that's obvious. Am I right?

That's not a good way to go about it.

*Addendum: maybe if they were ents.
Wow, I love the idea, and you're definitely targeting a problem that faces many people.

My observations:

- Why is the intro text set as an image? I know you have alt-text there, but it just seems an odd thing to do now-a-days. Also, when I send links to people to recommend they have a look, I often copy-paste the blurb to explain it. I can't do that easily with this.

- Soundkey is too new a concept to just add it to a design as "soundkey: XXXXX" - not everyone is curious enough to find out what a soundkey is.
Encourage users or designers to place it closer to the difficult words.
A hint would make it clear that help is available "How to pronounce my name: go to soundkey.com/XXXXX" - in other words, promote the help first, and soundkey second.
Over time, I see this has the potential to become a generic (as in hoover)

- Provide an easy to copy link, much like how URL shorteners present you with the entire link to copy. Currently, I have to see the key, remember or copy it, browse to your site, then enter it (...into the little box at the top right of soundkey)
What I'd prefer to do is copy and paste the URI that takes me straight to that soundkey. Every thought, click, key press makes people a step less likely to use Soundkey.

- I'd swap positions of "Tell it like it is" and "Soundkeys in action" - the business card image tells me straight away what you do, without having to read the description. In fact, highlight the addition of the soundkey on the 2nd card. Just imagine that users are completely lazy - they don't want to read the text, they don't want to play 'spot the difference' between the two cards.

Honestly, great idea, and keep us posted on your progress.
Yes, but there is a big difference between typing part of the file or function name and typing a full path. Search-based semi-global matching is a really fast way to navigate.
How is marriage like prison? It's mainly meant to save taxes and to enable you to see your spouse in the hospital.
For those of you using Visual Studio, there is an addon called StudioTools that adds this functionality: http://submain.com/products/studiotools.aspx

Highly recommended, they both have a smart open file that lets you start typing a filename, and smart goto, which lets you start typing a class or method name. Makes navigation so much faster!
> Security for one.

Install base is a big factor to security.
Convertible debt generally comes with a time limit, at which point it converts into equity at a pre-agreed upon price, just like if an angel had put a price on the round. That price is usually pretty low (good for the angel, bad for the entrepreneur), often lower than what it would've been if you'd just priced the angel round from the start. This is because in this situation the assumption is that you've tried to raise money from VCs and failed, implying the company has some problems that will prevent it from scaling.

In other words, if you seriously don't think you'll need to raise from institutional VCs, the standard convertible debt terms aren't for you.
What is the Right Amount of Money to Raise at a Startup?
I don't think the two are currently directly comparable.

They’ll never be directly comparable. Canvas is a bitmap drawing field, Flash is a vector drawing field with enhancements. If you want to do vector stuff you’re probably better off using SVG.
Mobile Apps That Outperform Web Sites
It's hardly the accuracy of costumes that matters about history. What matters is motivations of people and reasons for stuff happening. Hollywood movies are especially bad at portraying that accurately.
The problem with HTML5 is that it does not provide any better new features of multimedia, but an incomplete alternative to Flash. I would definitely choose HTML5 if I can make something that can not be done with Flash nor HTML4
I was referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inviolability , but I'm sure there's a rich vein of religious thought that considers 1 human life more worthy of saving than any amount of non-human life.
Really?

I can see grandma not using it, but anyone on this site ought to be able to figure out the basics in short order.

Of course, no one ever truly masters it - I'm always learning cool new things. But that's part of what makes it so great.
Why Common Lisp Bothers Me
is that useful?
If you define "point of excellence" as "talk like a native English speaker", then I'm sorry, but that will take a LOT of time. Reading lots and lots will not make you a better speaker.

My advice would be, if you want to become a better speaker, to seek out English-language programming available internationally (sadly, that may limit you to CNN International, but better than nothing), and focus on things like intonation, and the flow of discussion. Two things you won't learn from reading articles.

Of course, the alternative is to spend 20+ years in an English-speaking country, then you'll probably have better pronunciation and diction ;)
I'd like to see someone become a CSO at a funded and successful biotech without a PhD.
Setting up a payment gateway is really capital intensive business