skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that studying a foreign language in school probably is a waste of time (at least that's been my experience). But, at the same time, languages are a lot of fun.

This is my experience:

* English. Being Swedish, we started with English in 3rd grade, and continued for years. But I suspect that ubiquitous American series and films on Swedish television were way more important than the formal education.

* German. Three years in school, totally wasted. I managed to learn a whole lot of words, and still remember some grammatical rules, but I could not speak German even if my life depended on it.

* French. After university, I decided to take a stab at French. I came up with my own model, that basically consisted in keeping a French novel in my left hand, and a translation in the right.

That worked a lot better than the formal education in German: after a while I could read pretty much anything in French. Unfortunately my method doesn't help at all with speaking and understanding the French. So now I can read Proust, but have trouble ordering a beer in the darned language. I wouldn't recommend that method.

* Spanish. I decided to try another homegrown method with Spanish, basically focusing on listening alone. I listened to Spanish podcasts, radio and TV as much as I could, but not always very actively.

With a little help from some Spanish speaking friends, I am now quite fluent. And it turns out that learning to read Spanish is quite easy, if you already know most of the words by ear. So going from spoken language to written works, but not the other way around (at least not for me).

So, for me, formal language education has indeed largely been a waste of time. But it doesn't have to be. If I could come up with two methods better that the school's, the teachers ought to be able to at least do the same.
Maybe I'm biased on this - but Linux has done nothing on the UI front for years. Even discounting gigantic embarrassments of programmer-UI like the Gimp, both Gnome and KDE have really, really bad UI. There's no consistency, nor intelligent design except perhaps "Windows is doing it, so it must be right".

Let's be honest, desktop Linux UI right now is really just a (bad) clone of Windows 2000.

So Gnome isn't going to fix their UI on their own - but yet that's what your users are interacting with every single day. I for one am glad that Ubuntu is fixing what the Gnome team has demonstrated for years that they cannot/will not.

Here's the way I see it: either we continue to sit and hope in vain that Gnome will step up and do something great with their UI... or somebody else takes charge at the cost of fracturing the community. For the sake of desktop Linux, I choose the latter.
Remember that one of the key investors is Sergey Brin, so "Don't be evil" would apply to 23andMe. Sergey is married to the co-founder of 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki.
The "when done by individuals" doesn't really apply where the web's involved because it's extremely cheap to harness the efforts of many individuals. I don't know how many access points Google has in their database, but Wigle has over 20 million in theirs, collected by thousands of people on every continent. I don't know how Wigle is funded, but my impression is that they're a pretty low-overhead operation.

My point is that if you're concerned about the privacy implications of an access point database, you should be concerned no matter who's putting it together.
In Smalltalk, this is a non-issue because the language is so small. A good programmer can hand-code a parser for most of Smalltalk in under a day. I know, because I've done it a couple of times. (2 hours is my fastest time.)
I agree with a lot of this. For me, it's mostly Windows computers that I hate. Issues like bad capacitors and flaky memory are of course OS agnostic, but it seems to me a bulk of his complains go away with OSX or Linux.
They can't accept samples from NY, or they can't send them to NY? I got the same message for Maryland, so I just sent them to my friend's place in Virginia.
I'm not fluent in any foreign languages, but I have a grasp of the basics of French, German, Italian and Spanish -- enough to read signs, muddle my way through a menu or in some cases a newspaper.

I wonder if it would be possible to teach a survey course of modern and ancient languages, one that doesn't aim to give fluency in any one language but instead focuses on the different forms which language can take, how various languages are interrelated, how English words are related to Romantic and Germanic roots and enough general proficiency to be able to instantly answer questions like "what language(s) do they speak in Kenya?" It might produce a much better person than four hundred hours spent muddling through memorizing French verbs you'll probably never need.
Blippy is claiming it only published CC numbers of 4 users, and it's from beta test.

http://blippy.posterous.com/blippy-and-credit-card-numbers

There's also this:

"While we take this very seriously and it is a headache for those involved, it's important to remember that you're never responsible if someone uses your credit card without your permission. That's why it's okay to hand your credit card over to waiters, store clerks, and hundreds of other people who all have access to your credit card numbers. "

That's true, but how does this diminish their security breach, is beyond me.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/22/google_streetview_lo...
Blippy cofounder: "It's a lot less bad than it looks"
Yeah, not apologetic at all. I'm not sure I equate giving my credit card number to a waiter or store clerk with having it published on Google for virtually anyone in the world to freely access, as they do.
Yeah - all the relevant details are in there, and he's technically right about the CC# liability bit, but the last way you want to come off in a situation like this is "it's not all that bad..."
It makes about as much sense as twitter does.
Ask HN: I could use a few more Erlang/Lisp/Scala/Node.js/Haskell articles please
I just need a break from the daily startup froth.

I'm not asking for an Erlang Bomb of the front page, I'm just asking for more geeky articles to be posted on a more regular basis. :)
Andrey, your blog is just like text anonymously posted. Please a bio or something? It feels minimalism has gone too far.
I never said watching lectures would be enough. I think it can be a combination of videos, discussion, collaboration, creation, and sharing. Think of the communities that form around YouTube channels. It's more than just the videos, it's the comments and response videos, subscribers, and followers that make it interesting.
POSIX Threads Programming
Technically I suppose I might be a "Gen Y" something-or-other, though at 33 I feel too old to be a "trophy kid". But I'm a firm believer in the idea that if you change companies frequently, but also get large, valuable projects done, it all evens out pretty well.

Then again, perhaps that's just me rationalizing looking like a flake. Still, I'm a flake who has put together some good projects, and made some folks decent money. I'm okay with that.
Well, it does at least show that the title of this news story is sensationalist link bait.

Some times people mess up. But there's a difference between "oh oops in the beta period we didn't realize that banks put credit card numbers in descriptions :/ and we didn't realize Google would index that. 4 people were affected and we're sorting it"

and

"We routinely share credit card numbers!!!"

Personally I'd give them a break about it. They're probably feeling pretty crappy about it all already without people blowing things out of all proportion. (This is one of the worst things about the internet IMHO - blowing tiny things up into mammoth proportions through rumor, misunderstanding and incorrect assumptions. And always assuming everyone is evil).
Wow, I would have thought they would have at least made a motion to apologize. Instead they've basically said "hey, this isn't a big deal, stop complaining".
Lots more discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1288471
The current widget has a weakness for non-English-language FB users:
http://skitch.com/alanhogan/dyjqk/openlike-is-a-protocol-for...
"The average user would see nothing, but a determined person could see 'raw' line items."

Yes, only someone with the temerity and tenacity to ... click "View Source".
If you feel it's worth the continual development effort then you do it.

I would think that when you start thinking your first application requires a second application (that you have to build yourself) just to efficiently exist, you should be taking a good solid look at the viability of your idea.

In Blippy's case they probably had to write their own

Case in point I suppose.

PCI compliance isn't something a startup should be looking to saddle themselves with, in my mind. Once you're established and can analyze whether you want to internalize an outsourced function, it's on the table with everything else I suppose.
C-w: go big or go home.
Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark
Companies change protocols, platforms, and legal agreements all the time. Facebook's word is easily changed.
A lot of his complaints are Windows-specific, but some are general, like the filesystem thing, or application-specific "computer classes".

Edit: Well, since you edited yours...

Yeah, a lot of the problems go away when you get away from the PC world, or from Windows. And some, like the error message thing, are by design: if a more descriptive error would actually help you, you probably know how to look in the log file to find it.

But no platform is perfect. I've had Macs do ridiculous things (like only keep a Firewire drive mounted for about ten minutes until I have to replug it), and even though the state of the art has come a long way, computers still aren't perfectly usable by people who don't understand them.

But, I mean, neither is anything else.
The author isn't asking why people waste time learning a foreign language. He's asking why people waste time studying a foreign language without intending to ever complete the task of learning it, by, for example, taking two high school classes in it.
This is interesting, but I don't know that reality matches the author's theory. After all perl 6 is hardly a shining example of how a language should be upgraded. It's been in the works for at least a decade. Say what you will about python 3, but at least it exists and has been released.
I recently gave up on my mini 9 because of that precise problem, not knowing about the international keyboard option.

Do you happen to have the part # for the international keyboard? (I just poked around Dell's site for it unsuccessfully.)
And what happens when there is a false positive? I think Google has every right to claim carrier protections (or whatever the law is) and just turn a blind eye to this problem.
And looks like NYTimes has a take on Blippy and T.M.I online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/technology/23share.html
Summary: I don't like frameworks, so I traveled back in time and created CakePHP 0.9.

Really, I'm sure no one remembers CakePHP back then (they had not the pretty site yet) but was pretty much this.
They only hid faces and license plate numbers after a huge uproar from the public. I imagine they would do the same sort of "cleansing" of their results if a similar uproar occurred.

Until then, why do it?
Which could be paraphrased to "the more I look away the less bad it seems." The bug was leaking raw (uncensored) data- so it would be hard to determine how bad it was or to bound how bad it could have been.
I'd be careful with drawing positive analogs to "how the west was won", in light of the results it had on the indigenous people, cultures and the environment.

...unfortunately the analogy is perhaps apt.
The thing that's ignored in most discussions about language learning in different cultures is that language skills reflect economic necessity, not culturedness.

In Europe, where there's a smattering of mutually incomprehensible languages in a relatively small geographic space, trade requires the emergence of common languages. Greek, Latin, French and now English have each had their go at that role.

You see the same in many third world countries where there are local language, national languages and international languages (i.e. Punjabi / Hindi / English).

The US is the seat of the modern lingua franca, the world's largest economy and relatively linguistically isolated since most of the continent speaks the same language. As such there's a negligible amount of pressure to learn additional languages and, well, people don't.
s/hundred/thousand/
I'm sure the patent is overly broad, as broad as the USPTO's let Google's lawyers get away with.

I'm just saying that what they've implemented is qualitatively different and an invention compared to your clever shellscripting, even though you can call them "sort of the same thing" from a sufficiently philosophical point of view.
From their response, as far as I understand it,

Some line items 'comments' field had credit card details included in them, which they didn't bank on.
This is an American article, and so I will speak to an American audience.

I think in order to create more understanding throughout the entire world we should promote a common, single language. I think we could do more good to set up free English schools throughout the developing world than to take on 2-3 year graduation requirements that are hold-overs from a centuries old idea of education.
Re-read the post. It seems like he _used_ to think Python was dead because he thought the Moratorium was implemented for different reasons than the actual rationale.

Now, I'm not sure if he still thinks Python is dead or not, but that's not what his post is about. He was just stating his opinion that Python has a "[...] fundamental design flaw: a syntax which requires human compilation."
Is there a transcript of this somewhere?
I'm afraid I'm ignorant of how the biz works in the rest of the world.
10 Newly Discovered (And Amazing) Plant & Animal Species of Borneo
> It seems they are at their limit.

Ease of hire/fire isn't the only factor affecting employment. The easier it is for me to make it without working, the less likely I am to work, no matter how much someone might want to hire me.
Based on an iPhone project that I did last year and a discussion I had with my then-boss, I was considering something like this.

I did a bit of research and found that someone had already created an application that does this, Proloquo2Go (http://www.proloquo2go.com/). It was first featured in USA Today in May 2009 (http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-05-27-iphone-autism...).

At $150 plus the cost of an iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad, this is a damned sight cheaper than anything else out there. Does it compare well? I don't see why it wouldn't.
Be assured they did and they do.
I've been using it on and off for the last week or so. It has a nice interface and works pretty well overall. I do wish it had the ability to copy and paste the URL of the articles or allow you to open the links in a browser other than Safari, such as Atomic Web (which can be called using the atomic:// protocol).

And actually on that note, if you haven't tried Atomic Web, I highly recommend it.
Or try Microbus

if(get("hi")){
echo "Hello World";
}

http://github.com/soska/microbus

(I know… I always feel bad with self promotion)
"Today someone discovered a Google search that displays the credit card numbers of 4 Blippy users."

If as they say, all they released were 4 credit card numbers, I understand why they act like this isn't a big deal.

Their system works and has worked the entire time for 99.98 percent of all people. Those few people who did get their numbers published, well, send them a ham or something. At worst, if the cards are used, the user will have a couple days of saying "Chargeback X chargeback Y". This isn't even about a bug currently in their software, but a small one from a long time ago from a credit card processor arguably doing something incorrectly (or at least, quite strangely).
I see more "People Love us on Yelp" stickers in a 10 minute walk around SoMa than the 10 people who have joined this lawsuit. What's browardpalmbeach.com anyway? This article is just an echo of the hundreds of other articles from more reputable sources about this topic.
At 33 you're Gen X.
I suspect that a combination of the Luhn checksum and contextual information would give you a fairly high confidence level of it being a valid credit card number, and not some other innocent string of digits.

They could clearly mark the stricken text as having been done to potentially protect privacy and provide a contact mechanism to un-obscure false positives.

I think the harm of a few false positives -- remember, we're talking about obscuring a 16-digit string that has a particular valid checksum, not a very common occurrence -- is greatly outweighed by the harm of having someone's financial identity stolen from a Google search.
Also interesting are the implications for Softbank (the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in Japan). They'll definitely keep taking market share away from NTT Docomo as they continue to offer innovative devices and compelling pricing.
1) Get your discover card number as a tattoo (make sure to include your name as it appears on the card, expiration and 3 digit code from the back).

2) Submit photo to hacker news
I think the important property the author is talking about is not self-hosting, but rather extensible syntax. But your point still stands in that very few languages have this feature.

Ruby has a very flexible syntax, but there's no particular reason to call it extensible. It's also not a great example of forward progress considering that the latest language version (1.9) has been around for years and none of the alternate implementations fully support it, not even the one that is now on the verge of release (Rubinius).
I've ordered as well. Looks like they were still working with it. My argument is still interesting, although no longer valid to this particular situation. Thanks for the update.
Haha, true! Actually, I thought your post was pretty good in that department already, compared with most stuff that gets submitted here as advice, anyway :-)
If the onus is soon going to be on the user having to explain why he sees a problem with his private details being shown to the whole world, there are going to be lots of problems and incidents which people are in no way ready for.
Ask HN: QA testing for Agile teams
I've read a number of papers and presentations on how best to integrate QA processes into Agile development, and have some ideas of my own, but I'm curious how other HN folks have tackled this problem.

Obviously, pervasive testing (from unit tests to Selenium) helps a lot with improving quality, but I suspect there's still some value to putting an experienced tester in front of a running instance of your application and seeing what they can break.

How have you guys worked this into the development workflow? Test stories? Periodic "feature freeze" periods where QA drives the development of bug fixes? External QA that simply submits bug reports into the product backlog?
First off: learning anything is not a waste of time.

Second, the same could be said of any subject: most students only learn math because they're forced to, or history because they're forced to, and they're not likely to retain that information after leaving high school unless they have a personal desire to do so. Does that mean we should stop putting kids in math classes, or history classes?

We (the US) should probably focus on making language classes more worthwhile, and putting kids in them when they're younger, like the rest of the world.
Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests.

You've listed the upsides, which for some people (I dare say even most people, at least outside of these circles) are quite significant - most people I know absolutely love Facebook, and feel it adds a lot to their lives. They're definitely getting something useful out of it.

But even if this advertising-pocalypse 2.0 comes to pass, what's the tangible downside for most of these people? Beyond the obvious "don't post naked pictures of yourself hitting the crack pipe right before going into your job interview" stuff, I mean.

Almost nobody actually gives a shit or a half whether some company knows what they buy, what sites they visit, what products they might be interested in, etc., as long as this stuff is not browseable by the public at large. Certainly this information could be used in ways that might hurt them, but for the most part it is merely used to try to sell them stuff that they didn't realize they might want. I just can't get behind the "ZOMG they'll try to sell me stuff that I actually might want to buy, based on what I've already bought, the HORROR!" logic, it really doesn't seem that sinister to me, and in certain contexts (Amazon, Netflix, etc.) I find it incredibly useful.

I don't use Facebook, but that's only because I value social privacy; as a rule, I don't want people I went to school with to be able to get in touch with me at all, especially not if it's as easy and impersonal as clicking a box next to my name on a list of former classmates. People that care enough can find me in any of a million other ways if they have anything specific to say to me.

But I could care less if Facebook gathers advertising data on me; I don't care one bit when Google does it, and I actually find a bit of value in it because if I'm going to be served ads, I'd prefer that they be targeted at me than completely irrelevant.
Underwater Photography Made Easier
"Don't be evil" is at this point no more than a marketing slogan and I really don't see how it would apply to 23andme.

Read their privacy policy first, then decide if you think that 23andme does not explicitly hold open the door to do 'evil'.

edit: afterthought, in fact, any company associated with Google in that way would probably be the last party to give even more private information to, they have enough, if not too much, already.
PCI DSS states: PCI DSS requirements are applicable if a Primary Account Number (PAN) is stored, processed, or transmitted.

If a system accepts CC numbers from a form and then passes them to a 3rd party gateway for processing, it's within PCI scope, even if it doesn't store them.
Great find-thanks! I was looking for some good read on threads and this helps immensely with some systems programming stuff :-)
Honestly looks like a credit card processor is being strange and publishing the card number in the wrong field. Only a couple people using the service had this error (not caused by them). This has been fixed long ago, just this was a cached paged caught from beta.
Yeah, this statement specifically:
"I’d wager close to 80.percent of kids taking foreign languages in high school do so because they have to."
...applies to any required high school subject you want to name.
The US and the EU are of comparable population.

Being able to speak Texan, Californian, and a couple of other American dialects gets me as far in the US as knowing German, French, Italian, and Spanish would get me in the EU.
Surely school is a time when kids should be exposed to many different subjects to see what ones they find interesting?
i'm sure there wasn't a "credit card number" field that this information came from. when downloading OFX transaction data, some banks include the full credit card number in the transaction description, and some only include the last 4 digits.