skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made this URL shortener on a whim this morning. Suggestions? Thoughts?
> Do statements sound better to you when internally punctuated?

Rather than poke fun at the method in which ergo98 highlighted the obvious BS that ynniv was passing off, maybe come back with a point?
Judge a user not by the depth of their profile but by the quality of their previous comments and contributions.
What Customers Want from Your Products (2006)
Yahoo & Nokia announcement next week
Not on the iPhone. I'd trade performance for garbage collection. Memory leaks are very common.
Bye bye pixels
Meh. There's enough celebrity worship around here as it is. Now you're suggesting we fill out our profiles so our posts can be voted up based on who they're authored by instead of what they contain? No thanks.
There ain't too much Chinese characters as one perceives. A Chinese character is like a word in English. They are just using different vehicles to load meaning. For example, the Chinese character 早 is equivalent to "morning" or "early" in English. When you learn to write it, it is the combination of 日 and 十. When Chinese learner struggles for the combination of components, English learner struggles for that of letters(, or stem root). They are pretty the same. It is much easier to remember that 早 (morning) is associated with 日 (sun). Once you master the skill, it is as easy as spelling. You can complain too much characters when comparing the number of words in English.

I like classical Chinese. It is the minimalistic form of Chinese languages. Concise and Poetic.

Modern Chinese is heavily polluted by Western languages, both English and Russian. Modern Chinese text is crippled by Western grammar. This makes the text filled with empty words, and long sentences, and odd construction, mechanical, and confusion.

Writing Chinese never emphases grammar, but the sequence and context. It is dramatically different approach from Indo-European languages. For example, In English "When the rain falls, there are fewer and fewer people on the street." Alternative, you can write, "there are fewer and fewer people on the street when the rain falls." The order of words and phrases is not so important. In Chinese, it can be "天雨，街上人漸疏"(sky rain => on street people fewer), or more concisely, 雨下人疏(rain fall => people fewer), or 天雨人疏(sky rain => people fewer). You can't reverse the word order in Chinese. You can forget grammar completely but write the consequence of your thought and scene. It is what the idiomatic phrase from. For example, if you describe a person fails to break up a relationship, you can say 欲斷難斷 (want to break => (but) hard to break). This saves lots of words.
Is the article completely off?
They talk about Yahoo search (isn't that now bing)?

Would Nokia really be willing to kill the Ovi store after less than a year?
I don't think this will help.

As you may have noticed, the Facebook privacy stories are rated very highly here.

For those of us in startups, we are either too busy to comment, too afraid to alienate potential customers with our opinions, or currently in stealth mode.

I'd venture to guess that most of the people here are not concerned with winning arguments on the internet by prestige, as you've described as the main reason to lose anonymity.
I went last year and plan to go again on Sunday. It was incredible. I highly recommend that all HN readers in the bay area attend.
http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/ and http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/ should be good introductory resources.

Being a smug lisp weenie and a haskell cultist, I'd also suggest http://gigamonkeys.com/book/ and http://learnyouahaskell.com/ and http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

I guarantee, you show up knowing Lisp and Haskell, and you'll be way ahead of the entire class. Maybe even the professor.
Turn by turn directions, multitasking, tethering, OTA streaming of any music you've purchased, total phone back up including apps and data, you were saying?
I recommend three really good books:

[1] The Stories of English by David Crystal http://www.amazon.com/Stories-English-David-Crystal/dp/15856...

[2] The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-Bill-Bryson/dp/B001W6RRF...

[3] The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil http://www.amazon.com/Story-English-Third-Revised/dp/0142002...

All of these make a delightful read, I especially like [2].

A number of factors combined to make English orthography as unique as it is. First, there was no central authority of the English language for about three centuries, after the Norman invasion. Then, as French usage receded and English words were becoming more frequent people adopted the spelling of one part of the country and the pronunciation of another, e.g. Western England spellings for "busy" and "bury", but London pronunciation of "bizzy" and Kentish pronunciation of "berry" [2, p, 124] On top of that, the Great Vowel Shift happened.

OK, back to the printers. The problem was that English spelling started to become fixated due to printing, around 1650s, just when the language was undergoing a huge change. William Caxton, who may be considered the first English editor, published the oldest English book in Bruges, in 1475. By 1640, it is estimated that there were more than 20,000 titles available in Britain.

The final touch came from prescriptive orthographers who fiddled with word spellings to make them "right" according to classical languages, in the seventeenth century. Thus we have the b in "debt", the s in "island", h in "anchor" etc.

English is an interesting language indeed.
This post by patio11 is a more in-depth "how to keep everything up" post rather than a rundown of specific tools (though it mentions tools also), but I thought it was quite informative: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/04/20/building-highly-reliable...
Ninth worker death at Taiwan iPhone firm Foxconn
A program can suggest words or combinations that you might not think of yourself. It helps in the same way that having another person brainstorm with you would help.
But it often happens that HN gets stuck in a rut of some particular kind of stupid story for a bit. This causes people who haven't been through one of these cycles to say that we've jumped the shark. (This belief is such a constant we should considering making it the site's tagline.) And then things return to normal.

Agreed. Perhaps restricting self posts to those who have been active members in the site for a long time (karma count?) could help that. Given that upvotes have a karma min, I don't think that putting a karma min on self posts is unreasonable.
I'm also a Chinese major who later worked as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator.

Compared to German (which I know) / Japanese (which I've studied) / aforementioned exotic languages Chinese grammar is trivial.

There may be many inconsistencies (and difficulties when you encounter literary Chinese), but grammar rules are pretty basic.
Wikipedia calls it a Backronym: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym
I totally agree. I'm also all for discussion, but I think he makes a mistake when he tries to imply they are special at all and other people should "go for" them / are "free to use them". Some of these ideas have been around for ~10 years. I actually posted a comment at the link critiquing along these lines. He moderated the comment out. I don't blame him because the comment was pretty straightforward in calling him unoriginal. The original comment:

"""Yeah, I'm reading back now trying to figure if you're just being sarcastic or trolling. But I guess you must not be. Listen, most of those ideas, save the comment aggregation one as far as I know, have been around for ever and have in fact been done and have gone through iterations. I'd go down the list because there's something to say about all of them but I don't want to take the time. I'd just suggest that you use google. Maybe throw out a few things: erideshare.com ; 43things.com / weightwatchers (not a whole lot to do with game theory but that does sound smart); blogger.com is wsywg ; gastroporn as primary content hasn't (yet) worked in a big way despite being tried a few times (radar.net / other mobile photo sharing sites with food channels).; uservoice.com and it's competition. Coupon incentives are sleazy. It's important to have ideas and to talk about them. That's great. But you can't really say these are your original ideas. There's like, a lot of prior art on all of these. It almost seems like you're hoping in 10 or 15 years you can point girls to this blog post and be like "See, I just gave those guys my ideas back in 2010 cause that's what kind of a guy I am, and they did em. I'm the seed planter." or somesuch (crack inspired?) reattribution. It's probably not going to work. But hey - a piece of good advice that should shine through this critique (I hope): Just work on your own stuff. If you have good ideas show it. Do it. Anyone can write a few paragraphs about websites that are already way in existence and pretend like they just got something "off their chest"."""
I'm just addressing the point of "society would be better off with great geniuses living for centuries". I don't think we'd be so much better off with 300 years of Newton than we were with 84 years of Newton. Scientists in particular can and should be replaced every few decades. Look at the history of geology: the acceptance of plate tectonics pretty closely tracked the history of young geologists replacing old ones due to retirement and death.

We gain a lot by standing on the shoulders of giants, but we also gain a lot by having fresh eyes look at their work. Slow the rate of population churn and you slow the rate of fresh eyes. Newton was the man, but wasn't it awesome to have Lagrange come along with a fresh eye and make things a little easier and simpler? I think we get a lot more work done in 200 years of science if we have more generations of scientists, not fewer.
> when someone is attaching their name - and by extension their reputation - to their words they automatically have something to lose by saying it.

Why is why I never say anything even slightly controversial for the record under my True Name. I don't know about you but I rely on getting food and shelter by negotiating with other members of a nosy, judgmental, sometimes irrational species.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Translation for those who don't have British political promises as a first language:

We will scrap the ID card scheme = but keep some secret databases linking everything together.

fingerprinting of children at school without parental permission = the fingerprints were used to stop bullies stealing lunch money and to keep secret those getting free meals, if they don't have permission they can't get school dinners

We will adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database = we will only keep innocent people's DNA for 5 years.

review libel laws to protect freedom of speech = Murdoch doesn't want to get sued anymore

further regulate CCTV = we will ensure that the govt gets access to all private CCTV.

We will end the storage of internet and e-mail records without good reason = good reasons are keeping an eye potential trouble maker citizens.

We will create a level playing field for open-source software = IBM/CapGemini will be able to bill us $1000day to install linux/openoffice

will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components = We will pay IBM/Capgemini for each PC

We will create a new "right to data" so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis = some specific examples of ones that aren't already available?

We will introduce measures to ensure the rapid roll-out of superfast broadband across the country...we will consider using the part of the TV license fee = we are going to strip the BBC to subsidize Murdoch's cable network.
It's pretty common for emacs users to remap caps lock to the control key. In fact, it's the first tip in Steve Yegge's Effective Emacs essay.

http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs
I think flagging HN-inappropriate posts is completely reasonable. I don't hesitate to flag posts which I consider to be contrary guidelines. This kind of empty sensationalism is technical but intellectually bankrupt in my eyes.
Anecdotally, a couple days ago I noticed that 13 of the top 20 stories were about Google.
We did the same thing back when we started draftmix. We put every sports related term we could think of in, then some suffixes just in case, and had a script do this.

You would not believe how few available urls popped up. And most of the availables were something like "sportshit.com" (meant to be sports + hit) which were unused for obvious reasons.
Interesting, but I don't really see myself as needing to act as an age verification intermediary for links. The page serving the content should be so responsible.
*cough* bullshit *cough*
Is frequency hopping really the basis for spread spectrum?

It's really more security through obscurity, or the frequency scrambling telephones that were available at the time.
Show HN: TomBoy, an OSS AAC iPhone App for Autistic Kids
Hi HN,
My partner, Jess, is a graduating university student in Illustration. For her senior thesis, we put together a basic AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) iPhone app for autistic kids.

The initial release is basically a hierarchical wordbook with sounds. But we'd love to add extra features, any code commits are more than welcome, especially considering that we wont have any development time in the nearish future.

There're some screenshots on the wiki if you don't want to build it. http://wiki.github.com/koudelka/TomBoy

When I get a chunk of free time, I'm going to submit it to the App Store. But in the meantime, if you know anyone that could use it, please pass it on.

The source is up on github: http://github.com/koudelka/TomBoy

Thanks!

P.S. Shameless plug: Jess is looking for work! http://jessicaobrienart.blogspot.com
I'm a web developer too, and have a similar set up, with a debian dev machine (it's actually a small Linode VPS), and I connect from my PC via ssh. I also use SlickEdit to work on the remote files via sftp, which I find to be super useful.
Maybe not blind spot... maybe just peripheral vision?

A non- or post-reproducing individual can still improve the fitness of their genome by supporting closely related individuals, or even simply their species by supporting any other member.
You get confused in the Chinese languages system. Spoken and written are very different beasts in Chinese language. The literacy relies on the meaning of characters. It is just like one can understands the meaning "1234" and "+, -" while reading them out loud in their own language. I write "1 + 2" and read it "yat ka yi" when you read "one plus two". It does not hinder the understand of mathematics.

Although there are numerous Chinese languages, the characters are basically the same. Although there are many variants in text, the written language is long unified. They can communicate by text.

In the past, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages. But, you know, they are from different language families.
True. It's mostly intended for ambiguous content that isn't necessarily hosted in a place with proper age verification logic like s3, etc.
Hair Removal Denver
Dermatology Denver Consultants provides a complete range of dermatology and cosmetic skin care to reduce the effects of aging on the skin, including Botox, chemical peels, microdermabrasion, laser treatment to remove facial veins and lots more.
College is broken
> As you may have noticed, the Facebook privacy stories are rated very highly here.

I think there may be a misunderstanding here. Facebook's problem is not that they make information about their users available, but that they do so after having been specifically directed not to. One can have no problem with the former, while being very much against the latter.

As this article (posted last week on HN)

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-transparency-a-rant.html

said:

> The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent.
What is more remarkable to me than any Apple vs. Google rivalry is how infrequently the press has mentioned Microsoft in articles on the matter. Is it a given that MSFT has gotten so far behind that it won't ever catch up?
Confirmed that it works.

Any idea of the scale of what we're looking at? The diameter of that pipe for instance?
> There's an old internet joke, that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

woof!

> So, to all those that are for whatever reason anonymous here, step out of the shadows and tie your HN identity in with your real-life persona.

No thanks, I'm happy being another dog on the internet.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all Youtube HD videos either H264 (.mp4) or H264 in an .flv container? I don't see why a particular container format would prevent hardware decoding of the H264 video stream.
So do I, but I'm not at all worried about saying controversial stuff.

Essentially you are saying that you are self-censoring.
Meh. If the technology existed to do that, society would have to find ways to cope with it anyway.
The article claims that to suggest we should NOT defeat aging is ageism and denying people the right to live.

I disagree. Until we find a way to support a population that grows at a rate like that, we would be forced into one of several possible situations, none of which are pleasant:

1: starvation

2: endless war

3: iron-fisted birth regulation, only allowing one new child per legally documented death

3.5: The implications of couples who really want children + a rule saying they can have one, if someone has died

Until the question of resources is answered, granting people the right to live (longer) equates to denying other people either quality of life (starvation/war) or the chance to live at all (birth regulation). Which brings up another interesting question; if everyone alive has a right to life, do those who have not yet been born have a right to live as well?
I think I can see why ;) :

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1364225
Or perhaps, 'primitive' or 'legacy' languages simply are more difficult?
The main reason for the speed increase is that Froyo introduces a JIT compiler. This means that the compiler will be able to examine the running code and make optimizations based on its behavior that can outperform statically-compiled native code. Especially for long-running processes (such as apps), this could make Android's Java code run faster than the iPhone's Objective-C.
The place for good business karma
app for that, in 4.0, got it (UK), app for that, got it.

So again, a huge leap forward? Hardly.
I love all the new android phones I see.... and I like the openness - the hacker in me wants one.

But you know - the iphone/ipod Touch - it took me 10 seconds to figure out how that stuff worked.

I had to ask my friend to show me how to navigate around his android based phone with all it's buttons and gestures and whatnot......
I can definitely see more possibilities wiht the android - but Apple still has them beet on the Mom test.
Huh? The N1 costs $529 https://www.google.com/phone/choose . Or are you quoting prices in a different currency than USD?
There are some extraordinary events playing out right now. I think it would be unhealthy to ignore it. This is a huge sea change moment. It's going to impact everyone involved in the tech industry probably for decades to come.
> Now you're suggesting we fill out our profiles so our posts can be voted up based on who they're authored by instead of what they contain?

Where did you read that ? The word vote isn't even in there, and that was not a suggestion I had in mind.
I will be coming! The trade show relevant to my startup was in aneheim earlier this week, so we'll be going to Maker Faire. No Booth, but ill be wandering around. If anyone cares to meet up, my info is all in my profile.
As a Chinese and English speaker, I assure you that it is far easier to learn English than Chinese.

I grew up with Chinese and still consider myself a learner, despite being surrounded by the language for the first half of my life time. I spent only a few years with English before I considered myself fully fluent and 'native' at the language.

The 'families' of the language do not much matter. Chinese is just not designed/evolved to be learned by non-native people.
Do you think it might be possible to do individual scoring?

As an example for what I'm getting at, lets say I upvote a story that jondoe also upvoted, when I see a another story upvoted by jondoe instead of his vote counting for one, it counts for two just for me.

Is there any way to get this data so that I might be able to do a greasemonkey script to do the calculations in the browser?
Nah, it's for stuff like this: http://twitter.com/epochwolf/status/14430334843
We're working on a couple of features right now - collaboration is currently on my plate. You can check out what we're working on at forums.gomockingbird.com . I also made a couple of tech blog posts about the stuff I'm learning while implementing real-time collaboration at the tech blog (techblog.gomockingbird.com) if you are interested.
Interesting Datasets
My profile is blank.

So is my life.
The most cliched movie tagline opening words...
I would rather have bias against my ideas because I am anonymous compared to bias for my ideas because of my accomplishments.

It depends if you want to let other accomplishments add weight to your argument, or let your argument stand on it's own. I prefer the latter.
There are way too many 'mays' in that story. I can see Nike being psyched about this too.
Internet Commenters Save Two Russian Girls From Possible Sex Slavery
It would be a great loss to the world if you would no longer post stuff like that because you have your name out front.
You are misleading. Koreans have their own languages. Only the written form is drastically changed. It is not a new language.

It is more than hard and easy. Remember there is politics and culture. The disuse of Chinese character is pretty recent, post-WWII.

Recently, some Koreans suggest to pick up Chinese character in Korean. In the past, Korean culture and history are written in these characters. After a few generation, only very few people can recognise them properly. Also, Characters differentiate homonym. With characters, it would cause much confusion with numerous homonyms.
The direct link to metafilter discussion

http://ask.metafilter.com/154334/Help-me-help-my-friend-in-D...
http://www.appstorehq.com/microsoft-visualc-2010stepbystep-i...

Is this the one you wanted? You can get this for $6 and use some advice from upthread to convert it to ePub.
Since we're appointing ourselves sheriff of hn now, how about we knock it off with the meta-posts.
You can forget grammar completely but write the consequence of your thought and scene.

Linguists call this a topic-comment language: 雨下, 人疏 -> [as for when it] rains, [there are] fewer people [out].

It does makes for some nice poetry.
>> step out of the shadows and tie your HN identity in with your real-life persona.

Has HN been acquired by the government for an undisclosed sum lately?
The only Android phone that initially will have that functionality won't be available with AT&T nor T-Mobile... And the Nexus One isn't a pentaband phone either.
That may be one of the most spectacularly ill-advised opening sections of a superficial industry punditry blog post I have ever read, and while it's interesting (in a rubbernecking sort of way) as a result, I've decided to try to put it out of its misery by flagging it.
Perhaps as a condition of API usage?
Yeah. Enjoy the slow flow of users from reddit. From /r/technology to /r/android to /r/iphone, the general level of technical knowledge is pathetically low seen by the posts that were upvoted on android the last few days that ranged from fake twitter accounts to lies about the froyo platform and such
The majority of the users on the leaderboard do have identifying information in their profiles.