skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try watching familiar movies that are dubbed into French _and_ have French subtitles. "Children's" movies may be best for this. One caveat is often the audio and subtitles will vary (e.g. tu vs vous); I'm not sure why they do this.

Anyway, watch the movie, and pause it whenever something comes up that you don't understand. You can also try watching English movies with French subtitles but it doesn't develop your French ear. Also Google Translate is good practice. Write something in one language and translate back and forth--it does a pretty decent job. Writing in French will force you to use the proper grammer and vocabulary to make the translation come out OK.

I've in my mid 30's and have learned French fluently and advanced Spanish in the past 6 years. Aside from being immersed in the language, finding a girlfriend definitely helps... :)

Finally Meetup.com and Couchsurfing.org can be good resources to meet locals (of both sexes...).

Good luck!
I actually recommend that people spend only about an hour or two on Ruby before getting into Rails. Ruby is very intuitive and the few things that aren't can be temporarily memorized until they make sense.

My roadmap would be:

1) sinatra hello world

2) sinatra hello world w/ erb template

3) deploy it to heroku

4) do something with a form (without form helpers)

5) do something with sessions

6) do something with datamapper

7) who needs rails?
Similar articles for reference:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1544064

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543328

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540120 <- This one has lots of comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540494

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541197

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541514 <- This one has a few comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542275

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542557
I upvoted you because even though I disagree with what you're saying, there's nothing wrong with your having that opinion nor with your expression of it.

On the other hand, I simply cannot stand to write Python because the One Way to Do It that tends to be provided is rarely the One Way I Want to Do It.

It's okay that some communities and some languages say "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it", though. After all, if I believe "There's more than one way to do it", that applies to languages and communities, too. If a language whose community believes in only one way to do it makes you happy, use it. If you're like me and prefer having many options to express individual pieces of code however feels most appropriate for that specific situation(e.g., expressing a series of transformations on a list as either a list comprehension or a pipeline like series of feeds connecting higher-order functions), use a language that lets you do that. Neither is better for everyone. Nor is the programmer who prefers either type of language any better than the programmer who prefers the other.
what were your end results for the amount of time you invested? are you conversational? fluent? can you read news articles or fairy tales (many languages are quite different when casually spoken versus formally written....usually there are more tenses for verb past-tense conjugations)

(what does "conversational" even mean? that you've memorized common stranger-conversations, or that you know how to conjugate all present tense verb forms?)
Could a will have a matching clause? Every dollar you earn gives you another dollar 5 years down the line. You get 200k seed.
Is there another CMS that has the same featureset and the same extensibility? I've tried a few, but keep coming back to Wordpress, even though it is annoying and a resource hog. It's too easy to extend, and it has most of the stuff I need built in to the core (as of 3.0 at least). I wish there were an alternative platform that ran on Python and Sqlite with the same polish in terms of features and ease-of-use, but I haven't found one yet (correct me if I'm wrong!)
You can't reasonably argue on something you 'highly doubt'.

I think they surely are paying it. There, it's even again now.
Comments like this seem to miss the point:

use strict; use warnings; is not required.
Moose is not the default object system.

You can't say, "Oh, this library has that feature!" Thats not good enough. It has to be built-in, not optional, core to the language. If you're working by yourself - you can write code in any language well. In groups, that is NOT the case. Writing Perl in groups requires rigorous code reviews and cooperation, and even then nightmares are hard to avoid. Expressiveness has its downsides. You cannot simply bring a Perl noob onto a project and not have him ruin it. You CAN bring a new Rubyist onto a project and they can be productive.
Effects Of Coffee In Women During Pregnancy
The examples look very interesting. This seems to be well developed considering the time they have put into the library and the examples. I haven't seen anything like this for iPhone and its great that it is free. I did encounter one of the examples crashing (augmented reality) and this was on a Motorola Droid
This was interesting except for the pointless Chomsky bashing. The fact that languages are different does not mean that they do not share a universal grammar. Languages can be very different and yet still share some underlying rules.

This article was written on a very different conceptual level than the universal grammar theories so it is really pointless to even mention those theories.
An interesting documentary around this question was made by an heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune called "Born Rich"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKKb7_7qBrk
Hey man, I'm working on an open-source project that could absolutely use some help from the UX/UI perspective. I'm more of a "back end" programmer, so all the UI stuff right now is very, erm, spartan and mechanical (at best).

If you'd like to see more,

see http://code.google.com/p/neddick

or the demo site is at

http://spdemo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1/

If you'd like to help out, join the mailing list (Google Group) or feel free to shoot me an email directly. My email is in my profile.
Absolutely. I agree 110%, but there is so much intertia going into this that it seems irredeemable. It isn't. I keep telling myself that it isn't, but I see no way the US can pull out of this both personally and on a state level. The amount of retrenchment needed is inconceivable. I've lost the link, but someone posted on HN a few weeks back about the economy going double-dip, and the slideshow ended with a link to Niall Ferguson accepting an award. In that speech, he demonstrated that the US will soon need to spend more money to service its debt than it does on its military (which is a humongous percentage of the budget), and that is an historic sign of imperial decline. The current policies of both the US and the UK mean that by 2040, their debts will equal some 450% of their respective GDPs - they will out-Greece Greece.
Its an old adage that's been handed down many generations. I hear it from a lot of the wealthy in Hong Kong.
Because I'm concerned about the future of OpenSolaris, I downloaded 8.1 and attempted to get a ZFS boot install going -- I was unsuccessful. The process is extremely complex, and the best doc you're going to get is a wiki page with incomplete and complex instructions:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot

Moreover, there's no support for ZFS boot in the installer (sidebar: the installer has barely changed since when I first tried FreeBSD 2.2 in 1998).

I'd say stick to OpenSolaris if you require ZFS boot; alternatively keep boot on UFS and use ZFS for your data filesystems.
That I can agree with, but I think the fix is in education.
I could list a few that I attend, but the better/easier thing would be for you to search meetup.com. It should provide you with a good starting point by industry and/or tech topic.

The regional tech entrepreneurial organizations, like the Northern Virginia Tech Council also maintain lists of resources.

Lastly, there are a few revenue-generating (Profitable?!?) startups that provide services back to the local startup community by organizing and/or making space available for events. The three that pop into mind first are Affinity Labs, 1410Q, and iStrategyLabs.
I suggest to learn old fashion way - read book (http://www.djangobook.com/) and when found something unknown just dig into it. But it's hard to know when to stop digging :)
You cannot simply bring a Perl noob onto a project and not have him ruin it. You CAN bring a new Rubyist onto a project and they can be productive.

These assertions beg proofs.
Bashing?

Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages - essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.

I don't see that as bashing. The author is just explaining the chain of reasoning.
Flippen wish Debian had a better release cycle. Its amazing how FreeBSD gets it right.

Well done guys.
"This seems too complicated."

It will to a developer. This is aimed at newbies. When you've been a developer for a while, so many skills become automatic to the point that they are invisible to you and you forget that newbies have to learn them.

Beginning programmers still struggle with proper indentation, for example. That's something they have to learn.
In case the author gets to read this, the site needs a clearly-labelled "Features" page. I'm not going to waste time watching half a dozen youtube videos or trawling Javadoc'ed source code. Sell it to me, tell me what it can do.
> Think of how non-radical PHP 4 -> PHP 5 and Python 2 -> Python 3 were, and how hard it was to get people to switch. Now imagine differences 100x those, and you can start to see Perl 6's relationship with Perl 5.

While the radical difference between Perl 6 and Perl 5 might discourage adoption, I wonder if the less radical changes of PHP 4 -> 5 and Python 2 -> 3 may have contributed to their slow adoption. After all, if there is no radical benefit you will receive from switching your code to a backwards-incompatible new version of your language, it can be hard to justify doing so.
Is this a bait and switch too? For CAD/USD transactions, www.peerfx.com has been operating for almost 2 years now, supposedly on similar principles. At the beginning, the peerfx rates were really goood, but now they've got a 1% spread and a 0.5% fee. Better than what you can get at a bank if you take their posted rate, but worse than the bank's "premium" rate.
For django, you're better off learning python first, because Django feels less DSL-like than Rails and it's purely python.

If I were to make a workflow, it'd be this for Django:
1) Learn python with these two resources:
a.This is for absolute beginners http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

b.Do these exercises - http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/exe... there are some video lectures if required

2) Understand HTTP:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol#Req...

3) Now onto django, follow this book along: http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/ keep at it and finish the book regardless of your comfort level

4) Build an easy search app from scratch to get a better idea of API's and python's awesomeness: http://lethain.com/entry/2008/jul/10/yahoo-s-build-your-own-...

5) Just make your own app
When I first started with Rails the biggest problem for me was that I didn't know Ruby.

Taking the time to learn Ruby before diving into Rails will make a huge difference. And if Rails doesn't turn out to be your thing, you still have your knowledge of Ruby for Sinatra or scripting.
I don't think you bothered to read the page.

A simple knowledge of thermodynamics demonstrates the sheer impossibility of the myth. The last calculation on the first section of the page will suffice: If you have a 1-inch pipe, shooting out pure natural gas at 28 MPH, you would have the equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb in 6 years 9 months. The methane produced in the gut has nowhere near that concentration, so it would have to be blowing much faster. A 1/10 ratio would mean 280 MPH.
I'm not sure what kind of fashion the Bratz dolls represent other than... well, for lack of a better word, skankiness.
There is an active Lean Startup Circle in DC, see http://www.meetup.com/DC-Lean-Startup-Circle/ (for a full list of LSC groups see http://leanstartup.pbworks.com/Meetups
I 100% agree, but think there is no chance of this happening. The incentives simply do not line up, and some sort of all-or-nothing transition is needed.

It's not (exactly) my community, but SIGMOD has been trying to do this since 2008 with the "repeatability/workability committee." See this:

http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod-pods-conferences/mirrors/sigmod...

There's also an interesting FAQ about the repeatability requirements specifically here:

http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod-pods-conferences/mirrors/sigmod...

... as well as various follow-ups from that work, if you search on Google Scholar.

The issues as I understand them are:

1. Research code is often of poor quality, usually thousands of lines of unchecked output by a single graduate student. There are probably bugs, some of which may change the results. In the absence of code, results are assumed to be correct. It takes substantially longer to write good code, and hurts researcher "output" to do so. As a result, good quality code is actively discouraged.

2. Releasing code and/or data usually makes it substantially easier for others to duplicate or catch up to your research program, which is seen as a disadvantage if you are still in an area. It may lead to more citations, but that probably isn't enough for the effort. Other researchers also have an incentive to try to find bugs in the code/data, which they may overstate as they try to get their own work accepted.

3. The code and/or data itself my be copyrighted or have unclear distribution terms, for example, if you are doing experiments on a web crawl.

4. Actual production quality code that does something useful can be used as the basis of a startup or other venture, especially if the researcher is the only one who has and understands it. Furthermore, research groups can make money licensing their code to outside companies if they do not release it openly.

5. Many (most?) industrial papers involve code or data that cannot be released. Ultimately, in highly competitive conferences, it is hard to balance "unverifiable" papers written by industry with academia papers. A blanket ban on papers without code or data would remove a huge number of industry contributions, but an optional requirement for code or data mostly continues the status quo. Many of the most interesting recent papers (e.g., MapReduce) might not have been published with a code/data requirement.
I will suggest to join http://www.openwebanalytics.com/ , it's a great project and it's very useful for startups.
I thought I heard that Buffett wasn't going to leave much to his heirs, and the bulk of his fortune will end up going to the Gates foundation?
Great profile of Elon Musk. The article is about him more than his car company. I would do anything to meet this guy one day.

“He’s one of these just unboundedly ambitious people;
that’s probably the single most important thing about him,
and he’s an eternal optimist, to a fault sometimes,”
- store as bookmarklet (zipped)

- upload to provider (google apps? dropbox?)

- code completion

- syntax coloring

- GUI editor

- object browser

- frameworks (jQuery etc)

- canvas library and GUI
I love my perl5 VM and therefore am not the expert on this.

I've contributed to Parrot and I've contributed to Perl 5. I hope this doesn't sound like an appeal to authority, but after my experiences, I believe that Perl 5 cannot evolve much further unless its internals undergo a similar rethinking.

Parrot has been nailed to the perch since Dan Sugalski left.

Dan designed a pretty good virtual machine to run Perl 5. Compare the timeline of Rakudo's genesis and his departure.
That assessor will be bribed.

Instead of advocating an idea that attempts to turn two wrongs into a right (tacking more regulation onto a problem you admit is caused by regulation), advocate for something more fundamental: the complete separation of state and economics.
I learned Ruby while learning Rails, and I don't think it was necessarily a bad thing. I mostly just needed help over a few humps ("What are these symbol things? How do blocks work? Wait, you mean everything is an object?"), and then it started to come together pretty nicely.

The biggest hurdle in learning Rails, IMO, is that it is such opinionated software. It does so much for you if you follow convention, and the newbie follows conventions because the tutorial says to, and has this holy pogo-sticking africanized honey bees, what the dong just happened? experience. Rails is fantastic because it does so much of the groundwork for you, but it also means that there are a lot of conventions to learn, and a lot of magic that happens that can be exceptionally confusing to the beginner.
Actually, a "wealth cap" is not such a ridiculous idea. Essentially, it's simply a progressive income tax with a tax bracket at 100%. If the bracket is high enough, e.g. $200 million, then it doesn't act as a disincentive and helps to balance the imperfectness of the market.

Many would cite John Rawls here, but I have my own criticisms and my philosophical debates (I am a philosophy minor) can run into weeks of time. Instead, I'm going to simply make the argument that wealth over $200 million is meaningless to a single person. That is, from a practical perspective, that is more money than one could ever spend. The only positive use that could come from that amount of money is heavy watched investment and philanthropy. It is not easy to see that $1 billion is enough to move the world. Why should that responsibility fall into a single citizen's hands? In the best circumstances, the citizen hires a flotilla of people to manage that wealth (e.g., Gates and Buffet) and they spend it wisely and do great good. I don't see the fundamental reason why the government couldn't just do the exact same thing. By awarding the money of a government to a single person (Gates and Buffet each had, at the height of their wealth, more money than most of the governments in the world), this simply ensures an entrenched oligarchy of the rich (and therefore powerful) unless they decide to give it away.

Many would argue that this is "their" money so they deserve it. I think this argument is mostly bollocks, though. Bill Gates had over $100 billion at one point. Let's say that a skilled professional makes ~$1 million (gross) over the same time period. That's a 100,000x multiplier. Did Gates really do 100,000x more work? Did he really have 100,000x more insight? I think he just got lucky. He was at the right time at the right place with a good idea. From there he built a company. But the trick is that it's a lot easier to make a lot of money when you already have a whole lot of money.

Anyway, I'm gonna end this here, even though I'm not completely satisfied with my argument because this is becoming ridiculous.

P.S. This is not for those who believe that the government can do nothing right. I'm not sure that it's even worth arguing with those people. Theoretically, there's no satisfying proof that that's the case and practically the only evidence I see is that when those same people set the government up to fall, it falls hard.
Most of the media writeups on this strangely avoid describing it (the linked article points out more details), which makes the controversy baffling if you only read those articles.

For example, one story (http://www.pamil-visions.net/coca-cola-pulls-facebook-campai...) makes it sound like it was no more than a mildly suggestive ad campaign, and gives examples of "the infamous embarrassing statuses" including "Never heard of it described as cute before.", which make it sound pretty tame, as if a bunch of sensitive moralists were offended by a mildly raunchy ad campaign. No mention of, say, the 2-girls-1-cup reference.
I can't help but notice that the graph in this article seems to have an obvious equilibrium point. I think it best describes the issue. There is a balance between capability and usability that maximizes desireablity.

And, if you can shift the capability line to the up-left, or the usability line to the up-right, you end up with a more desirable product. It's all about doing more with fewer features.
Don't believe all the advice you hear. Some of it contradicts itself, and not all of it will work for you. Use your best judgment and keep your goals in mind.
What was interesting to me was the use of agents in the English language. In my English classes, using passive voice would get red marks on your paper. So even if there were a natural tendency to think in agent-less terms, it would be drilled out of you in class.

Running my own business, I now find that passive voice is the most diplomatic way to discuss user error. The customer didn't do the wrong thing, e.g., "you made a typo in the shipping address" becomes "the shipping address had a typo". The wrong thing just happened, with no agent bearing direct blame. :)
Won't take long and weapons will be mounted to it and it will be deployed to hunt humans. Just like the other UAVs:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/07/raf-drones-afghanis...
Why do you waste more than 30 seconds whining about it?
Very funny! :-)
A big whiteboard that sits behind my monitor.

Aside from that, I've used FogBugz in the past and was satisfied with it.
I'm learning Ruby while learning Rails also. I didn't find the Ruby syntax very confusing, but the humps for me are "How do I make sure I'm doing this the right way even though I'm a n00b? How do I get over being a database control freak and give in to db management using ActiveRecord?"

I came from using CodeIgniter, which is a Rails-esque framework for PHP. Fortunately, the "opinonated" structure etc. made a whole lot of sense to me, and in retrospect makes me wonder why I didn't jump into Rails sooner.
I'm a native. Never heard of this. We must be on different economic classes. I come from a working class and so does everybody I grew up with.
Mobile web application for sharing location on Twitter
Depends on what you mean by "much". In percentage terms, he's promised to give away 99% of his fortune, leaving only 1% to his heirs. But in absolute terms, his fortune is around $50 billion, so the 1% he's leaving is still around $500 million--- so his heirs will still be among the richest people in the U.S.
Those Random Humans
Flattry Might Get You Somewhere
> Dig deep enough and you'll find somebody with a checkbook.

Yep. Nothing happens without a member of some good old boys' club benefiting from it somehow.
Are you including how the wealthy people operate when they're running businesses, or just in their personal lives? I've interacted with a number of game companies, for example, and I've found the big ones much more likely to try to screw you over if you don't have lawyers keeping them from doing so, whereas small indie studios will keep their word and try to act in a way that seems ethical, even if the letter of the law would let them screw you. And even within the large companies, it gets worse as you go up the corporate ladder: you can meet some designers who are trustworthy and will even go out of their way to make sure your dealings with them are positive (fighting their own management if necessary), but you always have to be wary if it's a CEO or VP you're talking to, because they'll stab you in the back if an opportunity arises.

Of course, some people get rich by operating those smallish businesses, and lots of them seem upstanding to me. But a lot of people get rich by filling the decision-maker (CEO/VP/etc.) roles at large firms, where they tend to be somewhat ruthless, perhaps because there's something of a disconnect in ethical responsibility (they're just doing their jobs, nothing personal).