skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Learn Russian or Chinese (mandarin)?
I'm a CS student with plenty of time left in college, so I've decided to learn a new language for fun and to add to my career.
I've got it down to either Mandarin Chinese or Russian but can't seem to decide which would benefit my career more. (though I'm getting repelled away from Chinese from what I keep hearing about their tech markets)

So which language would you advice.

P.S I'm already working on the more technical side by working on my C++, python and SQL (official mandatory course for my next semester) and being involved in competitive programming.

P.P.S I'll be working on this language for at least the remaining three years I have left in college .
If presented with a design full of these errors, and presented with an otherwise-identical design that has these errors corrected side-by-side, you will almost certainly prefer the one with the errors corrected, even if you can't put your finger on why.

I'm not very good at design, I'm especially terrible with colors, but if you study these mechanics a little you can significantly improve the look of your websites just by mechanically following these rules. It does work; a startup I worked at created a report of vulnerabilities on your website and by blindly following the principles of good design actually produced a very good looking report, better than the competition that could afford designers (but apparently didn't). It was a subtle thing, but putting our report next to the competition's report really made it look as if we were the ones with years of experience and knew what we were talking about, instead of the upstart newcomer. It failed, ultimately, but not because of our report format :)
DeviantArt Muro: An Awesome New HTML5 Drawing App
"Lud must have been here."

This reminds me of an essay by Thomas Pynchon: "Is it OK to be a Luddite." Possibly posted to HN recently.

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite....

Pynchon's point seems to be that the Luddites were not opposed to technology for the reasons we commonly imagine: fear of change, fear of submission to the machine, fear of obsolescence.

Instead, Ned Lud (an historically obscure, possibly fictional character) was a Hero who stood up to and mocked the machinery of a ruling class. Machinery that, incidentally, put many human beings out of work.

Ludditism was more a sideshow act in an evolving campaign of class-warfare. But also a kind of myth.

Cell phones are interesting in this context because they're a double-edged sword. They are both liberating and totalitarian. To give up your cell phone is to avoid the demands of possible higher-ups, but also risk missing timely receipt of profitable information ("The stock market's crashing, sell quick!").
Yeah, no doubt it's a lot easier to stay on the Google Reader stack. With NewsBlur, it's completely separate from Google Reader (other than an initial Google Reader OAuth import of your feeds). Which means I have to write my own iPhone app to communicate with NewsBlur, but that's part of the fun.

It's not a business, just a side project where I learn as much as I can about a huge variety of topics from server maintenance, to pattern recognition, to distributed systems (feed fetching).
The little things add up. A few pixels here, a broken alignment there, they make the overall design look unkempt. If it's egregious enough it makes things look sloppy. It may not seem like a big deal, but getting things pixel-precise makes someone a better, more fastidious designer.
> Edit Edit: If you're going to downvote, let's have your counter-arguments please.

Off-topic: I also noticed that a lot of comments get some early attention from eager downvoters. I know it's frustrating. Just wait a bit for the score to settle.
After having worked at the company I'm at for several years, I've seen quite a few mediocre programmers flounder at the same level for quite a while, none of them particularly improving.

I think the same things that keep someone from improving their skills are the same thing that make them a mediocre programmer in the first place. There is a difference between working hard at your job, and working hard to hone your craft.
Django nonrel-search gets auto-completiona and separate indexing
I've often dreamed of an embedded vi in my browser. Oh how many times I have hit <esc> and wiped out what I spent 15 minutes typing!
It's just what you are used to.
I've been working on such a site for the past week, which is why posed the original question.
eh, personally, I think it's /much/ easier to just ask for a raise first. My experience has been that you usually get it, and sometimes you get something much higher than you would expect. Unlike interviewing around, just asking takes maybe 10 minutes of effort and has zero downside.

No employer will be offended by you asking for more. Hell, lots of people think that ambition is a good thing. If you don't get what you want from just asking, /then/ the above makes sense. but really, most of the time there is free money to be had for the asking... get that money before you spend effort job hopping. If you do end up job hopping anyhow, usually your new salary is your old salary plus some percentage on top, so even if the boss gives you 3% and you think that's insulting, eh, that means you start 3% higher when you negotiate your next job.
Apress does a similar daily deal: http://apress.com/info/dailydeal
I disagree that it necessarily makes the world run on your time.

All it does, is make the default method of communication asynchronous and forces synchronous communication to be scheduled.

It doesn't "make the world run on your time", unless you're still using a phone to interrupt other people with unscheduled synchronous communication.

The responsible way to ditch the interruptions and improve focus is to shift your own communication to asynchronous methods and expectations as well.

I leave my phone on silent (no ring. no vibe.) unless I'm expecting a particular call. I think it's vastly less rude of me to make an unscheduled caller wait until I make time to answer a message than for that caller to have presumptuously attempted to interrupt my day with an unscheduled call or "emergency" email they demand an instant response to.

I have yet to work out a good way for actual emergency notifications to ring through. But until phones provide a good solution to that[1], I'll err on the side of being more productive every single day in exchange for running the risk of being 'out of contact' in the event of an actual emergency.

[1] I've tried setting my default ringer to dead air and setting a custom ringtone for my wife. But that doesn't let me easily flip the ringer back on for when I'm expecting a scheduled call. And I'd still like an email client that will let me set a custom alert rule based on contact. I'd rather not run a second email client to watch an 'emergency' mailbox.
Nope, that's probably the shelve extension: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ShelveExtension
I feel naked without my phone
I don't think this would make a huge difference to me, as I don't subscribe to enough feeds in GR for it to make a big difference to how I'd use it.

Also, speaking of unread flags [grating record scratch sound] I wrote a Chrome extension to add unread flags to HN comments: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/imeeonmdbakdmiln...

Ugh, that was awkward. Sorry about that.
So local traffic knows local roads?

Signs and indicators are for people who are not from the area.
Way too extreme. You can have a cell phone and still make the world run on your time.
In my experience owning a motorcycle in Canada or the US is more expensive than owning a small car.

Even medium sized sport or sport touring motorcycles (e.g., Honda VFR) aren't cheap to run. The engines are tuned for performance not fuel efficiency and usually need premium fuel, so small cars are about as cheap to re-fuel per mile. Also the maintenance cost that killed me was tires: You have to pay around $500 dollars for (two) good tires on a motorcycle every 10k miles (if you're lucky) whereas I spent only $200 at Costco for (four) tires for my car that should last more than 50k miles.

Also consider than motorcycles depreciate faster than cars and the resale market is less liquid so you lose more money when you sell.

Summary: Buy motorcycles because they're fun, not because they're cheap!

Granted a 50cc scooter would certainly be cheaper to run than a car but then you're restricted to city streets (i.e., no highways).
Akan among the egoists
Food 3.0: Intelligent Dialogue Series
Why do you think than green tea is especially mild?
Even the kerning example took me some time to figure out. These "wrong" issues are so imperceptible I think they're safely ignored by most. If a 1px spacing offset is so troubling to this person, he must be constantly frustrated by the "wrong" design he sees everywhere. Most people just aren't that perceptive.
Why did I choose programming?
Vin: It's like this fellow I knew in El Paso. One day, he just took all his clothes off and jumped in a mess of cactus. I asked him the same question, "Why?"
Calver: And?
Vin: He said, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
-The Magnificent Seven
Useful very. Pay for it? No. Hope this helps.
People get freaked out(especially parents)( if I don't answer my cell or If I don't take calls.

I ask them to chill out, explain that there was a time before cell phones, when life on.

Their counter is the standard "what if there is an emergency?"
and My counter counter(I know redundant) is "haven't recieved one of those calls in all the years I've had my cell. So, Im not holding my breath".
The same can be done for Gmail (and probably Google Apps) users through GDocs. Just share a document to an email address, and GDocs will show you their name.
InDinero (YC S10) sees huge market for small-business expense tracking
No need to apologise - I'm always somewhat humbled by just how well some people speak English as a non-native language.

<snip excerpt>

Ah - I don't have "Robots of Dawn" and it's a long time since I read it. Thank you.
Gej-minister o podróżach i partnerze | Świat
I'm not so sure why this even matters. If you search for someone based on their email address within Facebook, it comes up with their name and photo as well. In my case, it's a feature. But true there is no point to it giving this information on the wrong password screen, but if someone wants this information they can still get it using Facebook.

Maybe Google should worry about this too...I usually type unfamiliar email addresses into Google and end up with far more than just a name and a picture.
This is great, but is there any RSS feed? I couldn't find one.
Don't know it well enough to code it from scratch at work. Have an idea. Will post something by tonight.

Just finished a Data Structures class and still wrapping my head around Trees and hashing.

Thank you, kindly.
I use my cell phone a lot more for GoogleTalk than for calls.

In fact I have a data plan that has no call minutes. If I want to make a call, I can buy a prepaid card or call from other phone.
At minimum you should learn 2 programming languages. One must be imperative, one declarative. One object oriented, one functional. One weak, one strong. One static, one dynamic. One compiled, one scripted. You need a balanced diet.
Ask HN: Evidence which settle the C/C++… vs Python/Lisp/Haskell… Deathmatch?
I am most interested in whether programs written in "high-level" languages have less errors. (Note that I am talking about errors that can go undetected, and are actually shipped). That's a disagreement between me and a colleague:

To me, a high-level language will yield simpler and shorter programs, and tend to remove some classes of errors. That let your mind concentrate more on the problem, and less on unrelated details. Therefore, your program tend to have less errors.

To my colleague, using a high level language makes you lazy. By not exercising your mind regularly with trivial problems (such as indices in `for` loops), you tend to be less awake, if not a bit dumber. And that effect at least nullifies the benefits of a shorter and simpler program (when it comes to count the errors). In the end, your program does not have less errors. It even tend to have more.

So empirical evidence would be nice.
I used this, and liked it, but found the yellow too obnoxious - why does every comment get marked as yellow when i visit a comment page the first time?
"git rebase --interactive" can certainly be used instead of patch queues if you're careful not to mess with published changesets. Mercurial has the histedit extension[1] which does the same thing.

The one thing rebase -i and histedit can't really duplicate is versioned patch queues. If you want to keep track of changes to patches over time then rewriting history won't help you.

Perhaps you have a big feature with a bunch of moving parts that you want to refine as you get feedback/code review. With versioned queues your colleagues can see what parts of your patches changed since the last time they reviewed them, instead of looking at the entire set of patches as a whole.

[1]: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/HisteditExtension
Having too many feeds is just like having too much physical stuff in your life. I went through my list and paired it down to 100 (from about 300).

That's still too many and I plan to cut it down even more... but it's a weight off my mind to just let all of them go.

A good place to start when pruning your feeds is the "trends" page. http://www.google.com/reader/view/#trends-page
Why not do "Hacker News Readers" as a niche?

I'm just one data point... But, while I think I grok what you're doing, I'm not sure I grok why I should want it. When I read articles, maybe 1 out of 10 makes me want to explore further. When I do want to explore further, there's usually a pretty natural way to do it-- the google search box in my browser. Google uses the link graph to find stuff related to the keyword. You're proposing to have users do it, right? The Google path doesn't seem to be broken to me... Other than the rare time that I can't think up the right search phrase to get good results.
There are a lot of tradeoffs one makes with dealing with nontechnical customers which geeks might hate. Geeks do not have to worry about the "Facebook login" fiasco, but if you sell to my customers, are Paypal, etc, then login issues are a core business requirement. Note that site abandonment among users unable to log in is ridiculously high (I should track this...) and every time that happens Facebook loses revenue, shareholder value, and network effects.
GWT + HTML5 Can Do What?
One technique to help stay on top of the technology wave
Amazing Typography Display For Your Inspiration | Kitaro10
I agree with you. Programmers and bloggers are definitely the way to go.
A caveat: the findings of Piff's research are applicable only to his research subjects, who are likely Berkeley undergraduates at the Social Interaction Lab. Findings in psychological experiments don't carry across cultures. See 'The Weirdest People in the World?' for more:

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf

That said, other researchers conducting Ultimatum Game and Dictator Game experiments have found that higher-status individuals offer less to their counterparts, even when the 'status' is entirely make-believe (for instance, being told that they scored higher than their counterpart on a previously-conducted test of skill - even though they were in fact randomly assigned to their roles.) Researchers have also found that in Ultimatum Game experiments, lower-status individuals were willing to accept less, even when the low status was similarly make-believe.

In other words, Piff is making a somewhat politicized argument about wealth and 'the rich', when he should be talking about status. I'd argue that all this experiment shows is that American college undergraduates have internalized that high status is deserved, and therefore it's fair for high status people to retain a greater proportion of the benefits of status.
now, I am not advocating lying... but at least here in America, the employer has the employee fill out worksheets to figure tax deductions, then at the end of the year the employee evens up with the IRS. (if your calculations are off and you underpay by more than a certain amount, you have to pay penalties on top of paying the owed taxes, so the employee has an incentive to get it right.) In 15 years of working, I've never had an employer ask what I was getting before outside of salary negotiations, and I've been in situations where I owned my 'previous employer' so I'd know if they tried to contact the previous employer to verify income.

So while I think lying in general is a bad strategy, in part because you don't know when you'll get caught, I'm fairly certain that American employers won't catch you through their tax calculation process.
Clickable: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R3XVVKB
I'm sure you sometimes click on hyperlinks besides those that show up in search results. The point is to make navigation of that manner via related hyper-links better, which is somewhat orthogonal to search we think. Sure, you can search and find anything, but it's not quite the same as just browsing by clicking links.

Google uses the link graph to find stuff related to the keyword. You're proposing to have users do it, right?

I'm proposing to have users create a new link-graph, separate from the web's own inherent link graph. Keywords have nothing to do with it. :) - Looks like my home page isn't as clear as I thought.
Cause that's really dangerous when you're suffering deflation....you know, when you take actions to correct this situation.
None. Learn languages of nations which you can sell your skills to. Both China and Russia have ab abundance of CS students, and are cheaper than you(assuming you are in US or Europe proper). Plus, Russians seem to be quite OK with English.

Korean or Japanese, I say.
Google Voice transcribes voicemail. A bit hit-and-miss sometimes, but decent (and, presumably, getting better with more data).
Microsoft launches a new mobile game development studio
Thanks Denis gevent is sweet, I monitor the project and might switch to it one day.

As of now I still use some of the eventlet-only features like thread pools and subprocess handling. Performance has not been a problem yet as well. I imagine gevent is faster since it sits on top of libevent ...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+your+favorite+c...
No this really isn't much of an anti-tech rant, although it looks like some folks mistakenly took it for that.

Trying to shorten it, there is a huge amount of stuff in the world that you can accomplish with just 3 very simple UI controls. HTML has gone zillions of miles past that. Distraction can become a productivity issue in itself. Perhaps there is an opportunity for a vastly more simple technology interaction experience.

Or -- the iPod did one thing and did it well. That's why it was such a huge hit. Can you out iPod the iPod? Is there further to go down the simplicity path and still keep usefulness? I think there is.
Never ever Rentacoder. Most people don't care that much at what time you work on something if you can show you deliver on time and make yourself available for the occasional call during the day.

People worry about moonlighting when you have a full-time job but if you are running a startup they usually understand you can make time for them when you need it.
and of course they covered:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+also+floats+in+wat...
Of course: http://www36.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+speed+of+...
We're about to launch, so just about time to throw off the cloak anyways.

Its a videochat website, which if I described you'd immediately compare to Chatroulette. If we don't achieve critical mass early, everyone will leave.

To a degree it is like Chatroulette, though there are different types of rooms and a security mechanism that actually keeps perverts off (you sign in using FB connect, though we never reveal to anyone who you are. This is just to track you so we can block you permanently if reported. And no, you can't create a new FB account and get back on; you have to have 20+ friends to sign in).

If you show up and noone is on the site, you're going to leave and never come back. Thus, need a critical mass to keep it going.

Based on some calculations I've done, to keep a minimum of 50 people on the site at all times we'll need 15k visitors per day.

There are a few other features that I'd be thrilled to go on and on about, but I hope I answered your question. If you're curious and have more questions, you can find my email address in my profile.
http://www36.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+are+you+today%3F

http://www36.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Why%3F

http://www36.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+the+fuck%3F

http://www36.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+airspeed+...
Ask HN: How much do you value your anonymity online?
Anonymity online is becoming more and more of a luxury these days. If I come across someone professionally or personally all I need to do is google them and in most cases I'll get a very good idea about their habits, friends, interests... etc (not just what they say).

Personally I value my anonymity and privacy very much and I maintain that online by controlling where my real name appears and what it is associated with(as best I can), fragmenting my online personas limiting interactions using my real name. But with greater interconnectedness of social networks and content sites, this is getting harder to do. And then there is google, with Eric Schmidt saying ridiculous things like "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Should I even bother, is it even resonable to expect to meet people and be genuinely surprised?
Ahh..the Magento trap. You seem to be suffering from burnout.

My advice to is....leave it all behind. Pay your bills and move to your parents house for awhile if you have to. Have no payments haunting you. I believe that what's causing you all that stress is the rent.

I know it may sound ridiculous but your parents will help you by supporting you on this difficult time. And you can use that time to get your business straight.

Or maybe you need a restart, refresh, start over. If so, give yourself a few weeks or months, and do something unrelated to your job. Learn a new skill, work on something different. That will clear your head up and maybe bring some cool ideas. Then evaluate if you still want to work on this.
Students parody the OldSpice YouTube video's
Meaning of life? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+meaning+of+...
I can extend the list: one applicative, one concatenative. One eager, one lazy. One explicitly typed, one inferred.

2 languages won't be enough.
Another Urban Airshipper here. Just wanted to expound upon the TCP keep-alive issue because I was the most vocal proponent of using them vs. reinventing them ourselves.

The main reason using TCP keep-alives were a non-starter was because in our testing, carriers handled them in "special" ways which usually meant they rarely or never actually reach ed the intended endpoint.

Another strike against TCP keep-alives is how the RFC defining them seems pretty ambivalent on their use. Support is optional, delivery is not guaranteed (ACK segments with no data aren't reliably transmitted), and implementations may vary.

See: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-101

At the end of the day they're a fine freebie for protocols like SSH to use (although they're spoofable...), but we wanted finer-grained control in order to optimize resource usage on the device, our servers, and the pipes between.

I'd love to hear about others' experiences with TCP keep-alives though.
Good article, but lacks some pictures.

Drachten:

http://maps.google.com/maps?client=opera&q=Drachten&...

Makkinga:

http://maps.google.com/maps?client=opera&q=Makkinga&...
LG to Sell More than Double Android Units than Windows Phone 7 Ones
LG is expecting that by the end of the year, 70% of the smartphones they will sell will be based on Android.