skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say Chinese, because you will find more general-purpose use from this. Are you sure of what you want to do? You might change your major, take East Asian Studies, and do something completely different, as I have known some people to do in college - so I might not get 100% stuck on which would be better just for tech, either.

Ultimately, it will take you two-three years to become fairly proficient, depending on the strength of your school's program and how intense it is. However, you should not pursue the language just because you think it will be good for your career - you should learn a language because you have an interest in it, too.

(proficient here means that you will think that you are at all competent in this language... after 2 years, 5 days a week, you can go to China and impress your friends by 'surviving' quite well. Certainly, even after three years, you will be unlikely to really read much of any newspaper, etc. But spoken can be pretty good at this point.)

Since you have a lot of time left, you could start a course in both and see which might appeal to you more, though be advised that Chinese seems REALLY hard at first when you are confronted with four different 'tones' and are just scratching your head when the teacher constantly tells you you are doing it wrong. But once you move beyond that barrier, essentially after a few weeks when you can cope with the concept, things get easier -- grammar is easy, it's really just about learning more characters, expressions, and the like.

It is true that there are going to be a lot of Chinese CS people, many of whom will speak (some) English. However, Chinese opens up a lot of opportunities if you are dedicated to pursuing them. While the pickings are not as easy as they once were in China, there are still so few foreigners in China (in the grand scheme of things) that you can get involved successfully in different ventures, especially as a connector between China and the west.

Be advised that both languages are serious business -- for native English speakers, Russian is up there, and Chinese is even harder. That is not to discourage you, but just to say that if you are going to undertake learning them, you have to be really serious about it. Learning Chinese is a lot of fun, but definitely will involve a lot of work.

Both countries have some rule of law issues, among other problems, but again, you have to ask yourself what your intentions are. Languages don't just translate into some special linear relationship of increased success - you have to put them to work.
I'd love to turn my cellphone ringer off, but it's not really practical for a sysadmin.

And once I'm available 24/7 for work, I become available for anyone else that has that number.
U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It
This guy puts his finger on precisely the thing that might get me to switch from Common Lisp to Clojure someday. The Java interop aspect is vastly overrated on a technical level. (That's not to say it is overrated in general; it's a marketing master stroke without which the language would have been stillborn.) The concurrency innovations are at best experimental, seem kitchen-sinky, and don't attract me much. But boy do I envy those data structures.
Spontaneous order on the road (what happened when traffic lights were off)
Not much. We did look at other similar products and found out that there is nothing close to our idea. I asked some of my friends for their opinion and I saw that there are more people who need something like this. We're not big fans of researching, planning and such things. We're more into building real things.
Curious: How easy is it to draw in iPad compared to a tablet? (leaving the pressure sensitivity aside that is)
You could simply say that you have some commitments that prevent you from starting immediately, but that in the interregnum you would intend to use the opportunity to read and hone up on the skills required for the position - do they have a suggested reading list?

Lots of companies are fine with a pause before starting for real. It does depend on how long, though. "Several Months" is a long time - very few companies looking to hire would be willing to appoint someone, then wait "several months".

(edited for speeling errror)
I vote for web design community. Graphic design / photoshop / ajax tutorials are all over the place.
Well, they called me to do one last interview with a manager this afternoon, so maybe they actually are interested in me,.
Got definite plans for this in the pipeline, in addition to filtering out dupes.
Moving from car ownership to Zipcar does introduce other burdens, though, especially around scheduling. You have to make a reservation in advance -- in my neighborhood, a couple days in advance for peak times -- and you can't cancel beyond a certain time. You have to know exactly how long you'll be and your plans can't really change, and if you get stuck in traffic, you get to pay an extra $50 for being 5 minutes late. It's a great service for what it is, but it's not for everybody.
I hear, "Don't roll your own session store" frequently, but I wonder, is there any way to not roll your own session store when you are creating a single-sign-on application across multiple server technologies (PHP, ASP.NET, Rails)?
Talentag - Colleagues give recommendations and Foursquare-style badges
some guy said in reply to russian translation of that post:
there were a lot of breakthroughs since smalltalk, lisp and cpp were invented: pure functional languages, finger trees, theorem prover's and formal verification.

There's not much sense to learn another framework OR another way to solve problem. You should concentrate more on a theories that let you do it all yourself: Set, Type, theories etc.
Just a bit of background, TVC is a tech venture creation course at the University of Sydney, where we have notable guest speakers (such as the founders of Atlassian[1] and Omnisio[2]) coming in to share their experiences with us.
We'd like to extend the opportunity to ask questions to everyone through a website we've put together.

[1] Atlassian - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1516214
[2] Omnisio (YC '08) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262240
WebsiteBroker.com is less known, but still gets decent traffic:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/websitebroker.com+flippa.co...
I would guess that you haven't been stalked and physically threatened, then.
A year and a half ago, I had voice mail and kept missing things, since I didn't check it zealously enough. People would leave messages with the assumption that I'd listen to them. This assumption was incorrect.

I then switched to a voice mail message that asked the caller to email me, but I still kept missing things - perhaps your contacts would be more polite, but 80% of the people who called me would still leave messages on my voice mail.

I finally got rid of voice mail altogether about a year ago - if I don't pick up, people get the standard 'this voice mail inbox has not been set up' message. I no longer miss things, since people can't leave a message and therefore don't assume I'm on it - they go and find another way to get in touch with me instead.

There were complaints at first - from my girlfriend, from a couple of business associates. It took a couple of months for them to adapt to my new behavior. Now they text me.
I think it would be useful to have a service that would provide an IMAP style API for others to consume. This service would manage my subscriptions and maintain information about read/unread status, starred items and so on.

The benefit would be that I could easily use different reader applications/services, for example depending on the device I'm using or other needs. This would also make trying out new things, such as the Newsblur much more convenient.
SetTimeout Patterns in JavaScript
Possibly. I did the graduate treadmill after my first degree and I'd prefer to work somewhere smaller and less Initrodeish. I've been studying a slightly niche but useful area of computer science, so I don't really want to sell my ass to someone like McKinsey just because they have a Spring intake.

I guess my question is more about how to present my case to another person, without it sounding like I want to slack off.
Love it or hate it, Java's back catalog of libraries is gargantuan. One of the biggest obstacles in getting a new language adopted is library support. The fact that Clojure gets all that for free is a way to get people using the language now. As Clojure matures, I'm certain more and more native libraries will emerge negating a lot of the need for Java.
Stop Your Chronic Yeast Infections Forever
I had horrific experiences trying to get Racket namespaces to work correctly (in Racket, a namespace is a value rather than simply a name). I found I couldn't get files to use the same namespace no matter how hard I tried, and without a specific namespace some code I was eval-ing simply refused to work.

I suspect Clojure lacks this 'feature' :-)

It's frustrating because I'm sure Racket has a lot to offer but not being able to do something really simple (even after hours and hours of trying) completely put me off.
Neuroscientist: iPhone 4's 'Retina display' not bullsh*t
Hacker News Conversion Rate Test
I am gonna test some social engagement from HackerNews, Digg an Twitter. I have been reading a lot on how any page nowadays can become a landingpage. So I will test that if you come from Digg you see a Digg button (only that one), You come from hackernews and click on http://www.reedge.com/ you see that I am a HackerNews Fan :-) etc.

The idea is to see if the conversion is better by giving the users the idea that we relate with there favorite media. I will not say what the conversion goal is, but once I got results I will share them.

I want to avoid 20 buttons on our company site for every large stumble, digg, twitter, facebook, reddit etc. tool that is out there.

Do you think this would work?

Dennis
Ok. Had to get this out quick...
Back to work.
Don't know if it will compile

<code>
#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
for(int i = 1; i <= 100; ++i)
{
if(i%3==0 &&i%5==0)
cout <<"Fizzbuzz ";

else if(i % 3==0)
cout <<"FIzz ";
else if(i%5==0)
cout<<"buzz ";
else
cout << i << " ";
}
return 0;
}
</code>
Does this mean the foreigners have lost faith in the US government and stop buying the US debt? The Fed buying US debt is like the left hand buying from the right hand.
This way of thinking is kinda like "who will be the worst jerk, me or the guys trying to contact me?"
Japanese is much easier than both. (This obviosuly doesn't answer your question but just a tip)
Ahh damn the link is not clickable so you will not see it any idea how to get it clickable?

Now? http://www.reedge.com
Planets Align for the Perseid Meteor Shower
Thanks for the reply. By "Several Months" I probably mean a minimum of 1.5 months, but preferably around 3 months.

Part of the plan is to learn a few new areas of CS and math that I've been too busy to read, and code a few things I've been meaning to code. Some personal development without commitments all week.

Edit: "to" -> "too". Christ.
DeviantART's HTML5 drawing app Muro
I work in a statistics-related field and use R daily. Most R books emphasize applications for statistics, not R itself; they're written for non-programmers. R in a Nutshell overviews R itself and assumes basic programming experience. I personally prefer this method, since I can just Google for any particular stats functions I need. If you're already a programmer, this is probably the R book you want.
I would go this way, too. I'd give them a specific start date. If they're not OK with letting you fulfill your "other commitments" before that date, or if they press you to divulge what those commitments are and why they're so important, you didn't want to work for them anyway.
1.) The US wage stagnation/decline for the last 10-15 years has been caused by globalization of labor/emergence of China/India. It is not a recent phenomenon.

2.) If you think government printing money will increase/steady your wage, look no further then the last bailout/printing. The banks/shareholders got all the money. You got lost wages and lost jobs.

On a side note, man, there's alot of sheeples on this board. Do you all like get up early in the morning to go to work and get robbed?
i suppose it makes more sense to print money and lend it to itself than lending it to banks to lend to itself
My own pet theory is that people simply have a harder time justifying the giving of help/charity to people they do not know and/or understand.

e.g. It's easy to hate "the other" because you don't know them, you don't live next door to them, you've never lived through what they've lived through, etc. And this is amplified by those who benefit from the hate, and who slander with strawmen and push for rules that maintain the separations and distinctions. (DADT, segregation, most suburban zoning laws in the US, Arizona's new immigration laws, etc)

Similarly, it's harder for rich people in the suburbs to support social programs than even similarly rich people who simply live where they have more contact with people of more economic classes. Even if neither set of rich people had been personally poor.

Likewise, poor people --while more likely to give charity to other people who are in situations they understand-- are still very skeptical of charity given to "the other" (e.g. TARP)

Truly, some people have a strong philosophical belief and act accordingly. But mostly, people are just skeptical of "the other" and act accordingly.
Now just do something about auto insurance since everyone doesn't worry about smacking into someone else when they know that their car will be paid for afterward. That will really raise people's alertness.
Figure 3 is incomplete; as the space depicted in it is not a valid board configuration. If either x or x' is false, then the respective 1s on the extreme sides will be invalid. This is either a crop of a real situation (in which we assume the wire repeats beyond the scope of the image), or an error.
Agreed. IMO even Spanish is a better choice.
Oh, come on guys. This is exactly what SkyNet WOULD say if you asked it. If it didn't have tele-presence to kill you on the spot, that is.
But the real average wage adjusted for inflation has decreased for a long time. Deflation has in fact happened in labor cost. Now it's the time to bring the rest in line. It's unsustainable to have ever increasing asset price but lower labor cost. No one can afford to buy them at the end.
Absolutely. I will never understand the need to answer every single call. And interrupting SEX? That's just bizarre.
I see the button now that the link is clickable. No idea if this will affect your conversion rates but I wish you luck.

Edit: Quick slightly off-topic question that I've been curious about: have you received any complaints from customers requesting conversion optimization? I've found that setting any expectations for conversions with customers can backfire as one can't control web user behavior (search user to be more precise, as I work with search advertising).
Jugaad: Improvisation as innovation in India
I'm interested to see AppNowGo (private beta, so I can't see it yet). That's something I've thought about building, but it seems like a very hard problem.

Any solution that's doesn't require programming is going to have constraints. So even if the platform is fine for building v1, if they keep adding to it, eventually they're going to hit a wall where they must add feature X, which is impossible to do with the programming-free platform. And then what? They'll have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, I guess. And somehow get their data.

So I think you pretty much need to let them export their data. Better yet would be letting them export the actual app they've built where they get PHP or Rails code. But then you stop making money off of that person. I guess you could charge for the code export so that you at least get one last lump sum before they leave, but it seems dirty to charge people to leave your platform.

Another option would be to somehow allow programming as an advanced feature in such a way that they could do almost anything, but that would be pretty difficult to do, and you'd need some kind of sandbox to keep them from breaking your servers.
oh, no, we're paying less for things. help!

the massive housing bubble and it inflationary effects HAD to collapse. those who waited out the insanity deserve lower prices. those who were foolish do not deserve to have the rest of us prop up their property values, although our government is foolishly backing every bad bet out there.
It is a shame that Norway isn't an eligible country. Why?
As a side note, if you enjoy playing Minesweeper but don't like losing to a bad guess, you might want to try the implementation in Simon Tatham's puzzle collection:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

Unlike most other implementations, it only generates boards that can be solved by logic, so you never need to guess; your first square is guaranteed to be safe and to reveal enough information to progress.

(IIRC, the algorithm used to pre-solve each generated level bottoms out in an exhaustive search, so I guess this game variant is still in NP.)
Everybody knows I carry a phone but they also know that I don't answer it if I can't or don't want to. I have no problem with letting someone go to voicemail if I can't or don't want to talk on the phone right then... me carrying around a device that allows me to be connected whenever I want doesn't obligate me to actually be connected at any particular point. If they need me urgently, they should leave a second voicemail or, preferably, send me a text.
The US government is printing/robbing you of your savings. Don't believe it for a second it will trickle down to you; the last batch of printing/bailout went to banks and shareholders.

On a side note, man, there's alot of sheeples on this board. Do you all like get up early in the morning to go to work and get robbed?
All of the authors examples of "valid" critics are not of design decisions. They are examples of quality control issues AKA "sloppiness".
Huh? When did race come into this. Everybody does this sort of thing. e.g. http://twitter.com/ebertchicago/status/20856454619
There are contributions on the mailing list of threadpool and subprocess handling. But you're right this should be in the library - we're working on it.
I'm probably not your target audience, so take all this with a pinch of salt ...

A. I really have no idea what you're talking about

B. Was I supposed to see a "Hacker News" button?

C. Links in submissions are not clickable, they are in comments.

D. A single, simple, very specific example goes a long, long way. I was 1:20 into your video and it was still talking about how to do things and general usefulness, with no actual example.

... and now I'm bored and clicking away.
Google Reader is pretty much this - has an API
You don't have to answer every single call. I carry my phone all the time but I don't answer calls from unknown numbers. A lot of times I don't answer calls from friends either. They know I'll get back to them when I feel like it. Nobody has ever gotten their feelings hurt because of it.
Microsoft execs downplay talk of possible PC demand slowdown
This is crazy talk.
The advice on PHP might be correct, and it might jive with most of the collective experience of HNers... However, my company is always hiring C and C++ developers... we interview maybe 3 people a weak and hire maybe 1 person every 2 or 3 months.

That said, there is absolutely a shortage of C++ jobs... but this shortage has created an equal shortage of competent C++ programmers. We can't find C/C++ programmers to hire fast enough.
In high school. I joined an online community and started building a (hideous) website related to it on Angelfire. Went from HTML to Javascript to Perl to the Wonderful World of Linux, all within a year or so. Now I'm primarily a PHP dev but I tinker in everything from Python to Ruby to plain ol' C
Deflation is bad for debt issuers. Guess who's holding the biggest amount of debt?
Isn't this just serving a standard HTML webpage using different CSS dependent on the device?

So, basically using a developed version of media="screen, mobile"?

If so that's pretty brilliant marketing.
Alex Tabarrok linked to a video of a British town's experiment with this on a roundabout: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi0meiActlU&feature=playe... . They saw a 75% decrease in waiting time at the intersection.
Lately I've been forwarding people that leave me voicemails the Google Voice transcription along with my response. At first, a couple people took offense, but now they're asking me how to set that up for themselves.
Best toy store ever.
Unfortunately, posting this to HN might cause the apocalypse.
Django nonrel-search updates: auto-completion and separate indexing
I watched it on (black-and-white) over-the-air TV growing up in Argentina at the tail end of the military dictatorship. I'm not exaggerating when I say it changed my life -- and many of my friends' too.
You're right about that. But people shouldn't be learning rails from online tutorials, they should be reading Active Web Development with Rails which has clear instructions.

Learning new languages from random online tutorials is always going to be confusing because stuff on the net is either too cutting edge or too disorganized, no matter what language you're using (yes, even PHP).
You can easily check that on Google Preview. From what I've seen, both temperatures and weights are given in both American and European systems.
I prefer to treat text messaging like email, where I don't read it as soon as it is received. In fact, using Google Voice, my text messages ARE emails. People get used to and usually respect the fact that I have more important things to do that constantly reply to their queries.
Exploring the Singularity, with Michael Vassar
Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see it.
The world has to run on your time, unless the world can happily ignore you.
> What matters is how important and relevant each feed is to you at the current time. Put the ones I'm most likely to read at the top.

Google Reader's "Sort by magic" attempts to do this. It'd be nice to have more information on how it works though.

Also, don't underestimate the power of tagging your RSS feeds. Just like people set up GMail/Outlook/etc labels for important people or emails, you can set up tags for important feeds that you don't want to miss. Why not tag all of the "must read" feeds, the "skim" feeds, and the "eh" feeds, so that you can click on the "eh" label, and mark all as read if you get behind?

Google Reader is already a pretty powerful tool for feed reading (especially in conjunction with Yahoo Pipes or similar), and a lot of issues with RSS can already be solved with the tools at hand.