skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't always need hard data to prove a point. I could relate to this article from my personal experience. Smart people tend to be harsh on themselves and on their solutions.

The "most smart people" part could be revised to something else so it doesn't seem like the conclusion was from hard data.
Hundreds of Colleges Fail to Make the Grade on Financial Responsibility
While what you say is true of the article, I have noticed that mistakes seem easier to find when someone else is making them.
You could try that yourself by simply discussing a problem someone is facing. If they are stuck, ask them for a potential solution and see how quickly they will tear up that solution by over-analyzing the problems with the suggested solution.

My $.02 of course.
Downsides To Being Seen As A Man
To me, one of the most important things that apple did was offer free internet access in their stores; I go in there and use it all the time.

This is good for two reasons: it makes it look like everybody cares about apple (even though a lot of people are just there using what is effectively the free internet cafe) and it gets people into the store looking at the products.

Good job on that, Apple.
Rails has a hell of a learning curve. Ruby itself is mostly straightforward, but you're learning a new language and a new software stack at the same time - it's a lot more to take in than getting up to speed with PHP. It is opinionated software, and prefers convention over configuration, so until you start learning the conventions, it can be kind of confusing. That said, stick with it - once you get over the initial hump, it's very smooth sailing.

You're on the right track, you just may need a helping hand here and there. Try the #rubyonrails IRC channel on Freenode; it's very active, and tends to slant towards the newbie crowd. It may be just what you need.
It looks like GNU sort already does this internally, but with smarter temp file management. Increasing the memory size looks like a good idea, and if you have multiple hard drives, it may help to specify a temporary directory on a different hard drive with the -T option, since this problem looks IO-bound.
I've been learning Japanese for about five years, but was a fluent speaker after about two. I have only a little bit of advice.

- Try all the methods, see what sticks. Your learning style, basic knowledge/ability up until now will be different to everyone else's. I personally hate rosetta stone and software like it but I've seen other people have a lot of success with it. I like classes and exams because they force me to stick to a syllabus but other people hate classroom learning. It's extremely personal and no one can really prescribe a best method.

- There will be times where you lack material (grammar, vocab, etc) and times where you lack practice. For me there's always been a cycle of learning lots of material and going out to actually use it in real life. These cycles can last a few hours, days or even years. If you ever feel like you've got a lot of knowledge, but not much confidence, its time to make native speaker friends and _practice_. If on the other hand you feel like you've hit a plateau, most likely its time to hit the books.

- Learning on and off is fine, don't sweat that at all. Its perfectly alright to stop studying for a few months here and there, especially if you're spending regular time with native speakers. I barely touched a textbook or learning resource in the entire two years I lived in Japan.
Not much. I've seen no steps taken against OpenJDK yet, and even if they did an OpenSolaris on that, you could always run it with the official JDK. It would be beyond crazy if the wouldn't make one available anymore.

What probably will happen is that some frustrated developers won't use anything associated with the JVM. I don't expect to see a lot of this, though. A lot of the people who use JVM languages already work in an environment where there's more than enough proprietary enterprise software. And I doubt that it matters a lot for complete newbies.

Personally, I was on the lookout for new languages to focus upon, after playing with a lot recently. And after this, Ocaml and Erlang moved to the top of the stack, past Scala and Clojure.
You definitely bring up a very good point. I should phrase it properly. Yes, their own problems are problems they haven't solved - when in fact, they could have solved them. If their "unsolved problems" were brought to them by someone else, they would have had a solution very quickly.

That is precisely the reason to have mentors and personal advisors.

My $.02
Ask HN: help debug mapme, noob map app
Request for assist debugging simple map script: please test from your locale http://mapme.heroku.com
The headline is a nice use of language to make an almost-truism seem like an insight. Good fodder for the cold reader: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading

IE; Everyone is "better at solving other people's problems", since everyone is bad at solving their own problems. And they're bad at solving their own problems ... because they have them. Neither the observer nor the person himself/herself is likely to notice the problems they don't have, because they're good at solving. Uh, plus its easy to think your solution to someone else's problem is good since you don't have to put it into practice. And the headline mentions smart people, so I'm sure they're talk about you.
Request for assist debugging simple map script: please test from your locale http://mapme.heroku.com

source:
http://github.com/victusfate/mapme
Unless you have superhuman discipline specifically in the area of studying languages, there is no substitute for immersion. Book yourself a semester abroad (but not in one of the spoonfed foreign vacation programs most Universities sponsor -- find a program yourself). Or enroll in a language school. Choose a homestay, not a dorm. Stick with it for at least three months. Limit your English internet time and make local friends.

Intense studying with flashcards for vocabulary is also important and should be done every day. There is no substitute for thirty minutes without fail each morning. If you keep it up for a year, your word power in the new tongue will explode. But it must be every day.

Use native materials as soon as you can and make your vocabulary lists from them. A tutor can really help with that in the early stages.

Get a tutor or some one-on-one lessons to sharpen your pronunciation. You're pronouncing things wrong and no matter what the studies of casual students say, serious learners can adopt native accents with practice at any age. It takes hundreds of hours of practice to make muscle memory work and you need regular correction. This is the only stage where instruction is indispensable. Practice pronunciation constantly. Do it on the way to work or school, in the shower, all the time. It doesn't take brains -- you could almost do it in your sleep -- but you need hundreds of hours of practice. Muscle memory.

Arabic is really hard (and useless for picking up girls). You should expect it to take years and years. If you can't live abroad, it may never come to you. If you're only studying on-and-off, you might not have the discipline. Maybe consider an easier alternative. (Pretty much anything but Korean is easier.)
You can already do this rumoured behaviour with Facebook (it's called Friend Lists).

If Facebook hasn't managed to get people to adopt this, it seems hard to believe that anyone else will.
Surely if that is true, which I seriously doubt, this is partially on the buyer for not choosing products based on which is the best, and therefore not giving Oracle any incentive to spend on improving their products.
Amen to that. Friends sometimes try to bring that up only to be shot down instantly with some smart rationalization. Thanks.
Part of the reason for that isn't just your outsider perspective. Part of it is that you don't have any obligation to verify your diagnosis. A lot of "mistakes" you see people making probably aren't actually mistakes, a lot of things they are doing right are equally also not doing it right.

Without getting into specifics, how many people would look at, say, a government following $YOUR_PREFERRED_ECONOMIC_SYSTEM and call it a long series of "mistakes"? But of course you know that $YPES is not a long series of mistakes, it's the way any right-thinking person knows it should be done. In fact they are making a mistake for preferring some other system over yours!.... or are they?

It's very easy to inaccurately diagnose problems and prescribe solutions, but it doesn't mean much without validation.
Does "put[ting] the file into a list" mean "loading the file into memory"?
Sylvester Stallone studied in U of Miami and in Switzerland under a scholarship and Schwarzenegger built a succesful business empire from scratch. There's no reason a good brain and big size would be mutually exclusive.
Memory Inception: Creating A Great User Experience For Your Product
I watched alot of cartoons in the second language, fun and easy to pick up :)
From personal experience I would recommend taking the equivalent of a high school language course to understand the logic of a language and some vocabulary and then moving to a remote location to work where nobody speaks English. Andean mining camps really helped my Spanish to become fluent.
Yes, I know. I provided another example to support ellyagg's point.
That's an interesting semantic exercise, but I think you're missing the point. I've observed the phenomenon that the author discusses.

An example that I've observed, which doesn't quite fall in line with where the author went with it, but is interesting nonetheless, is when I get stuck solving a programming problem. When I'm showing others how to solve a problem of similar complexity, I seem to have more of my mind free to step through the pieces of the puzzle and can see solutions more clearly. It's like when I'm not using energy working on the problem and don't have any direct connection to it emotionally or otherwise, I can solve it more easily.

Another example of something in the same ballpark is a couple years ago I had errors on my credit report so I went to clear them up. I had to jump through a series of hoops to make that happen, and the whole process seemed like a big headache. It also was difficult to get the motivation to do it initially, even though I knew I needed to and understood the basic steps required. Fast-forward to a few months ago, and I had a friend that needed to dispute items on her credit report. I didn't dread jumping in to solve the problem, and even offered to help her fix it right then. Even though it was the same problem, the same complexity, and a similar time commitment, I had zero emotional attachment to the problem, and so I quickly dissected it into a step a, step b, step c process and got it done.
Tips for Writing Good Documentation
Technical documentation. I doubt it's something any of us would list as our favorite genre, either to write or to read. But it's one of those necessities we often curse then begrudgingly accept when we have to wade our way through it in order to solve a problem or when we have to write it in order to explain a technical product.
FWIW, I've done 100 hours a week for several weeks in a row.

I felt pretty productive since I could intermix the kind of work I was doing. 11AM-6PM would be meetings, interviews/recruiting, etc. Dinner break w/ hulu from 6-7. Then program myself for basically a full day (~7PM-2AM).
I've been learning chinese for about a year now. I use chinesepod for vocabulary, realisitic dialog and small doses of grammar. I deconstruct the podcasts into a form where I painstakingly repeat the entire dialog piece-wise at a slower speed until my pronounciation is good. Using audacity to label regions of the dialog and praat to pick out pitches, it's possible to get a very precise view of how the tones are being pronounced. (praat is opensource too). I use skritter to work on learning the characters imported from the lessons at chinesepod (they have an interoperability agreement)

I watch a live streaming weather channel from beijing, and another channel out of nanjing. Since the connections are spotty, I have $mplayer -dump the stream straight to file, and then play from that. This endows mplayer the ability to seek, and of course plays much smoother without the cache issues.

Use IRC. Typing the language is great practice and native speakers can offer helpful advice.

Staying motivated is the hardest part, prevent burn out any way possible. Use automation when it makes sense, though It's easy to spend too much time messing with tools to learn, rather than learning.
That would explain why Macs are colorless now... <0.5 wink>
"It is hard to foster good friendships without face contact. Don't matter what the resolution of your Skype video, it is just not the same."

It's common here to read people claiming that you don't need to go to college when you can learn as much, or more, form the Web. This is true perhaps for book learning but it misses the social aspect. School is not just about filling your head with stuff. It's about meeting new people, having face-to-face discussions, learning to work in teams, learning to be someplace on time and prepared, and so on.

"Another sensitive issue is that a higher proportion of HN-ers are probably introverts. Nothing wrong with that. I am one too. That means it is easier by default to be lonely. But in the long run it also hurts"

Somewhat tangential, but I beseech all of you who help organize, or ven just attend, tech gatherings to help break down the barriers of this introversion.

I'm amazed and disappointed to see so many people go to conferences, spend all their time hanging with co-workers who've also come along, then go home without really meeting any new people.

I appreciate how hard it can be to get out of your comfort zone and push yourself to socialize. Especially since the reaction from many other geeks is often abysmal. (Note to women: Sometimes when guys at a tech conference treat you with disdain or incoherent puzzlement it's because they're sexist jerks. But sometimes, maybe more often, it's because they're simply clueless unsocial oafs.)

Tech gatherings need more ways to break up the default cliques people tend to and promote more intermingling of people who've never met before.
This is not correct. It is very expensive to host, which chews up the profits.
For a site dedicated to open source, the funding sources and the actual identity of the writers is fairly obscure.

Pay no attention to the mam behind the curtain at your own peril.
Trying to stay positive, I think you should use the newsletter popup on something like the 3rd or 4th visit. By that time, users have read some of your material and could form an opinion about subscribing to a newsletter.

From my personal perspective, if you punch me in the nose with a sign-up form the first time I visit, not only am I going to dismiss it without any consideration at all, I am going to be suspicious of the subsequent material you present. Changing the timing of this popup could help you a bunch, I think.
I noticed them all over the chinese trade sides about six months ago. I had this bookmarked from then: http://www.tradetang.com/search/index.jsp?keyword=VIBRAM&... — note that 'VIBRAM' is a banned keyword, but the search is still returning plenty of results fromt he category.
They did support Python on App Engine before Java.
The longest tweet?
I know a number of people who would not call the death of Java a downside.
It's funny. Academia is much like most governments: Very inefficient, bloated, and wasteful of money.
"This will probably break a bunch of other random sites validation. Oh well."

Fun fact! Among said sites, PayPal. Or more specifically, paypalobjects.com which hosts their CSS.
I would start with number 4, and save the formal grammar study for (much) later.

IMHO, the far most important thing to do is to listen. I prefer podcasts, but anything (radio, films, TV, overheard conversations in bars) will do.

Understanding spoken language is also (again in my opinion) by far the most difficult part of learning a language. Especially in real life, and really noisy, situations, where you probably only hear half of the sounds people are making. The rest you will have to fill in yourself - which is sort of like solving crossword puzzles in real time.

This takes a lot of practice, and there's really no way around that.

Starting by studying all the rules of formal grammar is, I think, a bit like learning to play tennis by first studying the rule book a couple of years...
Facebook doesn't make it easy though. With 1000+ friends, I'd rather not sit down for 12 hours and try to categorize them.

Surely they can atleast guess for me (based on who I share friends with, when we became friends, whether we went to school or lived in the same city at the same time, etc.). If FB would give me a draft to review, then I'd try sorting through my friends.

If they don't, then I simply won't share many things that I might like to share, just because it has to be broadcast to everyone.
Exactly my thoughts. This post will generate a decent amount of visitors from HN. The vast majority of these visitors including myself will be first-timers to your site and unable to tell whether they are interested in subscribing to your newsletter in the first place.

If I have not seen your site, I will not subscribe to your newsletter. If I have read through n items on your website, chances are good I might be interested in your newsletter offer, though.
So do they make matching socks? I know this is about 'barefoot' but some of us know our bodies, and in my case if I actually worked out with these - which would be cool - I'd pretty much destroy them in a few days from sweating. Without socks to absorb the moister I'd be concerned about them getting pretty stinky after heavy use.

Now for a specialty shoe, rock-climbing/boulder comes to mind, yeah these would be incredible. In fact, I think I'll probably buy a pair for that the more I think about it. I don't tend to sweat as much climbing.
Facebook is Facebook's greatest threat. Consider Myspace: it was largely because they let their product deteriorate that users switched to Facebook.
Modelling dice combinations in Haskell, visualising distributions
Deolalikar P vs NP paper - Polymath1Wiki
Lack of sleep and stress also increase memory problems and raise the risk to fall into depression.

Just use some simple memory tests, now I think they could be very good indicators of performance. Under extreme stress I begun forgetting things, for eg. short term memory for numbers was almost completely gone.

Some non-direct measurements are just daily behaviour; do you lose your temper easier or do you just try get isolated.

Been there, done that. I would rather pay attention on just mental health and daily physical exercise than mental performance, things will normalize within a year anyway when the kid grows up and sleeps more steadily.
I disagree that you can learn a foreign language easily by hanging around people that speak that language, particularly if they are bilingual. It is a big effort to speak to someone who is not fluent, and people generally don't want to. Whether in the U.S. or abroad, you need to study enough to hold a simple conversation before you can effectively interact with people who you are not paying for lessons.

Most people go abroad for a limited amount of time. You should study tapes before you go, to use your practice time there effectively.

I think the Michel Thomas tapes/CDs are the best to start with, for the languages they are available in (mostly Romance languages). After you are done with these you can switch to Pimsleur for more study.

I found that the Michel Thomas tapes are enough background that you can have simple conversations, which of course is only the start of learning a language.
I don't give a shit what Google knows about me.

Its like the big poker websites. If they get caught cheating, then EVERYONE will jump ship and they will die.

Google is (I think) too smart to truly violate my privacy,
nevermind ads targeted to Prozac after that nasty breakup email.
The popup/overlay that tells me I'm a new user to this blog was keeping me from reading the content, so I just closed the tab.
1. Move to the country where your target language is spoken.

2. Find a live-in girlfriend or boyfriend who doesn't speak your language and is not motivated to learn it.

3. Carry a dictionary in your pocket, which you will have to reference constantly to speak with the aforementioned gf/bf.

4. Spend all of your time with people who don't speak your language.

5. Study a lot. Use a succinct grammar book like those published by Routeledge, use a Pimsleur course to get the language feel, and hammer away at vocabulary.

I lived in China, Ukraine and the Philippines and studied their respective languages without the benefit of a monolingual live-in girlfriend. I still learned these languages with varying levels of proficiency, but it was slow going. Then I moved to Brazil and followed the steps above. The difference is remarkable. I was completely conversational and literate in Portugese in about four months.
My theory: Ideas are easy, implementing is hard.

Being the sort of smart that can "solve" other people's problems only helps with the former. The latter is a totally different skillset, so when we actually have to do that part of the job, all of a sudden it seems much harder than it was just a second ago.
They do sell toe socks, and I've generally seen toe socks available from other vendors long before Vibram FiveFingers have existed.

You don't really need the socks though, and I've only worn them barefoot. The material is moisture wicking and your feet might get a little stinky but you can just throw the shoes in the wash fairly easily.
Er, more important than that (I think) are the failures of Friendster's management to manage growth and MySpace's sale to News Corp.

The fact that Facebook beat MySpace in the US is astonishing, IMO.
THE ONE WITH THE POWER TO VANQUISH FACEBOOK APPROACHES

BORN TO A STARTUP THAT HAS THRICE DEFIED THEM...

oh, never mind
I would like an option to completely hide downvoted comments and the subthreads below them, slashdot-like, not merely grey them out. As HN becomes more and more popular, the number of downvoted bullshit one-liner postings and accompanying one-liner chat-like "discussions" IMO seems to grow. I dont want to see people "chat". Based on that, I also would like an option to hide/remove postings below a given number of words, again, to remove the one-liner bullshit postings.
Threads (in Ruby): Enough Already
A lot of people doing what I just did last week. I closed my Facebook account because FB is just huge waste of time.
A House by the Park: chronology of the design and construction of a modern home
Protesters Gather At Google; 600 Employees Sign Petition, Organizers Claim
Energy Efficiency Initiatives: What Your Organization Needs to Know
Actually, you do need either hard data or some kind of logical argument to prove a point.

The author of this post makes an assertion (smart people can't solve their own problems), but never proves that assertion, nor does he give any reasoned argument as to why it may be true.

A better title for the post (though the author probably likes the current link-bait title) would be:

"Why other people's problems may be easier to solve than your own"
Yes, they make matching socks.

I've climbed in them before, and they're a bit different to climb in than specialized climbing shoes (I wear 5.10 spires normally). The rubber on the FiveFingers model I tried wasn't as tough as the 5.10 Stealth (which is likely different depending on the Fivefingers model), and climbing shoes also have much better ankle support. In particular, my Spires have a band of thick, tough rubber that covers the Achilles tendon, which is brilliant for heel-hooks. The Fivefingers, lacking that support, made moves like that more difficult.