skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "Gifted" has nothing to do with intellect or aptitude, but kids who learn from a very early age that their role is to fill their parents needs -- to please/protect/take care of them, to hide what is wrong, to make excuses, to say "they mean well."

That really opened my eyes to a few things. For one, she talked about little children who were so hurt that they shut off all emotion - "little stone children" - and that was me, until the crisis that broke me open so badly that I was able to listen to the message in When Things Fall Apart.

As for the guilt… I had tremendous amounts of guilt. My mother used to beat me, and when I got big enough, I started to hit back. She became really mentally ill as I grew up, because she always chose to be a victim, and though she was still mean and abusive, she was also weak and helpless -- so naturally I hated myself for my lack of control as much as I hated her for abusing me. I moved out at 15 and change because I was quite sure I'd either kill her, or myself.

I also hurt (emotionally) other people when I was growing up because I was so torn and broken, and that tortured me for years.

The only thing that helped me was When Things Fall Apart.

In short, the lesson is this: Learn to practice compassion for every person. To be human is to be deeply flawed. Everyone is deeply flawed - and so everyone deserves a shot at redemption, or at least forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn't only help the person forgived -- that almost doesn't matter, but it helps the person doing the forgiving. Forgiveness also doesn't mean you let them hurt you more, but that you recognize that they are weak, scared, flawed, and hurting, no matter how horrible their exterior is... and that's really the default state of humanity.

If you realize that about other people… and you practice compassion and forgiveness for them… then you realize that you, too, are only human, deeply flawed, and worthy of redemption and forgiveness. Then you practice compassion and forgiveness for yourself.

Here's an excerpt from When Things Fall Apart, one that particularly struck a chord with me - one I will never forget:

It's as if you just looked at yourself in the mirror, and you saw a gorilla. The mirror's there; it's showing "you", and what you see looks bad. You try to angle the mirror so you will look a little better, but no matter what you do, you still look like a gorilla. That's being nailed by life, the place where you have no choice except to embrace what's happening or push it away.

That is the essence of lovingkindness meditation. And it really, honestly, works. I can admit now all the bad things I've done… it still hurts a little, but it's nothing like the overpowering guilt, shame and self-hatred I felt for myself before. I can talk about it in public, like here, and stand tall, even though I know people will judge me and hate me for it.

I'm sorry your living situation is so tenuous.

Please email me at amy @ slash7 com and I'll send you the MP3s of the Pema Chodron book. Nobody has to know you have them. And I'm sure Pema Chodron herself would approve of me sending them to you.
Personally, I would run:

split -d -C 1G FILE split.FILE # separate into 1G files on line boundaries
# then, on separate cores
sort -u split.FILE.00 -o sort.FILE.00
sort -u split.FILE.01 -o sort.FILE.01
...
sort -u split.FILE.N -o sort.FILE.N
# then, on one core
sort -m -u sort.FILE.*

You should be aware that you may not get what you expect from sort unless you set LC_ALL="C". You should also pass "-S" to sort to set the main memory size, probably to a value like "1G". Of course, at some point when you're doing a lot of distributed processing you'll just want to use Hadoop, as other posters have noted.
Personally moved in the country whose language I wanted to speak.

Otherwise there is Tim Ferriss method http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/01/20/learning-lan...
No, Google Didn’t Remove Oracle From Its Search Results
I suppose, but I guess we don't really know the actual problem he is trying to solve. If he wants to do anything else with the data down the road then he is back to square one and has to start manipulating text files all over again.
The best way is immersion (roommates, television, taking regular college classes in another languages, etc) but if that's not something you can do, the next best thing is to get gigs translating documents. Underbid professional interpreters and be upfront about the time it will take. If possible, start with technical documents such as electronics manuals - they require minimum grammar and vocabulary. It worked for me to get started on English... when you have a paid gig with a deadline, you are much more motivated.
I have to learn a language for my graduate program. I have been learning German using the Michel Thomas audio program. It isn't perfect, but I do feel like I have learned a lot with relative ease -- much more easily than I learned Spanish in middle and high school classes.

Advantages:

* Michel Thomas CDs are significantly cheaper than software-based programs

* audio format means you can study on your commute, rather than only in front of your computer, and you can easily use the CDs with a Free OS

* I like that the program is interactive, and there are two other students on the recording -- it feels like you're getting useful feedback that you wouldn't get practicing alone

Possible Disadvantages:

* the program's focus is on grammar, which is useful for me, but it does mean that you don't learn a lot of vocabulary; I am on the twelfth disc of 15, and the lessons have barely touched on the use of nouns. This might be a downside if you are trying to become conversant with native speakers.

* the audio format means you don't always get the spelling of new words (sometimes they are spelled aloud on the recording, but not always); I deal with this by looking new words up in a German dictionary as I hear them

I also bought a book (German Quickly, by April Wilson) designed as a crash course for students needing to pass a language exam. It looks like it will be helpful in filling in the gaps in the Michel Thomas program, but I honestly can't recommend it yet, since I have barely cracked it -- reading a grammar book is so much dryer and more boring than listening to audio lessons!
I moved to France, and painfully became more apt in the language out of necessity.
Isn't that what Google Me plans on doing? These well-defined real-world communities would consist of a friend group, a family group, and a work group. All types of shared information would be classified into one of these groups and be visible to only those within that specific group.

Also, what about niche social networks? Linkedin seems to have conquered the professional social network. Facebook seems strongest in the friend category. To me it seems awkward having family and friends in the same Facebook network. Perhaps a niche family social network could succeed...
Sex, Smartphones and Statistics
Often the author of an article does not choose the headline. That would be the editor.
Thanks for disagreeing and extending the dialogue.

Friendster and Myspace didn't have a chance to figure out a way of making money that earns billions a year. Facebook has. That is why - Facebook is now in a position to not wither away like Friendster and Myspace. But thats just my opinion.
If there are any English speaking Canadian students out there who would like to learn or boost your French, I highly recommend the Explore [1] program. It's 5-weeks of French immersion that you will never forget. Being forced to speak, listen, and live the language is the best way to learn.

[1] http://www.myexplore.ca/en/
that aims to let normal non-gearheads write applications for Android phones with no programming knowledge

This is a misunderstanding. You need programming knowledge to make programs. App Inventor takes out/simplifies the coding requirement. If you want to make Tetris with App Inventor, you still need to know (or learn along the way) how to program.
Personally for me, the best way to learn a new speaking language is by conversing in that language. When I was in college, I'm 'forced' to speak in Mandarin as most of my friends speak Mandarin. Within 3 months I can converse pretty well in Mandarin. I listen when my friends speak, catch the pronunciation and repeat that. The loop goes on until I can speak with confidence.
The challenge with punditry is that you don't (never?) know the complete picture, just parts of it. Good ones try and extrapolate from "what the hell are they doing" to "these guys are too smart to be doing this without some other less obvious purpose", but good ones are few and far between.
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is a public company, so… duh?

"So say goodbye to the NAACP award […] But I'll just take the "I Got A Lot Of Cheese" award"

— Kanye West, "Everything I Am"
Scanning the Forbes list (I could have missed some): http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_The-Wo...

Doris Fisher (Gap): http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_Doris-...

Oprah Winfrey: http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_Oprah-...

Meg Whitman (Ebay): http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_Margar...
It would take some work to find the historical numbers, but recent results are readily available.

In Q3 2010 apple reported $15.7 billion in revenue.

$4.4 billion of that was laptops and desktops.

Apple retail stores account for roughly 20% of macs sold. How this compares to other Apple product lines wasn't apparent in the small amount of time I spent searching.

Apple does approximately $880 million in revenue per quarter on mac sales at retail stores. That doesn't take into account any of the marketing value that the stores deliver.

http://twilightjunction.blogspot.com/2010/08/apple-retail-st...

http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2010-by-t...
Did it take 11 minutes to do a line count? This wasn't across a network, was it? If so, then do the work local to where the data resides. I have had success munging textual data by making sure it stays compressed (lzop & pigz are good).
Yes, but don't forget pronunciation.
With the disclaimer that I'm the author of the linked piece, I'm not sure why the comment is silly. Dalvik is indeed at the heart of Oracle's claims, but many casual followers of its development are operating under the assumption that Google's cleanroom reimplementation shields it from patent claims.

An interpretation that is obviously false, as Dalvik was intended to circumvent copyright and - perhaps - trade secrets, not patents. But it's something you hear with some frequency, so spelling it out in clear terms seemed worthwhile.

No?
Exactly. The two moments of the cycle are: killer feature and protocols.

When a feature goes mainstream, it neads to be openly standartized (Take GUI toolkits, take instant messenging). Then another feature/innovation moves the "battle" elsewhere.

Facebook somehow made MSN instantly much less relevant by combining jabber to their social networking site. Someone else will surely do the same, by combining social networking protocols (plug Dispora++?) to something else interesting by itself for its data. Maybe more interactive appliances and webstores? Imagine for example every appliance (phone, computer, camera…) having an adapted 'view' of your dashboard and relations, backed by a distributed datastore with proper backup and cryto.
Talking, talking, talking. I'm a book study type of guy, but that really didn't cut it for me for getting fluent. I had a tough time "just talking", so I had to get thrown into situations where I needed to use the language in order to really practice.
FWIW Arabic is apparently ridiculously hard to become fluent in. This is according to one of my friends that speaks English, Hebrew, and Spanish and whose dad speaks Arabic (and English, and Hebrew, and French).
Because they prefer spending money on sales, marketing, and lawsuits than maintaining / improving their products, even their most profitable ones.
diaspora?
I find it hard to believe they were thinking that at the time.
I read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" You can pick these 2 books on Amazon used for a couple cents plus 3.99 shipping.
Facebook Survey
Probably worth it east of the Mississippi, because of the hub-and-spoke model airports have.
I made this quick survey about Facebook to see what people's problems are with Facebook. Perhaps there's room for a startup to come in and do something that Facebook isn't doing well. If you could, take a few minutes to fill it out. All fields are optional, but the age and school questions are probably the most important.
Read "The E-Myth" by Michael Gerber. It points out how most businesses must be setup from the start to allow a systemizatiom/franchising that allows the founder to exit.
I just made a survey to collect things that people like and dislike about Facebook: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603643

I'll share the results if I find anything good.
It's from episode 6 in season 1 of the Office (BBC). That was Tim's advice to Dawn when she was thinking about changing careers. I love that quote.
The criticism was pretty valid as when vista came out many of the computers weren't really up to recommended requirements with laptops (probably the biggest vista seller) having celerons and 1gb of ram.

It could have gone so much better if the computers didn't seem so slow to respond.

But in addition to that there were indeed criticism that wasn't valid and any program not working or anything else wrong with the computer was blamed on vista, mac just seemed to grab a hold of these ideas and advertise in the right way (I'm a mac).
Barefoot shoes try to outrace the black market
When I was in Spain, I talked with a number of adult immigrants about how long it took to become fluent in Spanish. They all said three years and that the first year (of complete immersion) was the hardest. Because they struggled with daily tasks. Watching movies with subtitles helped.
And you also gain a useless use of cat award: http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html

The above can be written: awk -F(dataseperator) "{print $(number of seperation to print)}" FILE | sort -g | uniq | sort -g
I think the mac success story could be very well be attributed to students and Starbucks.

Students because of the back to school deals that got better with each iteration of a better intel chip and that was a comfortable bet for parents enough.

And Starbucks, well, that's just a metric I've found to be useful in measuring the mac's proliferation in the american zeitgeist - I mean, the macbook has been somewhat of even a jewelry to adorned in public these days it seems, not just at Starbucks.
The evolution of a button
They're not both. FB is not exclusive when everyone and their grandma can sign up.
Having taken a Masters in Linguistics, and learned 3 languages besides my native one, I'd say that 1, 3 + 4 are basically the key to learning any language. It really is "Use it or lose it" when it comes to learning a new language.
Rosetta Stone sucks, don't go anywhere near it. Pimsleur & Michel Thomas are nice, particularly if the length of one lesson is equal to one half of your daily commute.

AJATT's a great website for learning Japanese - you might be able to adapt it to Arabic: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/

At the core of AJATT are the following principles:

1. Total immersion

2. Use of an SRS (Anki is free, cross-platform, & open source) to learn vocabulary IN CONTEXT

3. Language exchange with a Skype buddy to work on pronunciation

I don't know if #3 would be adequate for mastering Arabic pronunciation though. Japanese pronunciation is relatively easy for native English speakers so it's not an issue, but you might have to find somebody IRL to help you out.
I speak 4 languages. Russian is my native; I then learned English, Spanish and Portuguese.

There's only so much you can learn from books and taking lessons. My skills really took off to fluency level when I moved to the particular country (US, Mexico, Brazil, respectively) for at least few months (I would say at least 6 months) and practiced with native speakers.
By moving to central america.
I didn't personally like Rosetta Stone for Japanese, but everyone else I've talked to really likes it. How about that in combination with a little bit of full immersion on the web? Instead of CNN, try reading Al Jazeera or something. You can see the language as it's used in practice today while catching up on things that interest you.
I've been using software from Fluenz, which works really well for me for Spanish. I'm also lucky to live with a native speaker, and we watch movies with the sound or subtitles swapped.
2001 writing is so quaint. Didn't they know they should have called this "Rotten Apple: 10 reasons why Steve's Stores Are Going To Fail" and had each reason on a separate page? Saps.
As the other commenter said, they aren't both. They've chosen to be more widespread. This means that their user base is still growing, but from what I've heard it's mainly older people. I'm starting to hear from other High School students that they aren't interested in Facebook anymore, which was surprising but I can see why now.
It will be a new product (killer app) that at first doesn't seem related per se, but that network will then able to use its scale to back into being the next facebook.
"I give the advice for what it's worth: if you wish to learn a foreign tongue properly, study it in bed with a native girl. I'd have got more out of the classics from an hour's wrestling with a Greek wench than I did in four years of Study at school."
Are you using an SRS (Spaced Repetition) flashcard program? It helps if you're starting and stopping because it will force you to review all the words, grammar, sentences etc. that you used to know.

You can fit it into any other learning you do. It really helps put things into your "long-term memory".

Software:
Mnemosyne - http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/
Anki - http://ichi2.net/anki/
Would you say you're a rare case, as far as learning three languages? Many that pursue linguistics seem offended when asked how many languages they speak.
For Arabic, check out Al-Kitaab (and its predecessor book) at Amazon.com (worth reading the reviews, imho). Part of a three year course. Still I think forms the basis for most university programs. May be available on the internets.

Some day it'd be great to have rich, interactive ways to do learning. Rosetta Stone is cool. My experience is that this is good for a colloquial/conversational emphasis. It's all about details at some point though -- so Alif Baa / Al-Kitaab might not be so bad.

Personally, I don't know Arabic -- but I had a friend who was staying with us who was studying it at a university -- so I was curious to look it up. There are a lot of different theories about the best way to learn language: immersion, multimedia, native speakers, etc. I think when you're learning a language for the first time though, there's so much ground to cover, that it doesn't matter which direction you take. The best direction is the one you can go furthest in (is the most sustainable because of interest, convenience, availability, etc.) which is most positive and least negative. I.e., we don't learn a language perfectly the first 100 times traversing through it. But gradually we get there.

But it's probably like with programming -- the most undervalued link is actually just putting yourself in front of it (as much as possible, in a sustainable manner). This can be something as simple as eating at a restaurant where they speak Arabic. Or it can be flashcards, etc. At any rate, I guess they still use it at Midd too (I'm from California -- UC Berkeley and Stanford, I think use Al-Kitaab too, or used to):

http://www.middlebury.edu/ls/arabic/curriculum/courses

But yeah, depending on interests / how engaged you'll be with the language in the future (reading a newspaper can be both a goal and a tool -- but only if you really need it / want it), it probably all depends.
You should go to a local bike shop and make sure your bike is fitted properly. It definitely should not hurt your knees at a higher cadence
Kareena kapoor wardrobe malfunction at Starweek 1st Anniversary
I recently had a conversation with my best friend's grandmother, who floated from Cuba to Puerto Rico at the age of 27 (and 30 years later moved to Miami). At the time, to obtain work in Puerto Rico, you were required to be proficient in English. Since she didn't know any English and had less than $5 to her name, her solution was to watch television only in English, read stuff that was only published in English, and eventually she said she refused to talk to anyone if they weren't using English. After a year of this, she knew enough to get a job. Similarly, I have another friend who is part Cuban whose dad learned English by watching tons of Sesame Street and English news programs.
I had a ton of the trouble learning rails and it actually took me a couple of attempts. The most affective thing for me was just starting a project and taking it slow trying to do everything the "rails way". Learning rails for me was a tremendously slow process but now it just makes sense and I can do things so much more quickly than I ever code with PHP. Rails is definitely easier to learn if you directly apply a guide to problem in my opinion, but maybe this is the case for all programming though.

More specifically, I have found railscasts and the official rails guides plus railsdoc to me infinitely useful. I usually look for a railscast to get the overview of the thing I want to use then look for a guide and then move into the rdoc for deeper understanding.
Once it was available for Windows users, it took off.
"The best way to learn a new language is in the horizontal position [i.e. with a lover]." — Recently retired NPR correspondent in Moscow
This is actually the most important thing. Have an awful vocabulary, a rudimentary grammar, but get the pronunciation right. You can always buff up on your words or rules, but getting rid of an atrocious accent is very hard to do. Utterly impossible if you're Styrian.

I wonder whether singing helps. The overall musical structure might make proper phonetics easier to memorize; on the other hand I've heard quite a lot of people who can sing without an accent, but sound very differently when actually speaking. Maybe it is too much rote memorization.
This hoax was probably started by this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599584#up_1599737
I actually had a beer with Max last week in Shenzhen. He is definitely real and quite interesting :)
Need to have a grasp of basic grammar - after that it's all conversation, if you can't talk to real people watch tons of TV/Movies with subtitles (both movie and subs in original language of course).
You're right "shot" may be a bit of an over statement, but I was definitely on my way to being there.

That said I was following a great program and training with coaches and athletes at the University of Washington. In hindsight I was probably pushing the weight farther than I should have been, but I think that is the natural tendency when you are trying to continually lift heavier and heavier weight.
10kb HTML5 web app contest, sponsored by MS, $3000 top prize