skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would you join a startup if you don't get an emotional thrill from your job? I thought that was the point.
Key graf:

One thing I found surprising this week was learning that to many H.P.
observers Ms. Fiorina no longer seemed quite so bad. It was actually
her strategic vision that Mr. Hurd had executed, I heard again and again.
Her problem was that while she talked a good game, she lacked the skill
to get that big, hulking, aircraft carrier of a company moving in the
direction she pointed. Mr. Hurd was a brilliant operational executive,
but had the strategic sense of a gnat, and knew only how to cut costs.
iHackerNews.com: mobile HN, with voting, article reader, comments...
http://ihackernews.com is a mobile version of HN. It was previously hosted at toadjaw.com/hn. This is the 2nd version moved over to the new domain.

My next task is to build in commenting. I'd like to hear what you like and don't like. What would make this easier to use on phones.

This version adds voting, SmartPeople follow, better layout, ask page, new page, links to specific threads. Made long comments, links, and code blocks wrap. Links in Ask HN and profiles are real links.
Come on guys, give me a break. It was a welcome note which said, what can be found on the website.

I agree if you would have said, it is not required for the people who are visiting it for the first time as you don't know the quality of content provided. But definitely it dint say or meant "go away".
I agreed with you up until the "I found the material lacking in quality". Not all "smart people" are alike, and you may be one of the fortunate ones to not have the problems that he describes. Specifically, from what I've read of your previous posts, you seem like a practical person.

That said, the tweet thing on the left side was annoying enough that it warranted firing up the javascript debugger to make it go away.
get people to comment here with links to a "ask hn: review my startup" of the applicants startup - this way (hopefully) users will upvote the most useful/interesting/relevant review posts here, and everyone gets value (eg: feedback) on what they're working on.
> This is the key point. Users don't care.

That is no point at all. Users are not familiar enough with the problem space to be able to care (or not).
> any new (or existing but not participating) major competitor can be throttled to oblivion

No they can't.
Hah, self-duh. Total failure of technical cynicism on my part.
Because your educational system is scantily socialized.
I've been using Quizlet for a while while learning French. It certainly has come in handy for vocabulary, but as with a lot of sites based around user-generated content it's really hard to find the good content that I want.

For example, there are thousands of French flash card sets, but not all of them have English as the first language (and some of them are French and English but English is the second language). I've found that really the best way is to stab in the dark until you find a user who has created the best content.

Oh, and while you're here, it would be great to have some nice smartphone formatting or an app for doing revision on the move.

Looking forward to the audio features!
My German pronunciation was horrible until I sang for a year or two in an oratory choir in Stuttgart. Singing is the best way I know to get pronunciation right - my guess is it's engaging different parts of your brain in order to trick the left brain into not paying attention while you're learning the less verbal stuff.
Not everything can be reduced to an Ayn Rand novel.
I believe 2 (building up a vocabulary) is quite important as well; I know many people with good vocal English skills but very poor vocabulary and it can be hard to have a meaningful casual conversation with them because they simply don't understand the subtle differences in meaning between synonyms or even worse, don't even know them. Which makes it hard to express complex ideas or emotions.

And it gets even worse when they (non-native English speakers) speak to English people who instinctively try to use their usual English humour and then feel confused because their conversation partner doesn't get or misunderstand what they're trying to express.
Best C introduction?
Hi all,
What resources do you recommend for getting familiar with the C programming language? I own the Kernighan/Ritchie text and it's helpful, but it'd be nice to supplement it with something that's more "beginner" oriented.

I have experience programming in higher-level OO languages like Ruby/Java/C#, so I find I'm in a funny spot. I'm aware that things like pointers exist, but they've always been abstracted away in the languages I've used so far. It'd be nice to find a resource that introduced C for those programmers who are used to having their language/runtime handle pointers, memory, etc. for them.

All answers much appreciated!
That's actually the exact opposite of what the article said:

Our story of rising cost is devoid of bad people making bad decisions. This means that there are no simple fixes, like price controls, that would not also reduce the quality of the education we offer.
Clickable: http://ihackernews.com
Correct, but maybe not in the sense that you are implying.
Google's fiber carrying only Google packets isn't the Internet, it's a Google network. If your company puts in a dedicated line between two offices or data centers, should we declare it neutral too?
Hotel information posted to the FAQ: http://erlangcamp.com/page/357/faq
Why? A dryer gets far hotter than 35C. I just mean enough warm air moving through the shoe to dry it quickly. A decent heat gun should give you that control.
F-150 Jet Truck
Buzz was an opt-in.
You have to completely immerse yourself in the language, none of this learning from a CD bull.

I've seen first-hand how hard it can be for people to learn a language with a completely different alphabet. Try and learn the spoken language to at least a conversational level, until you attempt to learn the written form.

If I could give 3 tips, I would suggest:

1. If it's an option, move to a country that speaks the language as a first language, and if you can limit the amount of English contact you have
2. Focus on grammar as well as vocabulary
3. Over-expose yourself to the language… watch Arabic tv, listen to Arabic radio and music …etc.
It costs so much because those running it are insulated from competition and from being accountable - costs are just passed on to the students.
These are one of the more common things we get spam links for on HN.
Skype for discussions, Lang8.com for writing blogs and peer review etc etc etc

What is/was Lang8.com? It looks like there's nothing there now.
Are you saying that if some ISP's network is grinding to a halt under the weight of a DOS attack or a worm, they should be legally prohibited from doing anything about it? Unless we're using different terminology, Only the endpoints would be allowed to do anything about this under your proposal.
I'm surprised how few people realize this. I guess drug use is one of those topics that tend to shut off people's rational faculties and make them react with emotion and a holier-than-thou attitude
Maybe, but it's difficult to make that argument, partly because many of the best universities in the world are private. Introducing price controls on private universities sounds incredibly intrusive to me, but if the state were to simply subsidize education, why should the student who gets into Harvard receive 5 times as much taxpayer funds as one who goes into a state school? If we only subsidize a limited amount, how does that help the problem? My university costs ~$50k per year and people beg to pay it without gov't subsidies.
I don't think the author was saying Android specifically or uniquely enables this (that's just his experience with this process), but rather that the smartphone product does.
How TED became the new Harvard
Tips for Writing Good Documentation
I think the downvote here was unwarranted: pizza_ makes a good point. Over the past decade or so we've seen demand for higher education explode. The motivation is simple -- those with higher education earn a higher living wage than those without, on average. Honestly, though, what's the point? We may be graduating many more people, but why? Despite the increase we have nowhere near enough people doing professional work (e.g., plumbing, welding, etc.) and a continuing lack of graduates in the significantly underpopular STEM fields. In essence, why are so many people going to college and not getting a useful education?
Bollocks. People in the alternative JVM language space have been hankering for all sorts of VM changes/additions for years, including TCO, fixnums, method handles, continuations, etc etc etc. How many openJVM+ implementations have ever been implemented, nevermind used out in the world? None, AFAIK -- the progress, as it is, happens in the MLVM, which is under the umbrella of OpenJDK.

So as I said, the exceptions to this might be highly VM vendors, such as Azul, GAE, and various people that have worked on (maybe deployed, I don't know?) full-stack Java operating systems and/or Java-on-a-chip (for embedded applications I suppose). Anyone developing applications, libraries, et al. are entirely unaffected AFAICT.
Does Facebook really know more? Google knows everything I'm looking for and what I like through the tons of websites I visit (thanks to google analytics). And if you use gmail and google maps, it also knows your friends and where you go to.
I have C Primer Plus and it's a good companion to K&R. It's very thorough and verbose (~1000 pages). Anything in K&R that needs more explanation should be in it.
I'll put fifty dollars against that.
I think ads like this are a great way for Vibram to raise awareness of the problem with a sense of humor:

image: http://birthdayshoes.com/media/blogs/bdayshoes/2010_Photos/m...

description: http://birthdayshoes.com/merrell-barefoot-shoes-partner-with...

I love my VFFs. Vibram deserves to reap the financial rewards for creating a whole new product category, and doing such a great job with it.
iHackerNews is awesome. Thanks for making this, and especially the voting improvements !
I didn't realize that there were a lot of runners here hacking up the hills. I have Newtons at home but I didn't like them. They aren't made for the trails I run either. I might try Zoots soon.
If you want to answer this question, it's probably a mistake to look at Facebook itself. The biggest danger to successful technology companies is that the world will change in a way that makes them irrelevant. The new thing, whatever it is, will initially seem unimportant. By the time the incumbent realizes how important it is, it will be too late.

This sort of generic answer is not very exciting. It would be more exciting if you could say what the new thing would be. (To some people at least; to most it would seem a toy.) But that is quite hard to do.
The low setting for a heat gun is somewhere around 350 deg F. A hair dryer on the lowest setting might work though.

edit: according to Wikipedia, heat guns go from 200-1000 deg F. Still far too hot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_gun
Yep, that's one of the main purposes of the site I linked to.

Alibaba is by far the biggest player, their ecommerce empire is easily the third biggest after Amazon and eBay. Their main site is basically for people outside China to hook up with factory agents to buy stuff wholesale. They also have a japan-specific version, and a heavily used internal chinese B2B version. Their http://taobao.com is super dominant within China, occupying a space between Amazon and eBay stores but with even more marketshare, and with sellers ranging from a kid in a dorm room to multinational corporations. They also own Yahoo China, the chinese paypal-equivalent, the biggest chinese ad network, and a salesforce.com-style CRM.

Their equivalent site to TradeTang would be their recently launched http://aliexpress.com that has a full US localization and integrated cart/payment/shipping/etc. You'll find some weird shit on there, like this seller: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/801597/all-wholesale-product... — page through his catalog to find dried seahorses, reciprocating drilldoes, folding bikes, giant inflatable water walking balls, ghillie suits, dried human placentas, cow bezoars, portable titanium stripper poles…

By far the biggest hassle with using Alibaba is just communicating with the seller, they hate answering email and if you ask multiple questions they'll cherry-pick the most superficial one to respond to. The only way to get anything done is to be up in the middle of the night and get them on MSN messenger.
It is quite often not possible to relocate, even to an immigrant community.

It is also not necessary. You may be surprised to find that we in Europe also learn languages in a class (granted often taken for years, not semesters)[1]. This will certainly be sufficient for someone to get to a point where they can "hold their own". Interest in the language in form of self-study further enhances this, even if nothing compares to immersion.

As for studying without the luxury of immersion, vocabulary is the most important thing. You can make yourself understood with nouns and unconjugated verbs alone. Spice it up with a little basic grammar, and then start listening and reading. TV, movies, books, magazines, dictionary at hand.

[1] Europeans who speak English and German or Swedish do gain reading comprehension in a free bonus language: Dutch.
Looks like they have some kind of bug. There are comments there with 0 points that could never have had 0 points.
Hotkeys for Hacker News
I don't think I could be less surprised at your moronic actions.

Combine your "threat" with your love of ignorant anti-government rants and... yeah... i'd put the secret service on you too.
- We don't know where our ideas come from, but it's not from our laptops.

- Interruption kills creativity.

- To be creative, you have to create a kind of oasis in your life. Boundaries of space and boundaries of time.
I'm horrified that the anti-regulation for anti-regulation's sake view point is the top thread currently.
I just downloaded Inconsolata, installed it, and set it to be the default font in Notepad++. It looks terrible. Is there something in particular I should do to make it not look terrible? This is on a Win7 machine.
You do realize that the 11 minute time is just about what you would expect to read the file off a single drive?
That's what I do too and it works. However, my biggest complain is the sole durability. I had mine for a few months (nowhere near 3 years) and the sole wore out to the point where there was a hole on each shoe on the balls of the feet area and I had to replace them.

I hope this issue gets solved with the new 2010 running models (Bikila, Speed) which have 2 additional millimeters of sole.
Wait, these ominous predictions you cite are the reasons you are AGAINST net neutrality?

The variety of opinions and reasonings for the positions that people take in this debate are beyond me. Completely freakin beyond me.
You need a "consistent" stack in the whole of everything executing under "handle_request" if you want that "one single exception handler bracketing the entire request". You don't get that in Javascript; you need a language with more power. There are several viable options: Threading, continuations, some hacked up thing like Python's yield (which is neat, but limited). But something.

Javascript's a very nice, dynamic language in most ways but its functions are very, very weak. They'll get better in the next version of ECMAScript, though. (Node.js will probably benefit from it.)
How "fat tweets" work (for now)
Sure. It certainly helped sell iPods in the days before deals with WalMart, Best Buy, etc. The iPod was a major shift in how people listened to music. Being able to try it out in the store before buying it was probably a big reason it caught on so quickly. As someone else pointed out the author didn't have all the relevant information at the time. Apple Stores only selling computers would have probably been much less successful but Apple was fully aware they wanted to make a push towards consumer electronics with the iPod.
The story reminds me of the "Man in the Arena" speech by Teddy Roosevelt. Apple is in the arena creating its own (and our) future. Journalists are in the stands, yelling at the ump and drinking $6.00 beers.

EDIT: Apple, damn you and your spellcheck on the iPhone. :-)
I've been a Chinese-English interpreter and translator after learning Chinese as a second language. You can find many tips

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

that worked for me that should help you too. These days Internet radio helps learners. I didn't have that when I started out.
Orkut in Brazil used to be just as impossible to displace as FB, and it's in the process of being displaced. So it can be done. Come to think of it, the same happened to ICQ over MSN, and in fact the very very old out there might see Usenet over BB in the same light.

So, 1: it can happen.

But also, 2: it will not happen over a feature list. A friend once said to me that MSN displaced ICQ because all the dumb hot girls didn't grok ICQ. As awful as the idea is, i think there is something to it. Something like street-cred.

Which obviously comes from who and not what. I think the official term is "cluster effects". But then again, cluster effects only require that YOUR friends be there, not that everyone is. Which is to say: it's not about universality, but traction --- similar, not the same.

Finally, 3: should it? Why must FB fall? It is a walled garden, and it is stifling of competition, for sure. But the thing about walled gardens is that while obviously flawed from the collective perspective, from the individual perspective they are, well, gardens. As in pleasant.

I guess anything that "competes" with FB is as bad as, the "good side of the force" is not killing FB, but creating reasonable ways to mine it's data, like open protocols. Those will come, sooner or later, just like twitter and FB kinda interoperate, but they will not kill it, maybe at best make it less relevant.
I'm a native English speaker who's basically fluent in Mandarin. I've studied for 8 years and I live in China. It's my 4th foreign language.

From what I know, Arabic is about as far from English as Mandarin, so let me put in plainly:

If you want to become fluent, expect to put in about a decade of work.
This is not an easy language like French or Spanish which you'd be able to pick up by studying at home. You need to go live in an Arabic-speaking country.
Ideally, find a native girlfriend / boyfriend there.
When memorizing vocab, it's more efficient (for me, at least) to memorize for a day or two, then forget, then relearn a few more times than to try to keep a new word in my mind for a long time span. Forgetting and then relearning just seems to be the trick to shoring up long-term memory. I find I need to learn a new word an average of 4 or 5 times before it really sticks.
That is the opinion of the author of the article, but the opinion may be mistaken.
Based on years of experience with language learning and teaching, I'm tempted to say that European patterns don't generalize to North America. I never saw even one North American student gain anything resembling fluency by using these techniques. And I've seen hundreds flail. What I'm describing is how the people whom I've known to achieve fluency actually did it, where fluency is defined as being able to understand conversation between native speakers and hold one's own in it.

It's hard to exaggerate how far multilingualism is from the norm here. No doubt the reasons for this go far beyond individual effort or technique.
Twitter character limit broken
Well, not quite ...

Request-URI Too Large

The requested URL's length exceeds the capacity limit for
this server.

Maybe 50+ paragraphs of lorem ipsum was a bit too much.

EDIT: 100K chars didn't quite make it, but ~1K seems ok
Oracle Pricing [pdf]
I'm pretty sure you're wrong about this. The exact same idiom I used to buffer up requests and feed them whole to a single function that could catch all possible exceptions works just fine in Javascript. Is this an issue with JS exceptions that I'm unaware of? I may just be talking past you.
I think it says something about the power of culture when fully shod feet, high-heeled feet, flip-flopped feet, etc., are all acceptable but a gloved foot is somehow "weird looking".
Actually you can make several t.co links and merge it together to post it on a tweet. Actually the tweet that this thread linked to have 5 links itself. Simply merging many t.co links with text can make the longest tweet and it works! And 50+ paragraphs is too much for a single URI anyway.

EDIT: Seems now Twitter has fixed the bug and only shows the t.co link not the text or exact URL in the tweet! No more longest tweets! Only t.co links.
BSD's problem is that most progress gets entombed in proprietary forks. It was inevitable that a GPL'd kernel, being immune to that problem, would catch up and displace it.

How I read it, fwiw, is that kernel development involves a lot of drivers, and benefits heavily from a leaf-heavy committer structure. Which is what Linux is built on (even if it's perhaps less elegant at the top, with one or two people arbitrating everything instead of the FreeBSD teams, etc.). But I imagine BSD might've adapted / grown a more driver-amenable tree structure if there weren't legal pressures in their inception.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I don't know how important the GPL was to Linux's success. I think it's a hugely important piece of history -- and a very active one. But the resulting forces from legal outcomes in technology -- they're just so momentuous. Think of other industries. What other industries cycle through major corporations every decade? I mean, that's 4-5 major shifts since personal computing was even thought of. Is it just the rapid speed of technology driving things?

Your overall thesis relies on innovative work being immune from patent holder attacks.

That's a good point. But my point is that the day you sign up for a patent is the day you've tapped someone else to beat you. And you could go even further and say, the day that happens, you've spurred the next great technology.

The day you go anywhere near the law is the day you've crested around exponential growth. The law is too slow. Technology is too fast. But Google would have to detach themselves totally from any form of greed to realize that. I doubt they will, even though I can't think of a single technology firm (in the past 60 years) that has grown exponentially after engaging in a legal fight voluntarily.

That said, the points you make are interesting and perhaps more pertinent than the kind of crazy long-term theorizing that I am rather fond of.

ETA. One more point. BSD, by actively avoiding any type of legal engagement (i.e., allowing proprietary use via their licensing) -- which decision arguably was a direct result of their involvement in the 90s legal battles -- may prove in the long-run to be something that pushes its adoption further than Linux. BSD ironically forms the basis for iPhones and iPads and all that -- but is it still BSD? It's curious though because whatever it is -- it seems like technology swiftly moves around whatever legal engagements are in place. Whether or not this is a good thing, and whether we should protect free software for the long run, I don't know.
Admittedly the SCO reporting may have sounded one-sided, but in that case the facts were legitimately also rather one-sided.

But were the facts as one-sided as groklaw suggested? The judge's opinions were nowhere near as one-sided as groklaw's opinions; given a choice between believing that groklaw is biased and believing that a US district court judge is biased, I know where I stand.
Sort of like Core War: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_war

Or my favorite variant, FukYorBrane: http://esolangs.org/wiki/FukYorBrane