skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first thing to bear in mind is that language learning for an adult is a completely different proposition from language learning as a child. Kids are wired for it, they have the time, and usually have external pressure to make progress. Learning methods for kids therefore tend to be slow, tedious and - because kids haven't fully developed their capacity for abstract thought - dependent on rote memorization.

My recommendation would be to start with a Pimsleur course. Don't worry about writing and vocabulary at first, just get a feel for the language. With Arabic, you have a different alphabet to learn - do that before you try learning written vocabulary, or you will be forever hamstrung by romanized transliteration messing with your pronunciation.
For vocabulary, spaced repetition is the way to go. There are lots of sites and systems for this. Go with the ones that give you a high level of control over what you are studying, and train only production (i.e. going from English to Arabic), recognition will take care of itself.
For grammar, here's a cute idea I had some success with in Japanese which has highly regular grammar (I don't know about Arabic): as you learn the grammar rules, write code to produce them. E.g. write a function to conjugate the past tense. When it's working, you have the basis of a game to test yourself. Use your powers of abstraction to bypass rote memorization.

Don't be down about the fact you don't manage to keep studying religiously. As long as you get some studying done, no matter how little, you are making progress. There is a lot of snake oil out there - if you find something isn't fun or isn't working for you, don't try and force yourself. Most of us learnt languages the wrong way in school, and learned a lot of bad study habits and worst of all, got the idea that it's supposed to be hard and take a long time. Not true - use your experience of learning programming as a template for what your experience of learning a real language should be like.
(assuming you are a programmer, apologies if not)
Reading this text with this stylesheet is so painful. My my, look how far we've come with CSS.

Even something as simply as some line-height and a "double-spacing" effect would be so welcome here.
After years of failing to reach a deal, Verizon is finally getting the iPhone 4G.

Verizon's network performance makes QoS an issue. Imagine facetime over the mobile network, etc. Chances are Apple is very concerned about the Facetime experience and wants non-neutral QoS to benefit it.

Further, Google is making tons of money on mobile ads, etc. All Apple needs to do is direct search traffic to Bing (or to Apple's own search engine) and that's a significant revenue boost.

Search is no longer a hard problem. Microsoft cloned Google search fairly quickly and is very likely to help Apple by offering a good deal on revenue sharing.

These factors combine to suggest that Google is VERY worried about an Apple/Verizon deal.

Imagine if tens of millions more iPads are sold, each with Verizon 4G and non-net-neutral search redirects.

Does anyone really think consumers would care? Bing and Google return almost identical results, and Apple is probably less than two years away from being able to engineer its own Google caliber search engine.

I think that what people forget about Google is that in spite of all the brilliant engineering (which is surely unrivaled) most of the actual revenue comes from simple search which is very much threatened by net non-neutrality.

Google was forced to backpedal on its previous stance out of the necessity to stop Apple from making a google-killing deal with Verizon.

All this is speculative and based on speculation about how successful Apple's devices will be on Verizon (and how little customers care which search engine handles their searches). But Billions of dollars are enough to make any company change course on a dime.
To get the obvious things out of the way:

You're allowed one of jQuery/Prototype/Typekit

Entire package except the above library must be under 10kb - html, js, images, css, etc.

You're allowed to hook up with existing API's, eg flickr, google maps, but you're not allowed to load project-specific resources from them (eg uploading your header.jpg to flickr and loading it from there, or ajax requesting and eval()ing 100Kb of code).

11 days to go, I'm busy writing my entry as we speak!
I think many pundits miss your point of punditry too.
Immersion is the best way. If you can go to a country and take language lessons there, you will learn much more quickly. Learning a language requires lots of correct repetition.

If Spanish is what you want to learn, then it's pretty easy. Go to Antigua, Guatemala and spend 12 weeks in one of the 150 language schools. It will cost between $150-$200/week for classes with your own private instructor.

I spent 10 weeks at this school:

http://www.travelpod.com/ad/Proyecto_Linguistico_Francisco_M...

Be careful, this is a backbacker and gringo town. You might find yourself partying late into the night and not studying too much. Here's my favorite bar:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4123596654
Dolph Lundgren has a masters in Chemical Engineering
It's not uncommon. There was an article a long time ago telling the story of a DDOS attack on a gambling website, and how a guy who was a philosophy major (iirc) figured out how to beat it, and then formed a company providing the same service. Forgot the url/title/etc, but it was good. Plenty more available with a search.
I'm of the written/read type. The advantage you have with these skills is that you have all the time you need to acquire them. This was okay to me while I didn't have to interact with native speakers.
When the time came, I found myself unable to interact (due to lack of conversational skills...)

The thing that helped me the most was chatting by msn with my coworkers (not cellphone). You have the structure of a conversation with read/write times. You also get the latest jargon and regionalisms in written.
Don't overlook this useful resource!!!
I believe it uses scratch space in /tmp to do it if you pipe it in. (The manpage says that it allows you to specify an alternative temporary directory than $TMPDIR, however)
Innovator's dilemma + architectural conservatism + internal turf-war politics. As Facebook grows and the third-party innovators in their ecosystem become larger and more formidable, antibodies to innovation will be developed (higher barrier for new ideas to be attracted to the platform from the outside, higher barriers for new ideas to emerge and take root from the inside).

This won't kill Facebook it will just make it less relevant as a way of attracting innovator mindshare and new capital. As with Microsoft, this may take a decade or more to play out, and like Microsoft, by most measures (other than stock price) they'll still be considered a fairly successful business as this happens. Just one no longer growing insanely or having new Hollywood movies made about it.

What takes the mindshare? I don't know. Perhaps the marriage of consumer electronics and a collection of narrowly focused and ubiquitous services seems more likely to come together and be integrated into people lives than does belief that a walled garden "portal" conquering the world will continue.

Or possibly: social congregation around digital media. The return of the shared experience around the TV.
He also talked to experts and gave real facts and figures! Why waste so much time doing that?!
His decorator explanation is also excellent.
I think you're absolutely right to be concerned about the reimplementation of any sort of crypto, for exactly the right reasons.

However, have you ever looked at the OpenSSL code? It's insane. I presume it's ended up that way because people have the same fear of introducing a vulnerability.

At some point, someone needs to fix it.
>The measure of success in Starting Strength is 100% based on linearly increasing strength, with zero consideration to appearance aka "muscle growth."

Strength increase and muscle growth go hand in hand.
Linux KVM Update from LinuxCon
Why? Facebook is entrenched. Myspace was no where near the size of Facebook when Facebook came in and snatched the rug out from under them. FB has evolved to be the social networking platform, just as Google has evolved to be the primary search engine of the internet. Google gets competitors all the time, but none that really pose any major threat to their core search business. I'd say that FB has reached that level of critical mass for their own business. When it comes to social relationships, they have won. When it comes to everything else around that (places, questions, yadda yadda) the game is still very much in play.

I wouldn't for a second assume that just because Facebook came out of no where that history is a given to repeat. When FB came out of nowhere there was no web property with anywhere near FB's critical mass and momentum.
What do you and the original poster hope to achieve by

...| sort -g | uniq | sort -g

The second sort is doing nothing. And sort can do uniq, saving time and I/O.

$ (seq 10; seq 5) | shuf | sort -gu | fmt
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
$
upvoting for honesty and resourcefulness.
I guess I can see where you're coming from vis-a-vis wanting to spell it out. But wouldn't it make more sense to emphasize that creating Dalvik is exactly what put Google in position to receive this suit? It feels like you are suggesting that there was some intent to avoid a patent suit when Google decided to create Dalvik rather than license the JVM but that it didn't work. When in reality, creating Dalvik is what brought about the suit in the first place. If Google wanted to safely avoid a suit, they would have just licensed the JVM like everyone else right?
There's not a chance in hell a human can develop 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks. That article in pure snake oil. Maximum sythenthesis of muscle is around 3-5 pounds/month.
I took Italian for two semesters, an hour a day five days a week, and was pretty good by the end of it. It took me three years of Hebrew two days a week and then a month in Haifa to get to the same level.

If you only care about conversation and not reading or writing, a foreign girlfriend can work well too, if she's sufficiently patient.
In other words, people conducting illegal activity.
The file has 2+ billion lines. A set or hash table won't work very if if there are, say 500 million unique strings.
the fork: http://www.illumos.org/
Right, but that's not money made up front.
No, I stand by my statement. I don't believe that Facebook will continually dominate the hearts and minds of the online world in the way it does now, in perpetuity. My reason given for failure was "complacency and failure to inovate" which I believe is the downfall of most great companies. The companies that I listed were examples of this phenomenon. You can really take this theory all the way back to the Dutch east India trading company if you want to. Evolve or die. In all probability, someday facebook will stop evolving.

Now I'm currently refering to facebook failing in the same way that "Microsoft and Yahoo" have failed. They still exist, are still (quite) profitable, but their relavency is fading.

As to apple. I've always wondered if the magic there will continue after Steve Jobs dies.
What do you suppose people might do with this sort of data if they weren't in a legitimate position to monetize it (e.g. through an ad network)?

This code will sit there probing your cache over and over, it seems to just check a huge list of domains in order of Alexa rank.
too many games like Farmville? (similar to music on myspace?)
Did you just make it up?

Or is that

dujmiu
It just dawned on me that this is going to be another thing like SCO.

Man years will be spent arguing over this by thousands of self-appointed Internet Lawyers for years, with the signal to noise ratio approaching zero.
No, I learned them a long time before I did linguistics, in the course of other non-linguistics pursuits. I got into linguistics later on because of the computational linguistics angle.
I became skeptical of him after listening to his attempts at Thai.His fluent goal was set at...

"I want to be able to correctly speak the 5 tones of Thai and be able to read a given text of several sentences aloud to a local (who is not necessarily familiar with English and European accents), so that they can understand it."

And he failed at that...
http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/327591-one-guys-effort-t...
Worlds first voice call from a free GSM stack
I would use map/reduce to solve this problem. You can run a single node psuedo-cluster in a few minutes by using Cloudera's package repositories (CDH3, https://wiki.cloudera.com/display/DOC/Hadoop+(CDH3)+Quick+St...). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce
That was disappointing. A nice survey of Oatmeal comics, but there was very little "how to" information in this presentation.
Hollywood Top Hottest & Sexy Actresses Pictures, Wallpapers & Images
Hollywood top hottest and sexy actresses who are very populer for her hot body and good looking
in whole world. All theses are actresses available for your computer and mobile. So free download from here and enjoy it friends.
Some have already started calling this SCOracle. So yes, be prepared for a long protracted legal battle. The upside might be the end to software patents. The downside is years of legal maneuvering not to mention the death of Java.
Careful with the patents...

Cellular technology is an IP minefield. However, as long as you stay small and do it for educational value and fun -- you're OK.

Also -- there's a big difference between making a call and sustaining the call across handovers, dealing with base stations from different manufacturers, etc...
"In January 2009,[11] Lundgren's Marbella home was reportedly broken into by three masked burglars who tied up and threatened Qviberg, but fled when they spotted a family photo and realized that the house was owned by Lundgren.[16]" Love it.
I learned 3(ish) languages with actually no real intention. Its nothing mind-blowing - just a story. These concepts should pretty much be well known.

First one - English: I pretty much grasped the concept of English language simply by watching (a lot - and for years) Cartoon Network as a kid (FYI: my parents don't speak languages other than Croatian). And I probably watched all those cartoons over and over as they were replayed. When I got to the point where English was thought in school, I pretty much knew everything they were gonna teach us - it was just brushing out the knowledge correctly, and most importantly - putting it to use. Later, since I was around computers (and even later - internet), it all came to me naturally word-by-word since I was using English actively.

German: During those active cartoon watching days, Cartoon Network got "locked", and I switched to a German program where I watched (german synced) anime. The "putting it to use" part did not happen with German language, so even tho I cant really speak properly today (never studied or used it), I do however find it that I can understand 85% of the time exactly what they are saying (i can even read properly many things). I have a really hard time doing the talking since I've always listened (the cartoons) and never actually talked - never put it to use.

Today, as a 20ish year old guy - I'm studying Japanese (anime history & Go board game - kinda just kicked in), and I find it that I have a really hard time expanding my vocabulary. I am missing all that easy long-time immersion in the language that previously did the trick. Now I gotta hard-study it. I guess I could watch a lot of Japanese movies & anime but I don't really have the time or will to do so today.
If you're going to process this file a lot, and it's straightforward text, then consider compressing it with lzop(1). lzop's fast as compressing, and very fast at decompressing, and the overhead of having to decompress on every read through may well be much less than the time saved by waiting for disk.

lzop -9v $file
lzop -dc $file.lzo | sort ...

You shouldn't use cat(1) if you don't need to. You're removing the ability of wc(1) to do faster things than read(2) from a pipe, e.g. mmap(2) the file, which is probably what cat is doing.

Similarly don't use uniq(1) if sort's -u option will suffice as you're forcing 35GB of data to be written down a pipe to uniq(1) when it's quite possible that `sort -u' would produce 100MB or so.
This is the best analysis I've seen of the suit.

I agree that this is not primarily about money, given the uncertainty of an outcome. More than anything else though, this is Oracle proving they aren't going to play softball with infringement Sun's IP.

The whole episode reminds me of Nixon and Kissinger's plan to make the Soviets think he was nuts:

"Frustrated, Nixon decided to try something new: threaten the Soviet Union with a massive nuclear strike and make its leaders think he was crazy enough to go through with it. His hope was that the Soviets would be so frightened of events spinning out of control that they would strong-arm Hanoi, telling the North Vietnamese to start making concessions at the negotiating table or risk losing Soviet military support."

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff_nuc...

Larry doesn't care about openness or community -- he holds them in contempt. What he cares about is winning. And this was his way to prove it.
the concept itself
And harder to parse unambiguously for everyone. Gee, thanks.
Quoth the article: ...although I'll surely be fair to both parties in my coverage...

Uh-huh. Just like groklaw always is, right? You keep telling yourself that.

The blindest man in the world is the one who thinks he can see.
Facebook itself
OOOOOOOOO IN YOUR FACE CLIFF EDWARDS! HOW DOES THIS ONLINE SMACKDOWN 9 YEARS LATER FEEL!!!!
Personally, it's Ruby on Rails and Hadoop for now. My application has a browser-based front so Ruby on Rails is great and as far as the server is concerned, I use the old fashioned C++.
Given how I use the data I use in my stealth app, I will never want to use mySQL. It's Hadoop for the moment. Now with this Java lawsuit, I will not even consider building a Java-based application. Given a choice, one should never pick uncertainty or maybe even a lawsuit.

Its a quote from article in SF chronicle mentioned in above article. It makes no sense! Hadoop itself is written in Java, unless Google is open sourcing their own implementation, I dont think Hadoop will be replaced.

plus Hadoop is not a database! its a framework for distributed computing, HBASE which is implemented on top Hadoop is the database, but it is nowhere as mature as pgSQL.

Misinformed journalism..
Merge sort works very well if you have multiple cores available. The general idea is to split the file, sort in parallel, and then merge.

Here's a blog post I wrote about it:

http://arnab.org/blog/quick-and-easy-multicore-sort
I won't go as far as to say that singing is ineffective but, putting it at another way, you can sing in a foreign language pretty well without being able to speak that language.
Well, at least we can take you less seriously.
a new generation of kids.
He started off well but he didn't take his analysis far enough. It's not just a matter of being ignorant of constraints so that a problem appears easier to an outside smart observer. Many smart people I know are just better at restructuring themselves so that some problems no longer appear as problems or impinge enough on their thoughts to distract them from other tasks, i.e. they are in essence fooling themselves into believing the problem doesn't exist or they put enough stopgaps into place so that the problem doesn't interfere with their day to day activities enough to require a total solution. Another reason I think is that most smart people are better able to tolerate stress and general mental drain so to totally invest themselves into solving some problem they require a higher threshold of mental anguish or whatever it is that drives people to solve problems.
Oh, then I think you'd find a lot to like about APL/J/K. It's not just that they contain genuinely new ideas worth learning; they're mindblowing in the way that Lisp and Forth are. I agree with silentbicycle that your best bet is probably the tutorials that ship with J (http://www.jsoftware.com/start.htm). The closest thing to a manifesto is Iverson's Turing award lecture Notation as a Tool of Thought (http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm). But the really hardcore, beyond mindblowing stuff is Arthur Whitney's work on K, Q, and kdb. (Edit: the Q book is available online at https://code.kx.com/trac/wiki/QforMortals2/contents, user and pwd "anonymous").
GNU sort has a --compress-program option that can help if you're really tight on scratch space, e.g. lzop(1). The -T option or TMPDIR environment variable lets you state a filesystem with more free space can be used instead.
I've taken one year of Arabic. The first two quarters were with a white girl from Alabama who studied at the AUC. She was great. The last quarter was from a Moroccan, he was not. Point being don't put too much weight into having a native speaker.

I think the Pimsleur audio lessons are nice for Spanish and French, not so much for Arabic. I think the best route (barring immersion study) is to take classes, or do self study with the Al-Kitaab textbook and then take more advanced classes (as my first teacher did).
Now Scale Up is Out and Scale Out is In
I don't understand why you posted a link to a page asking for feedback, which itself doesn't even link to site.
-S is quite useful. For bigger sorting tasks, I usually use -S50% to speed up the speed of sorting. (sort's default memory size must be about 1MB).

It may also help to use compression with the temporary files (something like "--compress-program lzop"), but I've never tried that.
Chinese Localization Gotchas
Michel Thomas is good. One issue is that he is originally from Germany, so the german edition is probably great. He teaches a number of different languages (such as French), where you won't be learning from a native. He did spend time growing up there, and you'll probably hear his story about how he fooled the Germans with his French. Even so, it's not the same as hearing a native Parisian.

The other feature/problem is that you're hearing the two other students learning with you. They will often make the similar mistakes that you will make, which is encouraging. However, I think that 1 out of 3 fluent speakers on a tape is less effective for learning the correct pronunciation.

An interesting method, nonetheless.
Software patents are a spur to innovation by being an antispur to greed-touching systems. The best thing that happened to Linux was the BSD fight. The best thing that happened to the web was the Microsoft antitrust fight. Just sayin'.
This has to be one of the best don't judge a book by it's cover biographies I've ever read. I love that he left MIT to persue acting. Follow your dream.

"I will break you...r covelant bonds"
You need to understand the difference between patents and copyrights.

Copyright infringement and trade secrets abuse (where exposure could have happened) can be avoided by clean-rooming original works. That's what it means to clean-room - re-implement without being directly affected by the original.

Patent infringement can not be avoided in this fashion.

Hence, Google had choices:

1. License JVM, and probably pay some fees not compatible with their "free and free" android plans.

2. Use JVM without licensing and get nailed for copyright infringement.

3. Clean-room their own VM and risk a patent fight. At the time Sun was known for not starting up fights (Shwartz let on this in a recent interview), so it looked like a good plan.

4. Go a completely different route. Still risk patent infringement.