skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Daily immersion in the language (articles/books/wikipedia/podcasts/newscasts/films) in addition to a decent grammar work book and a very good dictionary.

Don't bother keeping a good record of vocabulary.

You're brain will remember what you need to know, just keep doing it everyday (read/listen/watch then speak/write).

It's like exercising; a bit every day is (usually) better than a lot once a week.

Grammar drills, looking up dictionary definitions (use cases) and general exposure over a sustained period of time is by far the most realistic way to learn a language as an adult.
probably they are going to use their core engine or something like that. or probably not. who knows...
Depending on how much functionality needs to be changed, and how the new developers compare in skill to the old ones, it could very well be easier and a better choice in every way.
The stock market indices are declining starting mid-2007 just as the unemployment index starts rising. But,the markets seem to be holding ok even though the unemployment queries have started increasing of late.
germane
Pros: You are an entrepreneur, cool.

Pros: "Cool idea, let us fund you"

Pros: You make money while you make money working

Cons: You could reach a point where you will have to decide which direction take. Oh, wait. Is this a cons?
" We are moving to a Google that knows more about you."

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking to financial analysts,

February 9, 2005, as quoted in the New York Times the next day

http://www.scroogle.org/

Scroogle is nice because it lets you search without logging a cookie, IP, ect. Google logs a lot about you every time you search. Even if you are not doing something "illegal" you should still be worried. Think of the bigger picture; opsec.
It's like exercising; a bit every day is (usually) better than a lot once a week.

+1.
"The Man from Earth"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/
Fasthosts Research—43% Companies Depend on External Web Developers
Fasthosts has conducted a survey and revealed very interesting facts according to which 43% companies totally depend on external web professionals to build and manage their websites.
<sarcasm>
Maybe those users still have 4:3 monitors and want to make it feel more like a widescreen without spending more money.

Make a toolbar and call it the "Toolbar Curator Pro 2011“ so the user can hide/disable other toolbars easily (Hey, most of them don't know that you can open "Internet Options", go to the "Programs" tab and click on "Manage add-ons".) Then, market it by saying how it's free and it even comes with Alta Vista search function. I bet most of those users don't have Alta Vista as a search provider in IE8 and it would sound so new and hip to them.
</sarcasm>

Seriously though, I think sz's suggestion is not bad.

I believe that toolbars are just one facet of the bigger problem. Toolbars clutter the UI, but there are also BHOs that are invisible and waste memory and processor, not to mention their inherent spy-like nature. They are even more evil than toolbars. I think Microsoft should drop the name "Browser Helper Object". To me, the name "BHO" is unnecessarily long and complicated, yet it doesn't convey a lot more meaning than "plug-in" or "add-on" (to the non-geeky user anyway). When the user tries to disable a toolbar in IE8, the browser also prompts whether to disable related BHOs. And I bet that most users are uncomfortable disabling BHOs because the name sounds foreign.
I've watched a bunch of Kickstarter videos the past few days for various projects, and I think their model is fantastic.

I think the idea of a Punk Math book is pretty interesting, but honestly, I think he should do a lecture series (I think his personality would really come across better in that medium). He seems like a sort of Bill Nye for mathematics.
Where is the like button for this reply?

Yeah, im a non-dev person but I am very much into selling, SEO, SEM, PR, design and creativity.

My suggestion, find a good hacker friend and build a strong relationship not around the startup but you both guys. Eventually something awesome will come up and you will be able to help maybe at financing or PR.

Suggestion 2. Dont buy "hacker's BS smoke". Get adviced.

Suggestion 3. Not exactly sure if you need to code tho. Just keep getting better at what you do and you will learn a lot just "on the go"

Suerte compañero. Saludos de Paraguay.
I didn't know this and it was very interesting. But, honestly, not all that surprising.

The beauty of this country is that it's a melting pot of cultures, religions, ideas, colors, and ethnic classes. It's what makes us both different and great.

So, of course, Islam, like every other culture introduced us to some beautiful new ideas. At the end of the day, we're a better more diverse nation because of said influence along with influences from every other group.

Which is why recent events pain me so much. Why can't we just all get along?
Fabulous: Python library for printing images and fancy text to the terminal
This reminds me of about 10 years ago when IBM spray painted "Peace Love Linux" on the sidewalks in SF. They didn't get away with their vandalism either.

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/04/19/ibm.guerill...
Me (4 back then) & my cousin (5) took off one day from the city where our moms were with us, to our home city (20km - not much) - we walked, ate some grass, kicked some signs, tooks two buses - one in right direction, one wrong - total from 9:00AM, uptill 4pm or later we were at the door of my grandmother & grandfather asking for the truck toy (that's why we started, we needed to play in the sand and we were missing an important vehicle).

That was in Bulgaria, around 1980s - Yes people were worried, but not much - it might've been the communist era that either did not produce much child related crime, or such were hiddenly took and dealt with (by still spreading that everything is okay).

Nowadays (especially was it 2004-2005) - there was whole media frenzy of kids disappearing - for about week or so. I've looked at the statistics - and nothing was different for that week compared to previous years - it's just that media picked it up.

It's exactly that - media - not news source - I'm talking about CNN, FOX, MSNBC and the crap that they do. I used to love CNN, I don't think I do anymore...

Anyway just my experience.

Oh, and later it was no problem for me taking of one part of the city (Burgas) and walking 2 or 3km through couple of streets, just to go to where my grandmother worked, and they go back, and stroll the streets.

Hell, our most favourite kid movies were about kids strolling all day streets either at their home cities, or at tourist resort places their parents were staying.

But nowadays.. It's just too much, too soft, and too tight at the same time.

As the article is saying: "Preaching independence while warning against it."
Hey! It just so happens my start-up is dedicated to creating fun language learning apps (free in app store), if you're learning Chinese or Spanish and have an iOS device, give it a whirl: http://321speak.com/

I pretty much comment on every hn language learning thread hoping for feedback...
A Happy Birthday Despite Grim News
I helped out with some punk math classes at Portland Freeskool circa 1997.

Math is pretty DIY since you don't need many resources.

'course by the folks from that era are scattered to the wind, as is normal for such scenes...
Yeah, I'm kinda tired of his whiney posts.

Adams needs to spring some of that Dilbert money and hire a good PA. Hey presto, pay the PA $150k, and life is simplified.
Sorry, another post.

But what happened to the "Little Red Riding Hood Story"?

How do we interpret in nowadays US standards? I guess it makes sense, huh! The big bad wolf, right!
In Japan there are lots of kids commuting to school at six or eight years old, often across town or in different cities. Everyone thinks I'm batshit insane when I tell them what Americans would think of it. I am mostly on board with this, although I did walk an eight year old to the station in downtown Nagoya because he was walking there at ten pm.
Mostly the choice of Portal smells to me of a university picking a famous recent title in an attempt to stay relevant

I don't see how you can get that from the article. It explains pretty clearly the specific topics they're going to emphasize, and how Portal ties in with the rest of the course.

What's nice about Portal is that it has such clear elements, that it gets people to see things they ordinarily wouldn't look for in a game. It's a great introduction to the idea that games can engage humanity.

For starters, it's got great set design, sounds, and music. The characters are studies in their respective types. The set shows a clear progression from clean "lab"-style environment to broken-down warehouse style (both well-executed) and then back again, with a gradual transformation between styles that mirrors the transition of the protagonist's relationship with her environment. The game also raises lots of different issues: the morality of experimenting on humans, the possible emotional nature of AIs, the effectiveness of various incentives (like curiosity, or guilt) and disincentives (like "death", more guilt, or pessimism).

I really would not have any trouble writing a humanities paper on this game, there's a lot going on. It's not the best video game ever, but I think it's good to start with a super-accessible game like Portal because so many people don't take games seriously.
I thought the guy made it clear that he didn't want to be _why anymore, or didn't want _why to be a "thing" anymore.

Do you really think _why would want you to celebrate Whyday? Let it go already.
This might seem clever, but this is completely backwards.
> I imagine it has the same psychological effect of waking up to a sunny vs rainy day.

And once again, I'm reminded that I'm one of the few people energized by gray, drizzly days.
You can opt out. Stop using Google's search engine. And if you're not comfortable with Microsoft or Yahoo, stop using search engines altogether. Use encyclopedias or libraries.

Ok, can we agree that the answer to Gruber's question is: "yes, obviously, someone needs to hold that information"?
He does a podcast with another guy. It's not very technical, but it is pretty entertaining. I think they're taking a break through the summer.
One that always seems to surprise non-programmers: there is no authoritative certification or regulation of programmers, the companies they work for, or the programs they produce. Being a software engineer requires no more credentials than playing the accordion on a street corner.
Anyway, Sense only lasted a few days on my phone, so I am not experienced. I just know that the stock AOSP lock screen, dialer, calendar, and browser all work better.

They just work better despite that you admit you don't have much experience with Sense?

I can understand not liking the spinning digits thing if you're a major calendar user, but I'm not so it doesn't really bother me. Seems like user preference on most of those things, not anything that makes one definitively better than the other. My phone is fast and responsive, so I don't really have any impetus to go around unlocking stuff when I don't need to (yet).
25 Comments, no one has yet pointed out the fact that one might not want to be Larry Ellison... ;)

That said, I would like to have Larry Ellison's money.
Last year, there was some sort of food-based reception right afterwards on campus. For the evening, a few YC companies threw after-parties at their offices in SF.
NASA astronauts like to know whether it is objectively true their rocket has a very high probability of not blowing up on the launchpad.
Learning Ruby with the Edgecase Ruby Koans
> Which is why recent events pain me so much. Why can't we just all get along?

I know you're asking rhetorically, but the answer is that there's moral philosophies that are incompatible with each other.

An example: Islamic culture typically believes that women's sexuality can be a destructive and corroding force for herself, her family, and society if not muted and regulated. Progressive multiculturalism believes that any muting or regulating of a person's sexuality is oppressive and wrong.

Thus progressive multiculturalism believes Islamic culture is oppressive and wrong, whereas Islamic culture believes progressive multiculturalism is destructive and corrosive for society and the individuals in society.

The reason we can't all get along is because cultures have violently opposed moral philosophies. Western progressivism wants to liberate and break what they perceive as Islamic oppression. Being that leaders in Muslim society generally have less access to fight back in an information war (since they have less access to media and universities), they fight back in other, more base and primitive ways.

Note that this isn't a moral judgment on either side, just an explanation of why we aren't all getting along.
Who said "book"?
Siren of Sahel Shines - Runway - Complete Shoot (v2) - Images | Mike White
u can have VMs nested to an arbitrary depth and it works very well. fyi, http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8970

This was my reply to that tweet..
@Ayjay, What would consist as "very strong" proof?

Some of my thoughts on that: Any 'proof' God gives must be physical so we can measure it. Anything we can measure is a 'normal' part of the universe, and so can't be God.

Rainbows = not God because it's just water vapor and light

The universe = not God because it's what happens when you get some kind of powerful explosion that throws out matter and energy for billions of years.

God literally appearing in the sky in physical form announcing that He is God and that He's responsible for this creation = not necessarily God because it could be alien technology, or propaganda warfare from US evangelicals, or <insert theory here that will let us spend millennia arguing before deciding anything has been proved>

--Trindaz on Fedang
This is pretty neat. I've been playing with "Leanback" as a means to show segmented videos one after another- I am addicted to SC2 screen cast sigh. Another method I have found, but do not like very much, is javascript. The YouTube player API gives back status codes when a video is Playing, Paused, Ended. After the Ended status is given I use js to place the new video in a div.
They write code for things they can't find an existing solution. Its not that they don't write any code, they just don't write very much, and what they do write is good enough to be found and used by others.
It's a disease!

http://www.scapegoatmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/too...
I'm listening to the first episode right now. So far I dig it.

edit: I just realized neither of us posted the link to the podcast. It's at: http://www.mathforprimates.com
Already watched that. It was pretty awesome. :)
This is a tremendous resource.

From a technical point of view, one of many interesting things there is the discussion of how the separately-made color frames were stitched into RGB images (he made separate R, G, and B exposures with a few seconds between them, so in many cases his models changed position, etc.): http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/process.html

(While merging similar images with the same color response is a fairly well-studied problem, merging different channels is an interesting challenge. Consider, for example, trying to algorithmically merge separate R, G, and B exposures of an Italian flag flapping in the breeze. It’s slightly, although not very much, like interpolating the Bayer array in a consumer camera.)

Another interesting bit of metadata here is the rights, from http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/237_prok.html :

There are no known restrictions on the use of these images. The issue of copyright was not addressed during the purchase of the collection from Prokudin-Gorskii's heirs in France in 1948. French law is unclear as to whether the heirs own any rights. However, they have expressed concern about "commercial use," and, as a courtesy to them, the Library is supplying interested researchers with the following contact information: [address given].

P.s.: the LOC’s photo and print collections in general are outstanding. They make extremely high-res scans of things like Matthew Brady’s Civil War portraits, political cartoons from the Russo-Japanese War, Hiroshige’s ukiyo-e prints, and Dorothea Lange’s dust bowl photos available for free over HTTP.
I wonder how many people this actually applies to. The majority of people I've spoken with seem to be able to make the connection when I say "sort a list of numbers."
That's really a bad example to choose. There's a huge portion of America that would completely disagree with the idea that "any muting or regulating of a person's sexuality is oppressive and wrong".

Western progressivism wants to liberate and break what they perceive as Islamic oppression.

This is a gross oversimplification of the conflict, to the point of being false and misleading. "West" vs "Islam" had very little to do with 'freedom' vs 'oppression' and if you ask people in islamic countries why they oppose the west, you'll find that many if not most of them consider the West to be the oppressors.
This is actually specifically NOT want I want:

"Modernizr does not add missing functionality to browsers; instead, it detects native availability of features and offers you a way to maintain a fine level of control over your site regardless of a browser’s capabilities."

I understand that not all HTML5 features can be reproduced in JS, but for the ones that can (such as "placeholder"), I don't want to have to think about reimplementing it for older browsers when it could be done automatically.
Will you in anyway use Amazon less? Assuming not, I don't really see why these companies would stop.

On top of that, most people using these toolbars don't have a problem with them even after being told about their drawbacks.
The median isn't the message (what to do if you're told you have cancer)
Fields Medal, Nevanlinna Prize, Gauss Prize, Chern Medal 2010
This year's Fields Medal, Nevanlinna Prize, Gauss Prize, Chern Medal awarded @ International Congress of Mathematicians
All Systems Are Go: An Interview with Rob Pike
Looks much better now =)
Only other suggestion I would give is to improve the UI on that landing page. I'll be interested to see how this turns out for you. Cheers.
That seems to be mostly missing the point of games as a medium, though--- everything you're discussing is what a novelization of Portal might have been about. In that case, why even pick a game at all? To me at least, the interesting aspects of games as a new form of media are the things that you couldn't imagine one-to-one translated into a novel, like experimentation, interactivity, exploration, rule systems, etc.

I do agree that it's easy to write humanities papers about games from a purely narrative direction, but it's a hallmark of the not-games-focused humanities academic usually--- the literary theorist or film scholar who wrote a paper about a game as if it were a novel or a film. That kind of work is thankfully getting much less common than it was 10-15 years ago.
The entire mathematics community eagerly awaits the announcement, at the opening of the ICM 2010, of the Fields Medals (started in 1936) and the Nevanlinna Prize (started in 1982). At the 2006 Congress another award, the Gauss Prize, was added. A new award, the Chern Prize, will be given for the first time in Hyderabad. The IMU has been awarding the Fields Medals- generally considered the “Nobel Prize for mathematics” – since 1936, the Nevanlinna Prize in the field of theoretical computer science since 1982, and the Gauss Prize for applied mathematical work since 2006. The Fields Medals and the Nevanlinna Prize are given to young researchers below 40 years of age, in recognition of specific path breaking results. The Gauss Prize recognizes mathematical results that have opened new areas of practical applications.
What, money and regulation?

Does this mean you're against corporations being able to spend money on political campaigns? ;)
I thought Tarsnap would be handing out S&W Model 500s as corporate swag for internship applicants.

At least seems like that kind of place from the outside: jail yard metal table, BSD boxen, a Colombian silver Peso, K&R and Plauger, bottle o' jack, dot-matrix printouts of kernel panics, cute unmentionables left by last night's mistaken young thang .. "This is Tarsnap, Asok. You can break hearts but you can't break servers."
Since I was 9, I looked for my 6 years old brother after school and brought him back home by bus every day. Granted, occasionally it would take me 20 minutes to find him and I'd get frustrated at why he was playing in the sand pit when we were supposed to go home, but it's not like we ever got kidnapped by strangers or anything....

That was only 11 years ago in Australia.
The spike in July 2010 was the month long debate between republicans and democrats (and in the press) about The H.R.4213 - Unemployment Compensation Extension Act.
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h4213/show

Passed in Senate: July 20, 2010.
Passed in Congress: July 22, 2010.
Signed by President Obama: July 23, 2010.

http://www.worldcorrespondents.com/unemployment-extension-ju...
> That's really a bad example to choose. There's a huge portion of America that would completely disagree with the idea that "any muting or regulating of a person's sexuality is oppressive and wrong".

Right, that's why I said "Western progressives," as opposed to other people who live in the Western world who aren't progressive.

> This is a gross oversimplification of the conflict

It wasn't a description of the entire conflict, just one aspect of why people don't get along.

> if you ask people in islamic countries why they oppose the west, you'll find that many if not most of them consider the West to be the oppressors.

The vast majority of Muslims who oppose the West do believe that Western society is destructive/corrosive to traditional Muslim values. There's other things too - in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the borders of the new Middle Eastern states were drawn without paying attention to traditional loyalties. That's why modern day Iraq is mixed Kurd, Sunni, and Shia. More goes into than what I wrote down - it's just one illustrative aspect of why there's conflict between two groups - Western progressives and traditional Muslims - that won't get along. That's not the whole story, but it is a true story.
I wonder if those solid colors were just the base of the paint, and some shading effect was applied on top to make the statues look more realistic. I mean, I have a hard time imagining that artists like the Ancient Greeks, who got the human shape so right, would also get the color so wrong.

(By the way, the little color left on the Elgin Marbles look like a badly weathered garden gnome. Oh well.)
what about people who want to money for the the joy of the experience itself?

isn't anyone here addicted to making money - it feels amazing.

anyways - it's glad to see that one girl and this guy writing all these posts and weeding out the non-serious people.

lionhearted's comment is spot on - Not very many people go all out to be a billionaire. If posts like these keep proliferating the numbers might go down even more.
Wow, nice app! I tried the Chinese version on my 3g, I like how it has male and female voices, and the images and design was top notch. I tend to like the immersion style, it's how children learn basically. I can see this really being successful for travelers and kids, especially as software like rosetta stone is so expensive, and this seems at least on par if not better (from what I've seen so far). Bon chance! Are you planning other languages?
Same question was posted a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603562
Just six days ago, this topic got a lot of discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603562

edit: ramchip beat me to it.