skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When someone learns to read Arabic they have to work out which letters are which, and which ones go with which sounds.

How's this different from any other language?

> telling the characters apart involves looking at very small details such as the placement of dots.

Really? Try reading Chinese characters.

The real challenge with learning Arabic is that no one speaks the classical/standard Arabic as a native tongue, each region has its own dialect, and so to be really effective at using Arabic to communicate with real life Arabs, you have to know a lot about 2 or 3 major dialects. Even in online writing, people mix standard Arabic with their own dialect or major dialects. If you understand Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi dialects, then you can communicate effectively with 90% of Arabs.

Basically you have to learn several (related) languages before you can communicate like a native Arab in the middle east. It's like learning Latin, Italian, Spanish and French at the same time.

Reading is trivial in comparison.
PayPal requires no email address verification.

I have the email address pwelch@gmail.com.

Every P. Welch in the world seems to be under the mistaken impression they have the email address pwelch@gmail.com.

PayPal has no mechanism for the legitimate owner of a given email address to stop people from registering PayPal accounts on that address, or to fix it afterwards.

Aside from that annoyance, I haven't had any problems with them.
Computer science curriculums vary wildly. And just because you were taught assembly and how a cpu works, doesn't mean you learned how to do it on unix or even x86. (My college taught with the spim mips emulator. I also taught myself dos assembly when I was younger, but this is the first time I've seen unix assembly.)
For more on urban exploration check out http://www.infiltration.org/ and the handy dandy companion book "Access All Areas" ( http://www.infiltration.org/aaa.html )
I had about the same LoC for my ruby solution. Time was way longer because I had to read at least three wikipedia articles on various aspects of modulo arithmetic after I was so ashamed of my brute force solutions.

Wonder if anyone tried frequency analysis since that should work well on an affine transform...
The post was more about rereading again the books that helped in you in one way or another.
Maybe not, but that isn't what podcasts where meant for either - they have different strengths, such as the ability to create a theater of the mind.

And if you don't think that matters, try to hear some of Dan Carlins Hardcore History.
Did you find assembly interesting the first time you encountered it? Some people here are still there. A CS degree is not yet a prerequisite for HN user registration!
* Just look at, e.g., the way Sun nearly killed IBM in the late 80's and early 90's. Sun never made as much as IBM did, but the people who founded Sun made more than they otherwise would have.*

I don't disagree with your general arguments, but this bit is factually wrong. IBM's problems in the late 80's and early 90's were to do with the rise of the PC industry, not the Unix workstation. Yes, IBM had a dysfunctional Unix strategy during that period, and yes it lost sales (some to Sun) but it wasn't Sun that was killing it, it was the rise of client server computing. If Sun hadn't been there then Apollo (remember them?) or HP or maybe even SGI
> There hasn’t been a packaged album side worth listening to the whole thing in order since Abbey Road.

I think this guy is just generally wrong. Most of what he is saying is just plain wrong.
It's definitely in Apple apps, and I imagine that 3rd party apps will get it for "free" using the standard media player classes. The issue is if apps could send arbitrary video data, because then your $99 Apple TV turns into a game console if you have an iPod touch.
Since Coral considers itself a distributed caching proxy rather than a crawler, it doesn't respect robots.txt. It does respect the relevant cache-control headers, like "no-cache", but this site doesn't appear to set them.

However, the main problem here is that Coral doesn't cache any files >50mb, so almost none of these are cached. The few <50mb do seem to be, though, e.g.: http://thenine.ca.nyud.net/essential/1998/1998.01.01%20-%20E...
You must be thinking of Graceland Side 1 :)
> Really? Try reading Chinese characters.

I studied Japanese, and I found that once you learn a Chinese character, you recognize it instantly like a picture. They have unique shapes, and not many are similar enough that you have to peer at it to discern the difference.

Identifying Chinese characters, to me, is like distinguishing the letter "A" from "B"

http://mural.uv.es/ciucama/kanji.gif <= it may well look like gibberish to you, but I'm sure you can notice that they are largely unique, and even if you only look at the 'shape', you can tell the difference.

From what I've seen of Arabic, identifying characters is often like distinguishing "0" from "O" and "l" from "1", or "W" from "VV"

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/arabic/alphabet/images/Arabi... <= disclaimer: this IS gibberish to me, but even so I can notice than many many letters are very similar to others.
"Israeli scientists believe they have identified why Arabic is particularly hard to learn to read."

Nothing wrong with that, but someone would take it politically :)
That is an incredible nice way to pad conservatives on the head for being backwards. Globalization is a good thing, so why would you want to hedge against it?
Unfortunately, Coral Cache doesn't cache anything >50mb, so for almost all of these it'll just redirect you to the original URL. (There are a handful of <50mb mixes, which it does serve up without redirecting.)
Oh my god I want this so bad but the server load is ridiculous. If someone could download it and put it on a torrent I'd love you so much.
I am interested, how can I contact you? I can give you credentials and details via email if you like. zain.allarakhia at gmail
I don't want a touch screen on a point-and-shoot digital camera, for example.

Touch screens may turn into a technology that's omnipresent although "educated" consumers try to avoid it (like glossy laptop screens or high-megapixel cameras with tiny sensors)
Yet another reason to love iphone tether via jailbreak, football.
I can never understand why people give advice like that. If they are right, nobody will remember or credit them, and if they are wrong they look terrible.

I certainly avoid making such statements, as I cannot bear the thought of my advice destroying the wealth of the people close enough to me to listen to me.
I don't think the example they came up with is really useful - how many engineers are really in the market for 50k/year jobs? It seems very low, so it is no wonder that he can't find qualified applicants.

As for the structural change, yep that is partly what is happening, but there is also a cyclical downturn.
Israelis learn Arabic like Americans learn Spanish, so there's a good non-political explanation for it. :)
you're missing the point I think, and so did the Author of this post. Its not about the bells and whistles, or features that came built in. Its about the apps that YOU may want to install on it, and not what the manufacturer gets to say you'll get. Who cares if the Sony Bravia has Netflix, YouTube, Pandora and even Hulu bundled in if the Apple TV or Google TV will allow you to install the apps you want. Just like what happened with phones in the past couple of years, its no longer about features, its about how many developers you can bring to your platform to build all the creative applications. If Balmer got one thing right, it would have been this: Developers, Developers, Developers.
They did say "2007" in the title...
One of my favorite google easter eggs is support for smoots (the unit mentioned in the article, equivalent to the length of a Mr. Oliver Smoot when lying down).

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=convert+1+smoot+to+feet
Yeah I can name three from this year already: Janelle Monáe "The ArchAndroid", Arcade Fire "The Suburbs", and The Roots "How I Got Over"

Not better than Abbey Road, but definitely worth listening too in whole.
Hey, can't have it both ways! If productivity goes up, and low-productivity jobs get outsourced to developing countries - which, by the way, is probably one of the reasons productivity goes up in the rich world - of course we will need less working hours to be done. But what should be regarded as a success - and to some extent as neo-colonialism against the world's poor - is seen as a problem. I think this speaks worlds about how backwards and still stuck in a work-and-produce mindset we are...
I think that is coming. It doesn't make sense if the AppleTV isn't an iOS device nor if it can't get apps from the app store. You know, it'll be a Jobs moment next year when he says "oh btw, app store for ATV is now available. I don't think they missed any trick, they're playing it by the book with any new device, first version doesn't do everything you hope for, but just enough to get you to buy.

Ex. iPad, no camera? really? next generation for sure then!
We go with marvel comic book characters. We started with the normal ones, but somehow ended up with an important service named uatu. I like this naming convention because there are a lot of names to draw from.
How embarassing for this guy. I guess the lesson is that armchair UI experts shouldn't underestimate Apple's product design skills. All his critiques are obvious issues that Apple was probably thinking about from day 1 of product design in 2005 or whenever. Buttons too small for touchscreen; make them bigger. No tactile feedback; make the UI super-responsive.

On the other hand you can cut the guy some slack since he made these predictions before release. It's actually quite a bit more embarassing when you hear an interview from Ballmer in 2010 floundering around trying to stick to his talking points about how an iPad is still a PC, and PCs will come in many form factors, etc.
I added it after his complaint.
You do have to give him credit for leaving the article up. I think I'd be busy purging it from every internet cache I could find if I'd written something this confident and wrong.
The problem with his article besides being obviously wrong in retrospect is his focus on usability as a defining factor for the success of the product.

Usability and simplicity isn't why a product succeeds, it needs to be understood in context with engineering, marketing, luck, timing and so many other things.

The iPhone succeeded because at the time it was such a fresh breath of air.
Sweet.

We're covering Hello World in my software dev. class on wednesday.
This is an epic one.
Http://www.dev-point.com/vb/t115176.html
http://www.dev-point.com/vb/t115176.html
Franz Kline’s Rather Large Liquor Bill (ARTINFO)
Read Seymour Paperts book Mindstorms

http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful...

The main point is to have children do something they understand from the real world and have a physical relationship with. That way it won't feel as abstract.
the market is already there, every iPad, iPhone, and iTouch owner will get one. God its cheaper than an iPod nano.
I think the stroke of genius in the iPhone (and I fully admit this is obvious 3 years later), is that people want to do a wide variety of simple things on their phone.

If you are sending tons of emails from your phone, then yeah, the physical keyboard blows the onscreen one out of the water. But when you are running a dozen apps with completely different functionality, but all of them are fairly simplistic, a touch-screen (especially a good one) does a better job on average, as compared to a keyboard where you quickly descend into the buttons being meaningless ala Nokia endless 2-button menu navigation.

Now obviously you can have both (I bought a G1 back in '08 and I like having both), but it took balls for Apple to make that decision and say that a touchscreen only would be sufficient. However the impact of that decision on the elegance of the form factor is undeniable, and something that I imagine had a large if unmeasurable impact on the success of the iPhone. It's the type of thing that you need a product visionary at the top to achieve, otherwise it's DOA at the first board meeting.
Welcome to the not evenly distributed future.
The version of the Mona Lisa in particular is doing interesting things to my brain. Usually the tendency to perceive faces is so strong that you see them with the slightest encouragement. But when I look at this there is some other hard-wired tendency-- perhaps a tendency to follow lines-- that's fighting with the tendency to perceive faces.
"View source" renders it with wraparound.
Wow - I've been using the Underground every day for the last five years. I've seen exactly two iPads (and perhaps a hundred Sony/Amazon eBook readers). Which route are you riding on?
This failure of this article to predict iPhone's success echos well with another article posted on HN yesterday ("simplicity is overrated") that UX simplicity does not equate simple functionality or single-purpose device. The killer product is often the ones with multiple powerful functions but also intuitive UX design that won't take long for the user to figure out how to operate it. Simple is about intuition.
With regard to tactile feedback, I think it's rather a learned experience. People who have never used phone-sized physical keyboards (like myself) won't care much about "losing" that experience.
Funny it ended up with the same title I gave it the first time I typed it. I like thinking of articles like this as a failed present that never happened, because I find that to be a deeper way of considering wrong predictions. That's the reason for the title as I wrote it, but straightforward works too. ;)

I do give the guy credit for making a call though, just not sure I'd buy his book.
I think this gives further credit to apple achievements and makes even clearer that designing good products goes far beyond any rule list anyone could make.
o and 0?

No, worst case it's like trying to tell appart l, i, j

Anyway, being a native Arabic, I don't see any inherent difficulty in the writing system.

I only encounter a problem if the font is bad or too small, or a combination of both. 10px in most standard Arabic fonts doesn't work very well.

I don't know if Kanji is readable at 10px, but I personally can't read it at that size. Any native Japanese/Chinese to shed some light?
Limiting Concurrency in Node.js
Actually that is exactly where Balmer was wrong.

It doesn't work like that and you certainly won't be making consumber friendly products only with developers.

What he should have said was developers, designers, vision. It's the symbiosis of developers and designers that makes a platform interesting.
No doubt! I took a web development job for less than that 10 years ago in higher ed when I was 22 and had no professional experience... of course they also gave me free healthcare, free tuition for my whole family, generous vacation, sick days and holidays, and a fantastic retirement system that when I turn 65 is slated to pay me $650 a month until the day I die, even though I only worked there 5 years.

Now I'm not sure what "qualified" means in this case, but it doesn't sound like they are hiring people fresh out of school, which they should be at that rate.
The best designers have an accurate mental model of their users. In their mind, they can put their product in the hand of the 30 year old floor manager at the Borders at the mall and predict what will happen with shocking accuracy.

They can predict it because they've watched the floor manager interact with past products in the usability lab dozens of times.

And because they have watched that person dozens of times, they know that even thought they can predict extremely well how that person will react, they know they have to run tests anyway, because the best designers know how often they've been surprised in the past.

The best designers have a great mental model of their users, and know when to use it.

The worst designers just use themselves as a model of their users, and their designs are accordingly screwy.
"Religion was born when the first con man met the first fool." --Mark Twain

Wish this is wrong for USA
This is somewhat old: The sysenter interface on x86 Linux is no longer experimental, and it's faster than the old int 0x80 interface as well. [1] However, going through either is a bad idea. Use glibc or similar instead:

[1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2002/12/9/13

1. Bad input values will at least potentially set errno, which allows more enlightening debugging sessions.

2. You don't have to reinvent printf and whatever other useful functions that are provided by libc and not the kernel.

3. You shouldn't be writing that much of your code in assembly anyway. Use C or something for most of the bulk and reserve assembly for the bottlenecks.

Anyway, here's more details on how system calls on x86 Linux work now:

http://articles.manugarg.com/systemcallinlinux2_6.html
Shortly before the test, you might try handwriting a page or so as a warm-up, in order to get the muscles loosened up.
You've got to admit that Apple has an uncanny ability to find such things though. It's no random event.
> Since money is predominantly allocated by insurance companies, not individuals, I would say that Pharma knows what insurance companies will spend money on.

Insurance companies are somewhat driven by what their customers want. If 20% want something, it tends to happen. Govt bureaucrats, not so much, and Congress rarely passes laws for 20% of the population.
Americans: For the sake of America
British : For the sake of Queen
Muslims : For the sake of Quran
Hindus : For the sake of Caste
I thought that until I began listening podcast while commuting. Don't listen to podcast at you desk, listen in the bus, while driving, running, etc... You don't need a iPod, I got a $30 mp3 player and it's great.
This reminds me of when I was 10 years old and got a copy of Think Pascal for the Macintosh. Previously I had done the usual AppleSoft BASIC, Logo, and even some Assembler and HyperTalk. But GUI programming stopped me short—partly due to the unattainable cost of InsideMacintosh—but mostly because the basic control flow was an inscrutable mystery to me, with nary a mention in any documentation I could find.
> If productivity goes up, and low-productivity jobs get outsourced to developing countries - which, by the way, is probably one of the reasons productivity goes up in the rich world - of course we will need less working hours to be done.

You're assuming that consumption doesn't go up.

If we're paying unemployment benefits, those folks should either be looking full-time or doing public service. Yes, that includes things that might otherwise be done by public employees.
I've got XMBC on an Acer nettop which as well as being an actual full computer, cost the same as an Apple TV with the same size hard drive. It also has a powerful video card that means you don't need to add a video accelerator card, just add a remote (either a cheap USB-IR model, or use your bluetooth playstation remote, or your Android or iPhone, iPad or netbook).

Unlike Apple, who expect you to have their stuff out on show, it came with a mount that attaches to the back of your TV which hides it's cheap'n'cheerful plastic exterior while minimizing cables.

I believe xmbc also does DNLA too if you wanted to plug it into one TV via HDMI and stream to another.
Here is an explanation of a simple algorithm that can generate those images, plus a Mathematica program that generates them: http://hernan.moraldo.com.ar/mazegeneration.htm
Or: Windows key, right arrow key, enter.
This guy has everything backwards. I sort of hate writing tests, but still write them first most of the time. In the end, they catch so many bugs and save so much time, I would never go back to hacking code and point and click testing. The only way manual testing works is if you have an over-financed company with a huge QA department.
Are you intending to have many of these transfers happening in parallel, or are you sending a single file and hoping to saturate your link? Do you have full control of both ends, or only the server? Are you streaming or is the whole file always transferred? Do you need encryption?

For simultaneous large files with no special needs, my instinct would be to just choose any lightweight HTTP server that supports sendfile(). Basically, pass it off to the kernel, and let it handle it. But maybe there are more subtle keys to good large file performance: http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/tcptune/

For cases where you are controlling both ends, you might find useful suggestions here: http://serverfault.com/questions/111813/what-is-the-best-way...
In particular, Tsunami and uftp look interesting.
Ktunnel facebook
Globalization, outsourcing, war on terror and internet will saturate America.
And USA will be inhabited with people living on Passive income
> I suppose one doesn't actually need first-hand experience to have such an opinion

We don't see that sort of complaint when Europeans give other kinds of advice to America.
On the other hand, it could mean FizzBuzz.
Her brute learning style reminds me of training artificial neural network from no prior knowledge: feeding problem-solution pairs to a Bayesian network again and again, hoping the ANN will reproduce the relationship somehow. We think her learning style sad and absurd, but such a statistical training technique logical and scientific. Just my two cents.
"The user has to interrupt her blissful reverie, open her eyes, come back visually to the yucky airplane that the beautiful music from the iPhone has been helping her escape. She then has to pick the phone up in one hand, lift it up to where she can see it, use her other hand to press the forward button, and put the phone back down. Instead of a one-hand, no eye operation, it's a two-hand, two-eye operation."

Or you can just double-click the button on the earbuds. One-hand, no eye operation.
related » http://j.mp/ideath
Nah, what you're seeing here is relatively poor, old, IA32, AT&T-style (which means GCC targeted), Linux-targeted assembly code.

This is not the article I would use to learn about Linux, operating systems, or assembly (although it's more accurate to say you learn "an ISA" instead of "assembly").
Can't upvote this enough.

On NPR an economist said that one thing that makes the US economy different (in a good way) from the EU economy is the extreme mobility of our workforce - that when times are tough, a reasonable portion of US people can and will pack up and move to a state where they can find jobs. If that is true, conversely isn't the effect of having health insurance so tightly coupled to employment equally detrimental? I mean it just blows my mind that we tie employment and healthcare together.
When I was 10 my dad taught me if else and how to make dialogue boxes in visual basic. My imagination did the rest.

So my advice is teach something that is practical and understood by the 10 year old. That's the best way to keep him/her interested. No point teaching stuff and telling him/her to have faith that one day it will be useful. That's not effective! You can let college do that later. But right now it's best to show the cool stuff to really get that interest going. So you don't necesarily have to start with the basics. Something cool, show him/her how to tweak it, voilà.
Not native, but I can read most kanji at 10px. (Some of the more complex ones with 12 or more strokes can be a bit difficult but you can usually guess them from context)
I think Perl is better way to teach Data Structures.

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174164&ci...
You mean the next time the actual day your of birth is a whole number of years ago isn't in 14 days. Fair enough - I didn't assume that was what this meant. This tells you when next your day of birth was a prime number of days ago.

I thought that was interesting and just a bit of fun.
You actually already buy a nice chunk of your meds from the Swiss. Switzerland is a nice place to incorporate.