skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to love Games Factory and Klik&Play
When I read the title, I was hoping to see a real alternative to captchas. What I see is not that different (pictures vs. letter/numbers)

Something revolutionary different is needed.
I wonder what the implications of this are with respect to maths / logic. IIRC the left hemisphere of the brain does more of the logical thinking, with the right being more creative - does this mean that people who read / write a lot of Arabic tend to have more developed logical or analytical skills?

Arabic numerals spring to mind, though they originated from India originally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals), and algebra and trigonometry have been developed a great deal by Arabic and Persian scholars - all these are fairly fundamental to mathematics.

I wonder if there is any causation due to the written language, or would it merely be correlation?
They are in a 110 Gigabyte torrent at themixingbowl, a site dedicated to mixes. I also highly recommend the BTTB series.
The article uses Nasm not GCC (or rather, not Gas - though Gas supports Intel syntax too now, afaik), and is definitely using Intel syntax. Note for instance the unintuitive order of source and destination in the MOV calls and the lack of delimiters on the operands, amongst other things.

[edit: clarification]
Learning to solve the puzzle would mean that you learned how to solve it without memorizing a technique.

There is a big difference between actually solving the cube and learning how to 'solve' it using some technique someone else came up with.

Solving it means that you analyzed the workings of the cube, figured out a way to return it to its original state without access to some outside source of information on how to do it.

Screwdrivers probably shouldn't count as a 'solution' in this sense ;)
I have to ask: California state employee? (Edit: on reflection, the skimpiness of the retirement plan makes me doubtful.)
He spoke at Startup Bootcamp last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdDGVhqMuWI

http://startupbootcamp.MIT.edu
Finding out "Who is a terrorist, and what are they going to bomb?" is a much tougher problem than, "What information can I glean from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to indicate this person might be a higher credit risk?"

For instance, I imagine a high number of updates on a Facebook profile containing the word "drunk" might lead to a higher risk profile for auto insurance.
960 - 1 = ?
Long story short: they click a button that looks like Paypal on my site, which links to an e-junkie URL, which 301s them to a Paypal URL, where they pay. Paypal then calls an e-junkie URL, which does some magic and calls a URL on my site. Simultaneously with this calling, the user is directed back to my site.
Microsoft (who whatever anyone says, know a thing or two about developer tools) have three "personalities". The typical corporate developer who just wants to do 9-5 (nothing wrong with that), up to the high-academic theoretician. When adding a feature to VS or whatever, they think, how will each of our personas use it?

I can't find the original article but here's a rference to it: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/11/mort-elvis-einstein...
Godwin's law only applies when calling someone a Nazi or comparing someone to a Nazi(s). Godwin doesn't cover the word 'Nazi' or 'Jew' turning up in a discussion.
I used Paypal to accept payment for an editing assignment. As soon as I got the payment, I transferred it from Paypal to my bank account, figuring that I was safe. After I completed the work, the client apparently did a chargeback on his credit card, so Paypal did the logical thing: withdrew the money from my account retroactively.

I wrangled customer support, got nowhere, and had a fat negative balance in my account, but I figured I was okay -- until six months later, when I got sent to collections, when I gave collections the money and then sued Paypal in small claims court (this might not have been the wisest move in the world; given recent experiences: http://jseliger.com/2010/08/28/dont-rent-an-apartment-from-n... , I don't think I'd bother with the same course of action today). Their EULA says you can't do that, but they offered me half the money to make me go away, which I did.

The moral of the story: I no longer use Paypal. Ever. For anything.

Moral #2: the horror stories are real.

EDIT: One other thing -- if you are selling virtual services, Paypal will not back you up. If I'd been smarter, I would've shipped something to the client's address, with a tracking number, which might've helped me.
Internet Explorer 8 PoC: Twitter forced-tweet demo
Ah, reminds me how we had to learn russian back in the commie days (I'm from Bulgaria). Nothing against russian, or it's people, but the regime required it.
> ... sleeping on a trampoline could actually be pretty comfortable.

FWIW, I have slept on a trampoline. It was very comfortable.
It's not a product. It's a landing page.

Could we stop voting stuff like this onto the front page? I'm sure it'll be cool when they actually build it, but right now it's just an hour's worth of brainstorming and 20 minutes of somebody's time in photoshop. There's absolutely nothing to see, so it's not of any value to us now.

I know that everybody considers this as a Minimum Viable Product, and that you're supposed to launch something like this for every idea you have. That's cool. And I know you're supposed to get as much exposure to it as you can.

But please please please, don't spam up HackerNews with stuff like this. I want to think we're better than that.

Can we make a policy of only submitting things that exist?
What's funny is that lots of western and some eastern slavic people have problems understanding cyrillic.

I blame it not.... simply not using it everyday :)

I still wonder how those mongolian folks are doing with it. I can read cyrillic just fine, but mongolian is gibberish to me!

Ah well languages! Hate them, love them...
true- but this type of content does not (at least in my experience) lend itself well to sharing discovery. it (at least in my experience) comes with the territory of interest.

i guess more remarkably, there is no timeliness to this article.
Compiling OpenTyrian in Ubuntu
Texas inquires on our approach to competition: Google
Yeah but reading it at 10px is a pain in the ass. Unfortunately it seems like everything is 10px.
A government cannot fix the job market, for the very simple reason that structurally, the economy reacts slower than "before the next election". Anything it tries to do in the short term will almost certain make the problem worse. The best thing it can do is try not to.

We see this pattern repeated again and again in the UK. The voters, sick of austerity, will vote in the high-spending Labour Party which promises all sorts of largesse. Then they'll wreck the economy with high tax and high borrowing, and voters will turn back to the fiscally responsible Tories, who will balance the books but slash spending on public services in the process. As soon as they've "fixed" the economy they'll be voted out again...

Another good example is the health service. All political parties promise to improve it. But a government lasts 5 years and it takes 8 years to train a new doctor. So rather than invest in skills, they spend the money on very visible projects like new buildings, the boast about how much they've spent, not what has actually been gotten for the money.
er, what will the public employees do then?
PayPal is great until you have a problem. Then it's a nightmare.

Once you fall afoul of them, which can happen for something so trivial and non out of the ordinary that it takes a while to even understand what they could be having a problem with, they'll lock down your account and essentially shut down your business until you jump through a long series of hoops, each more difficult and less reasonable than the last.

If you're lucky, after a couple weeks of opaque and contradictory communication with them, they'll let you continue running your business. If not, you get to scramble to find another way to collect payment.

My advice is to skip all the above and go straight to the "find another way to collect payment" step. PayPal would be a great way thing if they were reasonable, or even rational. But they're not. It's just not worth it.
He had me till WoW
Omega Warrior - Play Omega Warrior online Games
Fight the mutants to save the world!
tactile was certainly a poor choice of words- but nobody can deny there is room for improvement. i still can't type without looking.
this is the final precept, obfuscate your knowledge...
Alexis Ohanian (Reddit YC05) Startup Bootcamp (2009)
"As far as I know, there is know other tool out there, fast or slow, that offers zeromq's level of simplicity."

STOMP! Stomp is simpler than 0mq, but you have a central server instead of point to point.
I also use this Clojure Quick Reference: http://faustus.webatu.com/clj-quick-ref.html
The US economy is built on debt. And all that borrowing pushed up wages in the US and caused trade deficits and migration of workers into the US.

After all, it is not paper we are borrowing. It is the labor of others that we are borrowing. We must take delivery of it somehow.

And it seems likely that our borrowing will continue until it becomes impossible to continue. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats have the balls to break the debt habit in a downturn. And this downturn is far from over.

But the US keeps committing to more spending and absorbing all of the risks of private risk takers in favored industries. It insures many pension funds, is on the hook for your social security, your medicare and your house when you finally decide to walk away.

No individual would ever make such a grand series of errors and anyone who did would face consequences pretty quickly. Only the United States has the resources, trust and good will to piss away on this stupidity.
there is a 3 minute demo of the product on the front page. perhaps they put it up after your reply. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPVhPGOLe7c
FWIW (no teaching experience here):
In Russia, they're using Pascal to teach programming although I would try to explain programming in some basic abstract concepts.

Like:
Program is a list of instructions for computer to do and variable is a "box" where some value is contained.

To make it more engaging you probably need to homebrew some nice and easy to understand demos. Random idea: write a simple graphical library for visualisation for your favourite language to use with your demos.
For those interested in how this translates to Win32, there's a site with a wealth of tutorials for Win32 assembly that I had used just about 10 years ago. I just Googled and it still exists.

http://win32assembly.online.fr/tutorials.html
the games factory is still underdevelopment, and you can download a demo of the current version:

http://www.clickteam.com/eng/tgf2.php

(i'm also a fan. an web games factory would be awesome.)
You are not important if only you think so.
The government makes waves on the pond and directs your attention to where the water went up, distracts you from where it goes down and when boats get tipped over, it claims "no one could have seen it coming".
New Audis have a radio-driven clock, which means you never ever need to set the time.
Skimming through the list of podcasts I’ve subscribed to, a common thread seems to be people having real conversations, whether it’s news discussion, in-depth analysis of a topic or funny people saying funny things. Given the choice, I’d much rather listen to or watch the conversation than read a transcript or summary of it.
Very nice 2 pages cheat sheet by Steve Tayon http://clojure.org/cheatsheet and pdf http://cloud.github.com/downloads/richhickey/clojure/clojure...
That wasn't "something vaguely resembling garbage collection" — it was a no-op until garbage collection was finally introduced half a decade later.

And NSZone was already out of favor when I started programming Cocoa, on OS X 10.1. It just didn't have any advantages under OS X's memory model. It certainly wasn't a preallocated object pool like this. As it was explained to me at the time, the main point of NSZone originally was that it let you to blow away the whole zone at once without needing to release every single object. This was no longer the case in 10.1 (and I don't think it was even the case in 10.0).
it's not that easy to read apl either.
Likewise we could postulate a more realistic and limited creator-god, one which might even be empirical observable, either directly or indirect. The point being that we can only know which features a deity actually has after one has been observed in action.

Given available evidence at least some postulated deities have become increasingly unlikely, but this is not the case of all. Some might have merit if only they where actual observed from time to time.
"Plus: even if we set that aside, there will be certain bits of hardware you'll want to use that would require opening the Terminal to configure/install."

Change your mindset from hacker to 'non-technical relative or friend', and that problem goes away.

"There will be certain bits of hardware you'll want to use that will not work with you new system." is how they would phrase it, and oftentimes, it does not really bother them at all.

Even if it would bother them, getting a Mac likely would not help, as it would get them the same results for some of their old hardware.
I take it you mean Mach-O?

Mach-O is mach microkernel object format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach-O

In general, BSD assembler tends to be pretty stack heavy for cultural/engineering reasons. I don't think it ultimately matters all that much if you're fiddling around on your personal machine.
Eric Goldman: Texas AG Investigating Google Search, Are You Kidding Me??
I'm not assuming that consumption won't go up. I'm hoping it won't go up. Bigger, better, faster can't go on forever. We have this thing called the "economy" and instead of trying to "economize", we want to consume more and more forever...

Also, did I speak about unemployment benefits? I think we should try to keep as many people as possible employed, and have them all work fewer hours, whenever it is possible. Obama can't really relax too much, or share his job with another co-President, and of course if you're launching your startup and it's the challenge of your life you have to give it all - but not every job is really that important. To a large extent, the truth is that the world is full of small people who have trouble finding value and joy in their lives and want to "seem important" by working way too many hours (nor does the system help them give up part of their working hours, truth be told).
Threads without locks
Right. There's also screenshots, bulleted lists, and a feature chart.

There's no product though. There's nothing to download, nothing to sign up for, no way to actually get the thing and try it out.

Hopefully one day they'll get the product to the point where we can try it out and have a meaningful discussion about it. Until then, there's no reason for it to be here.
The development of logic in the Islamic world has little to do with the Arabic language and everything to do with Islamic jurisprudence (Fiqh), and the conquest of settled, sedentary peoples in Persia, the Roman occupied Levant and Anatolia.

Suddenly, Arabs found themselves heirs to great empires and custodians of far richer cultures than their own. The recent converts had to be immersed in the culture with something other than eloquent oration and rhetoric, as was the custom back in Arabia, since few of them spoke Arabic much less appreciated its word-craft. The converts themselves were running around interpreting Islam in their old, familiar ways; the Persians, subservient to their God-Kings would have idolized the new Arabs. Arab families from the inner-circle were vying for power, and old clan conflicts were beginning to threaten the new Caliphate.

It was during this period of economic stability, but cultural chaos that Islamic scholars rediscovered* pockets of philosophical cults: Gnostics, Neoplatonists, Aristotelians, and various Christian offshoots, all off whom had highly developed systems of inquiry and exposition. These fringe groups were learned men who saw wisdom not only in Christian teachings, the state-sponsored religion, but also in the old teachings of sages and thinkers of antiquity.

That's when Islam discovered Logic and fell in love. Unlike Rome, logic didn't threaten their religion because they believed their holly book was infallible; and the thought of man, once elevated, can only be in agreement with what God said, and if wrong, the error lay with man.

The Caliphs threw scholarships at researchers and sent them digging in the books. First, it was a period of translation, followed by active search for lost Greek sources, and finally, once the attic dried, new research and development.

Within 30 years of first contact, in Baghdad and Basra, Mecca and Madina; Logic, Rhetoric, Music, and Geometry were in school curricula, along with Quran. And the new students, learned in native Arabic and oblivious to translation, ran with the sciences and developed them, as any of their many indigenous crafts.
Sample size of only 40 students from 1.57 billion people who can read Arabic. Amazing...
Or Economic. Israel is the greatest exporter of Arabic translation software to world governments.
PUMA Red Bull on sale
As a heads up for anyone who doesn't realize how much music this is, that wget will slurp >100gb of stuff (or would, if it weren't for sever load).
At the extremes, it's beginning to sound like cities (or parts of them) are becoming centers for the wealthy and connected, the "creative class", while the poorer neighborhoods and burbs are used to house workers to service them. Those who can live in the city basically pay some form of subsidized rent to the rich.

Perhaps serfdom isn't so far gone after all. We've just renamed it.

(overly dramatic, yes, but I was struck at how much it sounds like things are drifting backwards in more ways than just income)
Thoughts on Oracle versus Google Patent Lawsuit
Yesterday I submitted "A Problem Course in Compilation: From Python to x86 Assembly". An 80 page book with worked examples. It got ZERO up votes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1662430

Yeah, I am jealous.
Usability and the Lowest Common Denominator
it's really not that hard. the buttons are always in the same place

i can type with like 70% accuracy without looking on the iphone, with 1 hand
Some Funny Toilet Signs
Here are some of the wackiest, funniest or oddest men and women toilet signs.
The two vital things you can help a kid with are:

1. Setting tasks that are within reach but will stretch his ability (and getting his buy-in on the idea before you start)

2. Teaching him how to find the answers to his own questions

I'd do all the setup yourself so the kid can jump straight in to producing something. I'd use FTP as it's easy to conceptualize. Avoid the command line and version control.

I'd start with HTML (written in Notepad) so that you can learn to present any data output. Just teach basic tags: h1, p, table, a href. Use w3schools for reference. Build something like a 'My Family' website with a page for each family member and links to the others.

Then maybe stir in a bit of CSS - again just basic stuff (colors, borders, positioning) and again using w3schools for reference. Use this to make the My Family website a bit prettier.

Then try some PHP/MySQL. You could save each family member in a table and use one PHP file to display each one based on an id specified as a get var.

Simple project ideas to try after that could be a simple CMS or (my favourite) a very basic Twitter clone.
Definitely. Never trust anyone who hasn't heard "Dark Side of the Moon."
There's a hidden feature called "Auto Sweep" that will auto drain your PayPal account nightly to your bank. You have to have a Premier or Business Account, and you have to call support to have them enable it. The manager of the operator who answers your call knows about it.
The list was created to address the foolish moderation currently on cocoa-dev.

Already more than two hundreds members in it with some very known cocoa developer.
C++ and then Java. It's what I did, those two will introduce him to OOP, and making GUI apps in Java is never going to get old, I guarantee.
The only mistake of this man is that he didn't account for the reality distortion field.
"AirPlay (which is kind of cool but inherently flawed in the fact that when I switch it to the TV from say my iPad, I’d like to use the iPad for some other task.)"

By the time this comes to the iPad, it'll be iOS 4.2 which probably means they've designed this as a background task, which would allow you to do other stuff on your iPad.
I'm just continuing the inductive series, beginning with pre-fire hominids and ending up with modern man. At each stage we were basically blind to the next stage, and once the unknown was revealed it highly interested us and affected our lives.

I see nothing unique about our present state of knowledge to feel like the series will change significantly.

No unwarranted optimism was intended. In fact, future stages may be terrible, but we will be highly interested in them and they will deeply affect our lives.
The research this seems to be discussing is at least partly described in "Language status and hemispheric involvement in reading: Evidence from trilingual Arabic speakers tested in Arabic, Hebrew, and English" by Raphiq Ibrahim and Zohar Eviatar. So far, I haven't been able to turn up a copy, so I'll just list my non-neuroscientist questions and concerns. I don't mean that I don't believe it necessarily; just that I have trouble accepting a lot of these statements without further qualification and discussion.

- Lateralization of brain function is a tricky business, because it's prone to exaggeration and urban legend. I'd like some clear citations for statements like, "When you are starting something new, there is a lot of [right hemisphere] involvement."

- Given the preceding statement, I'd also like some clear citations for "When the eyes see something for just a short time, and it is at one side of a screen, only one brain hemisphere is quick enough to process the image." When I first read this sentence, it made sense to me, but things which appeal to common sense are not necessarily true.

- What are the actual rates of recognition for the letters by the different speakers and for the different hemispheres? Was it really an all-or-nothing result, or was it a 49%-or-%51 result?

- Because this experiment (apparently) only tested individual letters, how does one take into account the fact that Arabic letters change their form in various parts of a word? Perhaps Arabic words are easier to read than Hebrew words because the letters, when put together, have a more recognizable shape than Hebrew letters, which have a more uniform outline. Would right-brain recognition of Arabic words vs. Hebrew words yield different results than the individual letters?

- Arabic is widely spoken in Israel, but what percentage of the Arabic speakers were native Arabic speakers who learned Hebrew later in life, and what percentage were native Hebrew speakers who learned Arabic later in life? How much later in life?

- Arabic typeset on a computer can differ radically from calligraphic Arabic and handwritten Arabic. What variety was tested? Would handwritten Arabic (which generally uses lines instead of dots for diacritics) aid or hinder understanding?

In general, science news prepared by non-scientific sources leaves out a lot of detail, but these are questions which I think could have a lot of bearing on the truth of this experiment.
There's a pretty big mistake in his logic, even without the benefit of hindsight.

The iPhone didn't have to be as easy to use as an iPod. It's competing against other phones, and only needed to be easier to use than those.

(In any case, I do find an iPhone easier to use than an iPod.)
Advice For Lurkers: Adding Genuine Value By Being Raw And Completely Real