skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's not a power of 2 (although it is 512 + 256 + 128 + 64).

Well, if that counts as "round" then I have to remind you that any integer can be written as a unique sum of various powers of two (or ten, or eight, or ...).

That said, being able to quickly convert an arbitrary number into that form has proven useful more than a few times. But I admit that I never realized that playing a very old, free game called "Binary Blitz" would turn out to be quite so useful to me.
35 Entertaining 404 Error Pages
I strongly object to your characterization; it's highly dependent on what you're familiar with. MOV calls map intuitively to assignment, and with assignment, the LHS is the destination and the RHS is the value. And Intel syntax uses type inference to deduce the width of operands, and only requires DWORD PTR / WORD PTR / BYTE PTR etc. to disambiguate when it's necessary.

(I have a very strong personal preference for the Intel syntax.)
I notice that I have a lot more trouble trying to read Japanese in smaller fonts, but I'm also not that great at reading it to begin with.

At least Japanese has katakana & hiragana, though, which have only a few strokes and are quite prevalent in normal writing. I've seen dense walls of tiny Chinese writing that looked positively impenetrable.
>Even in online writing, people mix standard Arabic with their own dialect or major dialects.

When that happens, it just shows a poor command of the Arabic language.

>It's like learning Latin, Italian, Spanish and French at the same time.

Let us not make it harder than it actually is.

I would say it is like learning English for the writing part, but also knowing a few words here and there like "Bonjour", "Hola" and "Grazie" for when you talk to people in various regions (in addition to the English language that they would all understand...)

>If you understand Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi dialects, then you can communicate effectively with 90% of Arabs.

If you learn Classical Arabic (this is what you would learn at school, not any of the dialects), and you learn a few important words from the following oral dialects:
Egyptian, Syrian, Moroccan/Algerian

then you are good to go from Morocco to Iraq.

BTW, native Arabic speaker here.
Not anywhere in any non-trivial population of people will you ever see anything of serious depth and novelty (aka, not some kind of cargo cult "classic") get nearly as much recognition as LOLcat/Hello World type material.

This is one of my favorite communities, but it's not exceptional in that regard.

That said, I like your link.
Important to whom? The universe itself is incapable of assigning 'importance', so saying that something is unimportant to the universe is just as wrong as saying something is important to the universe. Humans are important to humans, and that's what matters. If only I think I'm important, then I am, to me.
I can't play this, I've tried both Chrome and Explorer, both come up with a blank grid and the word 'wait' in the top right.
His logic for why people bought the iPod is flawed since he doesn't back it up with any evidence. I don't think iTunes had as much of an impact as he says, most people imported the majority of their collection from CDs in the early days of the iPod or downloaded it illegally which had nothing to do with iTunes. Also Apple was making the smallest harddisk MP3 player with the longest battery life for a few years and that's why I bought one (2nd gen, Feb. 2003) and later recommended it to others. I don't think the ease of loading the iPod was any better than other players in the early days, since flash based MP3 players were as easy or easier since you could just drag the files on or just their own simple tools. In fact to this day iTunes seems to hated by a large pencentage of my friends with iPods (who mostly use Windows BTW)

He also makes the mistake that the iPhone would be about music even though it was clealy a step backwards in terms of the capicity (4 and 8gb) and the controls as he points out. It was clearly designed for the Internet, Apps/games and video - though that is easier to see in hindsight.
I'm with dpcan on this one. I started my current 10yo on Scratch at 8 and have been giving him incremental "challenges". The immediate feedback for even his first "program" was enough to keep him hooked. He regularly keeps making new games and often pushing the system to its limits (Scratch has many annoying limitations if you're a seasoned programmer or even a kid who has figured out that something like an array - he wouldn't use that word, tho - would be useful).

He started 5th grade last week and one of his classes is a programming class which uses MicroWorlds - http://www.microworlds.com/ - as the learning platform. I grabbed the demo and may shell out the $100 for the home version, just so he can do stuff here in it as well. It's not a horrible system, but it's definitely rough around the edges.

I fully expect to have him starting in Python by 6th grade, tho.
Definitely. Learned Logo when I was 7 years old and it gave me all the fundamentals I needed.
What area are you looking at? If you're looking for web roles then put together a website explaining who you are and a portfolio if you have enough to show. Polish your smaller projects, publish them on GitHub and link to them from your site.
German taxes as a percentage of GDP is 39.3%. The US number is 28.2%. Government income should be about the same as government expenditures, so that means that the German stimulus was even bigger than the number in my previous comment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenu...
You need to be a kid to play with lego (or mindstormers)?
Programming to an interface just doesn't seem so useful within the scope of a method.
I live and work in Hollywood, and the conventional wisdom here is that "overnight success" takes 8-10 years.
This guy's first point is so shitty that you can discard the rest of the article based on it ALONE:

> First, the iPhone ignores the main reasons that the iPod succeeded: simplicity and ease of use. The iPod is very easy to play and very easy to load, much more so than any other device had ever been. Even more important, the online ITunes store made buying music much simpler and easier than it had been. You didn’t have to drive to the store, you didn’t have to even wait for the UPS man to deliver a CD from amazon. You could listen to the whole song before you bought it, not just a small clip. And you could buy individual songs that you liked instead of having to buy a whole CD of mediocre gunk to get those one or two good songs. (There hasn’t been a packaged album side worth listening to the whole thing in order since Abbey Road.) You didn't have to carry the CDs around with you and change them and worry about losing them. The iPod was a success not because it made complex and sophisticated things possible, but because it made simple things (listening to the music that you liked) simpler and easier than they ever had been before. The iPhone is doing the opposite.

I have highlighted the only section in which he lists complaints against the iPhone with respect to simplicity and ease of use.
For some reason, Jaron Lanier always reminds me of Magical Trevor: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/songs/magical+trevor/
Reading Arabic letters means paying attention to detail and where dots are located, especially when you first learn the language. Not an issue after that.

I fail to see how that is "hard for the brain", when you know that the Arabic alphabet is limited to 28 letters.

The OP should have looked at learning languages that have thousands of ideograms (Japanese Kanji, Chinese, etc...)

Abstract of reference paper here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14744200
It s a shame no full text of this research is freely available.
MMF (by the same people) exports to Flash, so it's a reality already.
The link's in my profile (not sure what the rules on self-linking are here!)

I get between 45 and 50k page views a month, which isn't exactly crazy traffic - I think the affiliate link in question did well because it was a) part of a very enthusiastic review of a pretty obscure product and b) the post was linked to/reblogged on Tumblr by much more popular sites.

It's certainly made me rethink my plan to put adverts on the site - hard to say without testing, but past experience with Google Ads makes me think the occasional hardware review/affiliate link would be better for me, in terms of earning some cash for all the work I put in, and better for my readers (no intrusive ads, and a good post is a good post whether it has an affiliate link in it or not).
Twitter's real founding story. The not so famous version.

http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/How-did-Jack-Dorsey-Ev-Willia...
Hey, wasn't that the year the economy started to go south? ....
Obviously, people stopped employing people in Perl, and the economy took a steep dive because of it!. Use Perl! Save the economy!.

( nb. for people with no sense of humour, this was a stab at people who don't understand that correlation != causation )
Rising productivity doesn't necessarily mean that working hours go down. Productivity is output per hour worked. So if output goes up and hours worked stay the same, that's a productivity increase.

Not sure why you call it neo-colonialism when a country like China builds a lot of factories to make stuff we want to buy. Hundereds of millions of people in these countries are now much wealthier than before. I do know about the harsh working conditions there but apparently they are better than what came before or everybody would just stay in their villages and grow rice. China's lack of democracy and prohibition of trade unions is hardly down to neo-colonialism either.
L-Systems and Fractals in html5-ish
Considering that the preceding sentence explains that the 1920s---before those two things happened---were the last decade in which one could be optimistic about politics, and then explains that those two things happening was the reason for the loss of optimism, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to interpret his statement as: the expansion of welfare and the granting of suffrage to women have turned out to be bad for America.

It's possible that he really thinks, instead: while those two things have rendered "capitalist democracy" an oxymoron, which I dislike, I nonetheless must agree that those two things happening was a good idea (for other reasons, presumably). But that certainly isn't the connotation of the words he chose. One could be forgiven for reading him to imply that he was at least not a big fan of either the expansion of welfare or the granting of women's suffrage.
Does it seem to anyone else that he has missed a few other service integrations that Apple mentioned?

Now, I'll give you that the Sony TV probably is capable of more, but I thought the Apple device was going to do YouTube and Flickr at least.
Me too. I loved it so much that when I was 14 I helped organise the first "Click convention" and held it in my local village.

We got the developers over from France, and they still hold it in the UK every year, not far from my house.
Spain's ETA declares ceasefire
I propose something interesting. Create a computer program that has some rules so is able to question whether there is God, and whose answer is We are. Then you can refine the program, when then program is very complex, say it satisfies Turing test, we can think about God with the help of this machine. I think people playing the game Life with its evolving capabilities must have been thinking something along these lines.
Nasreddin and the Schoolteacher
Nasreddin had a leaky ferry-boat, and used it to row people across the river.

One day his passenger was a fussy schoolteacher, and on the way across he decided to give Nasreddin a test and see how much he knew.

"Tell me, Nasreddin, what are eight sixes?"

"I've no idea."

"How do you spell magnificence?"

"I don't."

"Didn't you study anything at school?"

"No."

"In that case, half your life is lost."

Just then a fierce storm blew up, and the boat began to sink.

"Tell me, schoolteacher," said Nasreddin. "Did you ever learn to swim?"

"No."

"In that case, your whole life is lost."
Things like this make me so sad. Why not give that kid fingercolours? Or a xylophone? Make him experience the real world instead of simulation of something hidden behind a screen.
If you lose your password, the hoops you have to go through to recover it are amazing. Pro tip: don't ever lose your password. Or better, as others have suggested, sweep money out as soon as it arrives.
Unity 3d is plugin based. It uses Silverlight or Moonlight or it's own plugin if they're installed and working. This doesn't have that dependency.

OTOH, I suspect Unity3D's performance is much better, as most browsers don't have GPU accelerated graphics yet.
Exactly. It's been a really effective PR-campaign though.
How can I find a partner for a startup?
I am not a programmer I'm basically just a geek thinker. (Which is not bad everyone needs someone who can come up with ideas, I think thinkers have as much of a place as programmers in making an idea successful. )

At any time I have dozens of ideas jumping around in my head, most are nothing but occasionally I have one that I think has some real substance. I had one recently about how to transform email into the 21st century. (No it's not a Wave clone)

And I think I came up with something completely unique and awesome. The problem is I need a partner. I can't create this by myself.

I spoke to a developer about the idea and the cost is not the real problem.
The biggest problem I face now is self doubt.
I have no one to question me. No one to tell me my ideas suck or that they are awesome. No one to help me tweak a design or a feature and no one to help me expand my idea into something worth while.

My question is how do I find someone to listen to my ideas (take them and me seriously) and possibly join me in the pursuit of the geek dream?

Ps. AbuAyyoub@gmx.com if anyone is interested :D
Infinite fire, too touchy/important to be worth chancing it. Get someone well reviewed/recommended with data portability built into the contract.
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated."

WTH???!!
True, but Chrome is the exception, with it's awesome JS JIT.
It's not missed primarily because there's perfect visual feedback – when you scroll, the screen scrolls immediately (even if you reached the edge, it still scrolls a bit), when you type you see the letters popping up exactly at the point you're looking at, etc.
Paypal is very flawed, besides the fact that you can get accounts with almost no verification, and that tech support won't give you reasonable answers to valid questions, I've been trying to pay for stuff for a long time now. I keep getting an "insufficient funds" warning, while i have plenty of money on the account to cover 3 times what i'm paying for. I've talked to them twice and they keep saying that the system is going through malfunction. It's been like over three weeks now. So yeah it's not a good system, but what are the alternatives?
About Dive Into Python: http://oppugn.us/posts/1272050135.html
Free Network Vulnerability Scan - FreeScan from Qualys
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Why+the+iPhone+will+fail%2...
Just one in 103,000
Not really. Compare 0MQ's wire protocol:

http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:2

and STOMP:

http://stomp.codehaus.org/Protocol
I don't need an idea person, I need a designer who sleeps with the CSS3 standard next to their pillow for most of my projects.

Could you share with those looking at this post what you can offer other than this idea?
Yep, "nasm -f macho hello.s && ld -e _start -o hello hello.o" did the trick for me on Mac OS X 10.6
I'm a freelancer from India and Paypal is my primary payment processor as there are no other viable options.

Everything Paypal does is generally logical, even the chargeback handling and the occasional freezing due to suspected fraud.

Though I would prefer it if Paypal refrained from trying to handle disputes and just concentrated on handling payment transfers. Chargebacks are the bane of a freelancer's life especially when there is no proof of the service provided.

Paypal payments should be like actual cash transactions, once you pay the money to someone, it should be gone for good. If you have any disputes, handle it yourself.

Though I don't know how Paypal could make that work with credit card payments where buyers have the option to initiate a chargeback.
We have discussed many app on HN before they've been released, including the Atlas, the iPhone, and more.

A product not yet ready to be released clearly does not equate to that product not existing.

Nor does being angry entitle you to infer someone else is somehow lying when they say the app being demonstrated exists.
Solved it, knowing an old math concept helped, did a Google search and got the values [writing the code to loop through the values for m,n was easier but felt someone must have computed them and posted on web].

Just wrote the code for cipher and used all possible characters and replaced using the encrypted value. Though I nearly sent it to the wrong address since it wasn't clear whether address contained the answer it self or answer%256. took ~30 mins [mostly to look up ord,chr and the solution on google].

final solution 12 lines python code, does not calculates a,b,c just the cipher and i/o.
Er, the reason it's here is we can see the demo, discuss it, talk about competitors, decide if we think it's any good, etc.

Please, just stop posting. It's rude to the guys who made this. They're not liars, they're just showing off a WIP.
I'm not sure why this new list was needed, when Omnigroup has been hosting macosx-dev for years, and there isn't a lot of traffic on it.
Fruits of Misunderstanding
Good Reasons to Lock Down Your Wireless Network
It seems a bit bizarre to implement a system to send audio and video for comments. Youtube already do video replies which are not exactly setting the world alight, surely just a comment box will suffice?
A minor point - it's Milli Vanilli (although mini vanilli sounds interesting) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli
Re: sweetened whisky drinkers, a friend of mine who runs a rather nice bar (awarded best cocktail menu in the world from quite a few sources) simply smiles, says they don't stock coke, and suggests something else that's not as dominating to the customer.
It is obvious that Apple's direction is streaming. Streaming from the cloud is easily done. Streaming from users content is via AirPlay. Apple probably looked at DLNA. It looks unlikely that AirPlay will support 'non-Apple' format such as divx, mkv, flac. And I hope Apple will change its mind. It is not a Flash vs non-Flash issue.

Will Apple TV turns into an app & games platform? I see alot of pluses. Something not in the interactive TV as we know today. I think this is coming, based on what Google is doing. Google probably has some inside info that Apple is developing such, thus Google is developing its own Google TV to compete. But I think Apple's implementation will be something different. Maybe: using your iPad/iPhone as controller, select the game you want to display on your TV and push it via AirPlay, the game will then load and play on Apple TV. Then you use your iPad/iPhone as controller to play the game.
They will go and work in the private sector, of course. Why should they have "jobs for life"?
I don't know anything about photography and I still know a Zeiss lens is pretty damn good.
Exactly. My iPad hung a little yesterday and didn't do anything when I hit a button. I had, in fact, pressed the button, but there was no visual feedback. It's startling when it's not perfect, but when it works just so it doesn't really matter that it's not tactile feedback, it's that your brain gets the message that "yes, I just did x-action"
Good tip. Thanks.
Success == Mass delusions in a walled garden.
I learned programming through SilverCreator (http://www.silvercreator.net/?action=downloads) when I was younger than 10. SilverCreator is not updated anymore, it’s only for Mac, the official website doesn’t explain much about it, and there might be a few bugs, but nonetheless it’s a fun game-creation system.

It uses a card-based model where each “card” has an image area and a text area, plus buttons along the bottom, and you can switch between cards easily. You can start the kid off just implementing a guess-the-number game using dialogue boxes or the text area. There are built-in drawing tools for drawing to the image area, so it’s easy to create a simple choose-your-own adventure game and use the buttons along the bottom to switch screens. SilverCreator is made in REALbasic, and the programming language it uses is basically a slightly-more-easily-parsable version of REALbasic that uses global functions for everything. All code is started from an event, usually either a button click or entering a card. It’s missing some nice features for more advanced game creation, especially detecting whether a key is down or not (though it can detect key press events), but it supports sprites, sound effects, and even network connections with a simple API. The documentation for the programming language can be accessed from the program’s Help menu – many people have trouble finding it.

I created a Mayan number system translator, Collatz conjecture tester, Pong clone, and P2P chat client using SilverCreator, to give you an idea of what’s possible. You can check the forums on the SilverCreator site to view more examples of games or to ask for help.
I think it may be when a site transforms from basically being a resource to being considered a community. I effectively just said goodbye to Less Wrong, which I have followed longer than HN.
The iPhone won't really fail, but it sure the heck won't hold the lead. It is impossible for 1 new apphole model a year to compete against dozens of new android models. Windows became #1 because of the shear numbers of different hardware models that were being released.
The Labour/Tory thing isn't that simple. The UK's economy is strongly focused on London. When the Tories (conservatives) are in power, most of the money goes to the South East and the rest of the country suffers really badly. When Labour are in power, they attempt to spread that wealth to the outskirts, but they aren't good at doing it, so waste a lot. They are polar opposites, each creating their own long term damage, especially to public services.
I was talking to my goddaughter at her 21st birthday family gather in South West London a couple of weeks back. She, and her boyfriend, have already resigned themselves to never being able to buy their own home -- barring a lottery win, or some such, or via inheriting at some point.

I'd already bought my first house at 21, in that same area, and I'd say my income, adjusted, was comparable to one of theirs.

To be this young, and left with little hope, is a brutal wake-up call. Oh, it could be worse, but it could be, much more easily, so much better.
Paul The "psychic" Octopus Stuns World Cup Fans
I'd be curious to know, a few years on now, what type of phone he's using.

I'd have to say that as far as simplicity, iOS seems to be the leader right now (maybe not the most powerful/customizable though), in comparison to RIM/Android.
Can You Make Quick Money on Triond?
Get a virtual server (shouldn't cost you more than $10 a month) in the US which you RDP into when you need to log into Paypal. You could also set it up with VPN and use any other computer as long as it has VPN software installed.

To clarify: this should prevent your Paypal account from being locked as they not only see that your IP is in the US, but that it's the same every time.
I think this applies even when you're right or when in fact you did discover deep truths about the natural world.
i would say it's a nightmare programming in assembly without going through your tutorial.!!!