skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mmm, this is exactly my point - no-one focussed on "the next election" can safely undertake to deliberately make structural changes in the economy. The timescales are all wrong. It probably takes "a generation" to do it, 20-30 years. The best thing - for the country as a whole - for either party to do is just stop interfering. But, as is human nature, each will prioritize the interests of its core voters.
I'm a happy customer of http://www.ccavenue.com/content/comparative.jsp
Ask HN: what costs more? a 1 kB email or an SMS?
Does it cost more or less to GMail to send a 1 kB email compared to what it costs a mobile operator to send an SMS? My guess is that a 1kB email is cheaper, but does anybody know how much cheaper? (or more expensive)
Hi Kevin,

I like this, some feedback:

* Asides from the cultural challenges (I don't know who big bird is either) these are mostly better experiences to solve than captcha.

* The submit button is outside the rectangle. It's not visually part of the bafflebot area.

* Have a pay option with no ads. Let people pay per 1000 provided challenges, perhaps upfront. The ads are distracting and I run my own ads on my site, but I'd be happy to pay something reasonable for a captcha alternative

Overall, I think it works. Drop the cultural stuff, let me pay, and make it better looking and you'll have yourself a customer.
Really? It's like reading Chinese, but if it only had about fifty kanji and a perfectly regular grammar.

I'll grant you that it's pretty intimidating when you start, though.
As I expound in great detail in my book Why Software Sucks (Addison-Wesley, 2006, http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com/) your user is not you. Why this narcissistic, self-praising blog post of an obviously incompetent at least in marketing person is hanging on top of HN? Caturday?
I don't see a compelling reason for a smart display when there is so much competition for cheap boxes that drive displays.
It really is a nice way to think about things. Once, an early Microsoft employee reviewed one of my games on his blog, saying he'd been playing it for hours and enjoying it. Surrounding the review were posts about taking his Ferrari racing on track days.

I got a huge kick out of the fact that he chose to spend those hours with my game, given the entertainment it was competing against... though to be honest, given the choice I'd take the Ferrari!
https://www.gpal.net/?req=useragreement is an alternative
This is part of the reason I bought an iPad. My daughter has speech issues and playing some of the games has helped her a lot.
Most parents will give their kids a lot of toys. The iPad is just something new to help kids work on their fine motor and language skills.
First, before you ever turn the computer on, you should explain to them how computers work from a high-level that a kid can understand - i.e. how they are dumb, and they just follow instructions that we give them, and how those instructions are what's known as the program, etc.

Then I would suggest starting out with Hello World in Javascript. Javascript is straightforward, relatively forgiving, and it's on every computer, so it's basically the modern-day BASIC in my opinion. Show them what happens when things go wrong, not just when things go right, in order to drive home how computers are really just slaves to our directions.

Then maybe have them start working on a game, one piece at a time. Kids like games, after all. Maybe something simple like Tic-Tac-Toe or a Pong clone. The main advantage here in using Javascript is that they can email it to themselves and then play it anywhere with no need to set anything up - they can also continue to tinker with it on any computer after the teaching is over.
The service looks nice and the idea is definitely a good one. One questions - you guys look very similar to http://codility.com . AFAIK they have been around for a while (see discussion here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1039140), have more programming tasks, support TDD and more languages. It's unclear to me whether you just want to compete in the same space or are you anyhow different from them?
I don't have any hard data, but I would guess a majority of the users of the Latex+Dropbox combo are not on Windows. All those various nix users will not find any useful meat in this post. It would have been nice to submit it under a title like: Using Latex with Dropbox on Windows
From a westerner's point of view, each dialect would be considered its own language. I think there are more differences between Syrian and Egyptian than there are differences between Spanish and Italian.

From my point of view (as an Arab), Italian and Spanish are too similar to be considered separate languages.

It's mostly a matter of culture. We Arabs think of ourselves as one culture. We accept regional differences between dialects as a natural phenomenon. But if you actually think about it, there are big differences in basic expressions and various grammatical structures.

izzaiyak - kiifak

kwaiyis - mneeh

buss - leek (look)

3aiyz - biddi

mush raiye7 - maani raie7 (I'm not going)

Most Arabs know Egyptian and Syrian because they're constantly exposed to these dialects on TV, not because they're intrinsically mutually-intelligible. Izzaiyak doesn't resemble any word in Syrian or Iraqi Arabic, and I can't think of a possible Classical Arabic word as the origin for it, and yet we all know what izzaiyak means because we learned it from TV.

If you move to a region whose dialect isn't popular, you'll find it difficult to understand at first, but you'll quickly be able to pick it up; probably in about a week or so.

In the west, these concepts seem foreign; maybe it has something to do with focusing on individuality over the group.

I know in Japan there are many regional dialects, and they can be mutually-unintelligible at times. The Standard Japanese is the Tokyo dialect. I don't know what it's like if you're a native Japanese, but as a non-native, studying the Standard Japanese doesn't seem to be enough to pick up the various dialects just by ear.

I was watching a Japanese drama once, and some character was speaking a weird language. I thought he was speaking Korean or something, but I asked on a Japanese forum and they said it was a dialect of some region.[1] It seemed even natives have trouble deciphering it.

[1]: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=22386...
Writing a JavaScript interpreter for DBN using PEG.js and canvas (Part II)
In this article I build an interpreter for the DBN language from the parsed AST generated by the grammar we defined in the previous article in PEG.js.
emperor's new horse.

Let's say that I see the horse and I do realize that it's an assistance animal, albeit unusual. If other people doesn't look so surprised I might suspect my ignorance: it seems that all other people know what's going on, and take it as perfectly normal. As I don't want to stand out in the crowd as the only freak who didn't know about this socially accepted habit, I simply play quiet as nothing strange happened.

The same thing could happen in the head of many people and the overall effect would be that of uninterested people not caring about anything.

Group psychology is a very strange and fascinating thing.

(The analogy is with the tale of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperors_New_Clothes)
Phrasing all of your comments in a negative and hostile manner is also a poor way to make a point amongst any kind of people.
WOW!!!
www.RadioShackCatalogs.com is certainly a trip down the "memory lane" of my life - and what a trip it's been to surf this site. Like many other, Radio Shack sparked, and sustained my interest in electronics and electronic gadgets in general.

In addition to the 1939-2005 Radio Shack general products catalogs on display at this site, you can view Radio Shack TRS-80 and Tandy Computer catalogs, and other "virtual books" of old store photos, memorabilia, trademarks, and advertisements. You can even view old Radio Shack TV commercials, and there's even a forum.

Now I just need and entire weekend to go through it all :-) GREAT FIND!!!!
Sometimes it also helps having an accurate mental model of yourself. Not as common as one could assume.
Perhaps the biggest opportunity the UK had was when regional parliaments were proposed for England, that would have made the central government less influential and let locals focus on their main concerns. It was poorly implemented but an interesting first step if the public had gone for it.
Craigslist ‘Adult Services’ Pages Censored
Facebook testing ‘subscribe to’ user feature
What kind of writing? I was a story editor and story editor dept. chief for a while for tv shows screenplays, among other things related to it.
I tried that before with the VPS that runs my app. Problem is they are granular down to the city. My PP address is in Illionis and I've had it frozen when accessing it from San Francisco.
I'm in Chengdu. Not exactly close to Nanchang, but closer than the Bay Area. Any more details on what the project is?
Blogging And Mass Psychomanipulation
Hi Jason, I'm the head of development at Rocket Pack.

The reason we did the video and the website is because the product exists, and we're now at the point where we'd like to get a few pilot projects with other game development companies going.

We've been working hard on this for half a year now. If you can accomplish the same in 20 minutes with Photoshop, more power to you.
Thanks for your hard work.

I breifly covered ASM in my first year of university but I don't think it counts since we got all input with C.
Thanks for letting us know. Will fix the N900 situation ASAP. Flash is for the embedded Youtube video, but I do appreciate the irony as well... -Jiri, Rocket Pack
The Stonemaker Argument - Science Fiction
The website is http://healthgazelle.com/.

I appreciate the feedback but that isn't going to work in this case. There are a few people who have tried some things and given me positive feedback. It is one reason I haven't removed the site. In recent months, I post a lot less to health lists than I used to. Part of that is circumstantial (I worked overtime regularly for several months and my previous computer died, leaving me without a computer for three months). But part of it is that fighting with people is not turning out to be a good means to help them (and isn't a great experience for me either, though I can put up with quite a lot of crap if it is at least accomplishing something, but it's not). They are very ill. It is a highly charged subject. Most of the time, members of the community are incapable of behaving rationally (been there, done that, got the t-shirt). They are desperate for a solution and some folks in the community will raise tens of thousands of dollars for the CF Foundation while at the same time making ugly accusations about my motives because there are a few ads on my website.

When my youngest son was about 15 months old and newly walking, there was a place on our street where the sidewalk had a one inch high curb. He was a clumsy kid and would get down on hands and knees and crawl over that curb. If I am going to effectively reach more than a handful of people, I have to go around and remove all barriers, no matter how small. These are people for whom small things can be quite deadly. Asking them to take risks with their health on some unproven theory is insane. Bill Gates has said something like "Your unhappiest customers are your best source of learning". I have concluded that the folks who would like to lynch me are basically saying that I am a serious threat to their welfare and that sharing the idea that one can get well without sharing enough information for others to effectively and safely replicate the process is doing more harm than good. If I want to do something other than piss and moan about how no one is ever nice to me, I have to take that message seriously and DO something more effective.

Thank you for the feedback and the chance to think through this some more.
Norton Change Directory clones
You probably don't have kids, but I'll respond anyways. What if your kid already has real finger paints, musical instruments and all manor of "real world" toys and objects?

I recognized that my two children could use a touchscreen almost a year ago when they were 1 and 3 years old. When the iPad came out it was a no-brainer. Unlike a mouse, touchpad or keyboard, the touchscreen on my iPad is very usable (apps are a diff story) for my now 2 and 4 year olds and makes discovering computers a joy for them.

Yes they still go outside, get dirty and explore like any other kid. They just have this in addition to all that "real" stuff.
Just curious: why did you not sue the client who did the fraudulent chargeback? Was he/she located in another country?
I always am annoyed when I read that CouchDB can "scale up and down".
CouchDB has NO internal concept of sharding. The only thing it can do is repliaction. Riak and Cassandra can actually scale up and down, CouchDB can scale up and down as much as MySQL can...
(or did I miss something?)
I'd be happy to see a good canvas JS gamedev middleware. Only one I kind of like, that I've seen, is Akihabara. Do you guys know more libraries worth looking at?
Yeah - like that has worked so well in Scotland. All it has given us is a crazily expensive extra tier of government who feel that they can spend English taxpayers money to give Scots things that the rest of the UK don't get.

And yes, I am Scottish and no I have never voted Tory (in fact I used to vote SNP until I met Alex Salmond).
Goa is good, but there's a lot more to Oakenfold than just that set (love his set from Havana Cuba). I have to say I'm happy to see fellow trance dinosaurs here. The electro world has moved on from the days of Oaky but I still have a vast collection that I use for marathon coding sessions.
Start posting some of your ideas to your blog and if they are good enough and interesting, people will find you.

Also remember that just being an idea person may be synonym to being lazy.

The same way ideas are worth nothing without good execution, idea people are worth next to nothing for most startups. Startups run on tight schedules and insane amount of dedication and hard work. The idea of one founder sitting in the couch and sprouting out ideas may not resonate well with the technical people you are looking for.
Employers often seem blind to the fact that the job market is a free market - if you can't get applicants for a post at the rate you are offering then it's because you aren't offering the right amount of money. Don't whine about getting the government to educate more employees with the right skills - pay more money!
I only ever use PayPal for anything if there are no other alternatives.
Alternatively, it's another shiny new toy to prevent kids from developing concentration and the ability to focus on anything that doesn't have self-illumination and a constant stream of animated effects.
Well, I think that the idea is the most important part of any project.

If your ideas suck then your product will suck as well. Any monkey can bang out code, if there is not a good idea behind it then it's just a bunch of useless text on a screen. A person has to have a vision.

I am not a programmer, It's not my trade, however, I don't think that you have to sleep with CSS3 book in order to have a revolutionary idea. Not to mention I am not asking anyone for anything, and I am not offering anyone anything. Outsourcing is cheap these days so finding a person to build it is not a problem for me; the problem is I doubt myself and I doubt my ideas. I think I have an awesome idea, yet I don't completely trust my own judgement enough to sink my life savings into.

Which is why I need a partner. That is all I was getting at. I am not looking to throw an idea at someone and say "Build it while I sit on the couch and throw out ideas like our friend above suggested."
The Travelling Salesman - 10000km through 5 countries
No doubt. They've done remarkably well but this (1) hasn't always been the case with Apple and (2) they do benefit from a brand halo they have from the iPod which did change the game.

It'll be interesting to see if they can extend their wins into a new realm like with their social network - ping. That would be a testament to the firm's brilliance.
I've a somewhat radical solution to US unemployment problem. Breakup all mega corps for e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System_Divestiture
How to Write a Persuasive Essay
Persuasive essays are written to prove the writer’s theory is correct by the use of proper evidence. The aim of the persuasive essay is to persuade the readers to agree with the writer’s point of view. Hence, it is necessary to write the essay in the proper manner.
"System calls in Linux are done through int 0x80. (actually there's a kernel patch allowing system calls to be done via the syscall (sysenter) instruction on newer CPUs, but this thing is still experimental)."

This is no longer the case. While int 0x80 still works, this is not how well behaved binaries should syscall on Linux.

The proper way is to call a magic address on a magic page in own process space, which contains the proper code to do the system call. It will execute int 0x80 on CPUs that don't support sysenter/sysexit and sysenter on those that do.

The page (vdso) is inserted in all processes' address space by the kernel. Although its address is probably fixed, the proper way to find it is to examine the ELF auxilliary vector, which in turn is passed by the kernel via the initial process stack.
A layer of abstration away from Paypal is the best solution.

I use Plimus for payment processing, and they accept payment by Paypal. So I can accept Paypal payments without the possibility of ever having to deal directly with Paypal.

As as customer, I used to like to use Paypal because it was convenient and low-risk. I'd never deal directly with them as a merchant. I feel sure that my relationship with Paypal would become the 'top idea in my mind' at some stage and might take aways days or weeks of productivity.
From studying under the streetlights to CEO of a US firm
There is no "I" in community.
I am not a programmer by trade. This does not make me lazy, it makes me a school teacher, and a geek with an idea.

Nothing more nothing less. And I never said I was looking for technical people there are half a billion Indians I can hire to build something for me.

It's a partner in crime I seek young Padawan not a programmer. I honestly don't even care if the person can program "hello world" as long as I have someone to work with me to implement my ideas and to make them better.

I suppose I could go to school for another 4 years and try and learn how to program but I really have no desire to learn programming, nor do I have the time. But that far from makes me lazy.
"The researchers looked at 40 university students. Some of the students only spoke Hebrew, while some also spoke and read Arabic well."

Does this mean that all the 40 students had prior knowledge in Hebrew?

Does this mean that the ones which "only spoke Hebrew", only spoke it (but don't read and write it), or "spoke only Hebrew" (but don't speak Arabic).

(perhaps I have the illusion that the sentence is ambiguous because I'm not a native English speaker, please correct me)

Anyway, I fail to understand how this scientific experiment is being designed.

I have the feeling that they are only testing the difficulty to learn Arabic glyphs with no scientifically measurable difficulty to learn Hebrew glyphs since the tested subjects already know them. But this cannot be true, I cannot believe that such a blatant experimental error is being performed and the results being published, so I have to be wrong. Can somebody shed more light on it?
A Computer Chip Based on Probability Not Binary
Your SmartPhone will become Your WalletPhone
Yes but it's a pain to write complex code accessing memory when you need high level functions, can't simply cast pointers to C structures and alike.
It's in their own interest to find better ways to teach/learn it.

But it might also be in their interest to make it seem inferior ..
My initial reaction was "WTF is that doing on HN?":

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Mix:

"However in 2010, Mixriot, a website which hosted stream and download links to past Essential Mix broadcasts dating back to the first ever edition for its members, was asked to remove all its past recordings by production company Somethin' Else due to copyright infringement. The Mixriot website is still live though it has since taken down all Essential Mix broadcasts."

I would expect the owner of that site to be getting a nasty letter from a lawyer Real Soon Now.
Java / Ruby is an odd choice for trading particularly HFT, everyone else I have seen seems to be using C++ / C.

Though its not as odd as compared to a quant [from a large bank which held an info session at my unive] who I met last week and told me that he uses VBA + Perl (for research not trading though).
Wow, I am speechless at the amount I have learned from these replies, thank you all so much - and keep them coming ;)

I am teaching my 10 year old sister, but I don't really know much at all myself - I wish I had back then though, hence why I am teaching her.

She is learning just for the knowledge, with the aim of being able to use it as she needs - inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1299227.

I was thinking of something like this then, from the responses:

scratch/alice->hackety hack->lpthw/invent w python->how to think like a cs/a byte of python->tools/vim/emacs/vcs (?)->google code uni?->django book

Echoing Zed Shaw here (from the link about Dive Into Python, which was extremely helpful for me): what are some decent intros to all the tools used - eg git/vcs, emacs? This is as much for me as it is for her.

Any thoughts on this flow and the choice of resources, especially those with /options/?

hackety hack->?->rails guides? (what would be a similar path for ruby?)

And if this seems to be going a bit deeper than the original scope - it is - I suppose the latter bits are more aimed at teaching me and my brother. I have coded some vb6 before, and he hasn't done anything, but we both want to learn.

For us, we want to learn how to build websites first, so I was thinking:

Sitepoint tutorial (http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/html-css-beginners-gui... (beginner html+css)/w3schools->w3schools for html5/diveintohtml5
Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand
I think an iPad would be ideal or traveling with a child of any age - particularly long haul flights.

However, I might want a sick proof case if I was letting a young child (say under 4) use it while traveling.
The market is signaling that here in the US we have a severe shortage of CEO's.

We should be asking Congress to allow H1B visas for European CEO's who will do the same job for less than half the salary.
I guess I should create an app that plays a Chopin piece when you touch the screen. Then parents can buy it and imagine their kids are genii.

Just saying... But of course it is interesting how kids can interact with computers, no question.
I would be surprised if he still does not have one.
I don't want to sound harsh or anything, but how/why exactly is paypal to blame here? Client did a chargeback, paypal did what they must do. It's you and your client at work here, not paypal.
That would increase efficiency in those corporations and INCREASE unemployment.

When I have worked for "mega corps" I saw more people getting paid to much to do nothing.