skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To try to break the tool, I ran DJB's article on IPv6 [0] to Latin and back[1]. Impressively, most of the phrases translated, but they lost most of their semantic meaning. Double-translations are still heavily influenced by the language of the second text - the text picked up lots of "servant," "slave," and "prayer" references. There were some extra problems introduced: D.J. Bernstein became J.D. Bernstein, for instance.

Most of the semantics-wrecking errors were of the same type: failing to pick a correct definition from context. Here's a paragraph from the original:

Problem: There are only a few billion public IPv4 addresses. Many of those
addresses have already been allocated. What happens when we run out of
public IPv4 addresses?

And here's the double-translation:

PROBLEM there are few billion IPv4 addresses of the State. And many of them
attributed to prayer now. What happens when we run, from the public IPv4
addresses?

The only significant error in the first sentence is "public" => "of the State." The second sentence is also mostly intact, but has one of the spurious Latin-introduced phrases, "prayer." The error in the third sentence is very minor, but enough to make the entire translation meaningless.

Overall, I'm impressed that it attempts to translate so many technical phrases. I'm not impressed by their web interface - the "contribute a better translation" tooltip makes it impossible to copy individual lines or paragraphs in Chrome.

[0] http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

[1] http://pastebin.com/B73w7nPT
Flagged for misleading title. How about "Editor of HTML5 questions need for alt text in movie poster frames." This would 1) be less editorializing; 2) make this a submission of a technical issue as opposed to a submission questioning Ian's competence.
I always tend to think that in the blogging world there are those that are journalists and those that are diary writers. The diary writers only ever succeed if they're writing about things you'd read in Penthouse Forum circa 1978.

Try not to involve yourself or your feelings too much. Offer less opinion and more substance and things based on the concrete. Use the words "I" and "You" less and consider it more of a group activity -- even though people may have not shown up yet.

Instead of lines like "Do not allow anyone to read your code out of context.", you need to put the parts together and make the reader actually understand how you got to the thought process without being demanding. Instead consider something like "From practical experience I find that often, reading code out of context can obscure the meaning, context, blah." Zed is the only person who is allowed to be this opinionated, and only because he is charming at the same time.

If you want people to read, they have to feel engaged and part of the conversation. This is key.

Find your 10 favorite blogs, or ones of people you closely identify yourself as being close to professionally speaking, and do your best to gauge the voice of the ones that are extremely readable. Find your likes and dislikes, about a particular blogger or series of posts and gauge other media sources by the same methods.

I find my best writing comes after a lot of reading, pause to think, a mental break then coming back to the subject. Give it a try.
Are you taking about Season 1, crossing the fives?
It's not relevant whether a user pays for a service or not. They are your customers.
Week of Links Compilation
Your page took 35 seconds to load here. (Here being the rural US where broadband is not available.)
It reminds me of the saying (probably butchered here) that the more we learn about a topic, the more we realize how little we really know.
Well, it's more that Java lacks certain functionality that's intrinsic to more sophisticated languages. It's often harder to express ideas in Java because it has a more limited vocabulary (to stretch an analogy).
And WOW, this just hit me after posting. Your question to HN is by far and large more blog worthy than most of the things on your blog.
People who do multicast may not be too happy.
The article starts of a little depressing, telling the reader that humans are bad at programming and we have no hope. At least it finishes telling us we just need to use a bunch of cool toys to look smarter.
People keep using the expression "great artists" to refer to a company that makes an out-of-date phone that's only popular because Enterprises can turn the camera off and force users to have a 1 million character password that they have to type before every operation.

RIM is not a "great artist". RIM merely does exactly what people with a lot of money tell them to do, and then they charge the people with a lot of money a lot of money. Then they make a lot of money. It's not art. It's business.
If they were simply unwilling, a subpoena would fix that.
There already is a more open movie database:

http://www.omdb.org
We need to remember that computers are young. Really, really young. The invention of the first-ever electronic digital computer is still an event within living memory.

This can be hard to remember. Especially when you yourself are young, you're used to thinking of things that are even slightly older than you as eternal. (When you reach my age, and you are beginning to have colleagues who literally weren't alive during formative periods of your early career, you get a deeper appreciation for the fact that people -- including yourself -- have these horizons.) For example, I did graduate work on lasers, and I built my work on top of a great deal of earlier work, so I tend to think of lasers as things that have been around for a long time. But the laser isn't very old. It turned fifty this year. Many of my friends are older than the laser. Many of its early pioneers are still wandering around.

Look up the early years of engineering. Read certain chapters of the excellent Structures, or Why Things Don't Fall Down, or for a more personal view check out Chapter 20 of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi:

http://www.classicreader.com/book/2886/21/

The early history of tall buildings is the history of towers falling down. The early history of modern bridges is the history of bridges collapsing. The early history of steam-powered transportation is the history of boiler explosions, especially in the USA, which had a reputation for quick-and-dirty mechanical hacks as far back as the early 19th century. These situations took decades to change... or longer. Sometimes an order of magnitude longer.

And, crazy ideas about the Singularity notwithstanding, technology proceeds at a human pace. Right now, we're still at the point where substantial portions of the world population don't even have access to a computer (although the smart phone promises to change that). Very few people know how to program at any level. And that is the major issue facing programmers today, as it has been since the microcomputer was invented in the 1970s: There is more value in spreading the temporary hacks around more widely and cheaply than there is in inventing more permanent and solid stuff. Until we can meet the insatiable and growing demand for poor implementations of 1970s-era computing technologies, there's really no time or money for anything else. This condition is probably temporary, but when I say "temporary" I may still be talking on the scale of decades.
How much the /48 is larger is again what I don't care as I can calculate that easily but it doesn't mean anything in how it's to be used. The relevant piece is:

"5 RIRs, /23 to /12, smallest gets 512 /32 blocks, one per ISP, ISP divides into 64K /48 blocks, typically one for each customer"

It's obvious that the "customer" here is not "every man on Earth" or "every phone" but probably should be something like the smaller ISP or the big company. The lower 64 bits are it seems effectively "unique device id." So the idea is to use upper 64 bits to fix the location of the device and lower 64 to address the device. And yes, I think I've understood that the "device id" (lower 64-bits) doesn't have to be fixed and encoded in hardware.
"Max Klein" isn't a real person, and is hardly a reputable source.
H-bombs are sitting on tops of 30-year old space rockets right now.

Sending them to defeat asteroid might be even more devastating than not sending them though.
I write my software in Haskell because it doesn't crash in production. But then again, before I deploy, I ensure that there are unit tests.
much sense this does make not.
Slightly more relevant link: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta#New%20features%2...
Interesting.

My father was always pissed off. Now my sister is always pissed off. I'd like to send her this paper, but I think that would just piss her off.
I think that's a low-ball cost. I've seen some estimates at $1 tr. But still yes, the US (and the US alone) could conceivably afford that (compare to cost of Iraq for example), so I take your point. However, even so, i don't think even the US would (or should) attempt this alone. (It's not just cash, but expertise too).

Re the bailout figure: this is slightly misleading. This isn't money that's just been "spent". It's been invested - in purchasing assets and equity from the bailed out institutions. These institutions are largely expected to buy back these investments at a later date netting the US govt a profit (some already have). Additionally of course, the cost of NOT bailing out the banks may have been much, much more. So I don't think it's a comparable number.
> how much more time do hardware vendors need to put this in consumer products, where we'll see arguably the most pain (in terms of hand-holding service requirements)?

Under IPv6, won't customers just need a hub or a switch? Every IPv6-aware device in the home will just request a unique address directly from the ISP, completely eliminating the need for home routers. Of course, devices still needing IPv4 would need some other solution.

Of course, that doesn't come without a tradeoff (as mentioned in the submission). Those IPv6 devices will need to be aware that they are connected to the Internet at large, and security will need to be addressed accordingly.
This release uses a new interface font, which is the first major OS (that I know of, anyways) to not use a Helvetica-like font for their GUI. Mark Shuttleworth talks about the decision and impact on his blog: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/537
That's not necessary - we don't ourselves know the characters in the movie upon chancing on the page, and there's also readable text below explaining the actors (and who they're playing).
Not really. Mutable refs are provided by ST, which allows for chunks of your program where you are mutating state, but where the mutable state can't leak outside of boundaries you set.

(There is also the good-old-IORef, but I avoid IO for anything that's not input or output.)
The OP of the issue explained that he often uses the alt descriptions of movie posters to decide which movie he wants to see in the theatre.
But then again the use of colors in an image conveys meaning. That does not mean that there should be alt texts for each color channel. The alternative content should be provided at a level that makes sense if you don't have access to the specific media.

The HTML5 spec specifically addresses accessibility for video like this:

To make video content accessible to the blind, deaf, and those with other physical or cognitive disabilities, authors are expected to provide alternative media streams and/or to embed accessibility aids (such as caption or subtitle tracks, audio description tracks, or sign-language overlays) into their media streams. (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...)

This is much more sensible that providing an alt text for the first frame in the video.
In the singular, 'littera' is a character/single letter (e.g., 'a'). Normally, Romans used the plural ('litterae' - or other forms for other cases) to mean a document of some kind.
And the thing that really bugs me about all this is that having written this disingenuous article, he's just managed to get a platform to market his book to the thousands of people who are currently reading this article in order to complain about what a tool this guy is.

There's even a handy Amazon link from within the article!
It's difficult to see whether he's hopelessly naive or deeply disingenuous.
ICBMs don't even make it to orbit - if you wait till an asteroid is close enough that an ICBM could hit it then you might as well not bother.

[NB I do know that the SS-25 could do fractional orbits.]
Ian said "Why would you (a blind user) want to know what the poster frame is? How does it affect you?"

That is NOT questioning an assumption. He seems to imply that blind users have no use for an information that is interesting to other people.
screenshots: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/09/ubuntu-1010-maverick-meerkat-...
Here in Idaho, with the largest concentration of Basque short of the EU (might be larger, not sure), such a thing would be an excellent idea. I grew up wondering what people were saying and it always sort of drove me nuts :) These days when they say it electronically a translation either way would be magical!
We can't remember all the methods our code needs to call, so we use autocompleting IDEs to remind us.

I thought memorizing all of the details of these was only important in school, and even then only at exam time.
You can running multiple web and mail servers behind a single IP address. I personally am not doing this though because I have 5 IP addresses allocated to me, so I take advantage of them.
You are missing the point. We are not talking about "power" here.
Don't write to get things off your chest, write to entertain the people you want reading your stuff. It's like a book - you write to entertain or educate others, not yourself.
Funnily enough I've been struck with a block on a "page" from Facebook; the page is for a nearby City.

My crime appears to have been removing spam posts that were advertising affiliate links and pyramid schemes and the likes.

Obviously I've just been blocked from full access with no questions to me and no way for me to enquire if I'll ever get any of that access back or indeed if they plan on someone else taking an editorial view of the page. The page meanwhile is going to the dogs filling with more and more spam.

Obviously my actions weren't nice for some people either - spammers need to spam to make money and I was obviously preventing that.

So, I think my point is it cuts both ways and that Facebook appear to be rather haphazardly managing their monsterlith.
The font is available on the CD, but it has not been set as default (and it might not be default in the final release either).
Microsoft rumored to have put in a bid for Linden Labs makers of Second Life
Indeed, knowing that things suck and being able to document why they suck, and why your approach is somewhat better is a good skill. It's not all smoke and mirrors - it's providing a somewhat objective assessment of the situation.

I provide unit tests and documentation for projects - many others don't. Well... showing that to a client and saying "you're getting this which will help you understand what I'm doing, and help future devs understand what I did" is just good sense. If the client values it, they will pick you over someone else. If they don't value it, they will after they choose the cowboy over you . :)
The colorized picture doesn't have that and I'm not sure you could tie it up with the other information on the page easily.
Entering famous quotations probably short-circuits the translator, at least that's how it looks like when you're entering something like "I came, saw, conquered".
In my particular instance of the Universe, \t is usually represented by 8 spaces. I still prefer 4 though.
And coincidentally the only planet in our solar system's habitable zone that supports life is the one with a largish moon.
$2.99 * 115,000 copies = $343,850

That was over the course of 5 months = $68,770 per month

Impressive for a game that took 5 days to develop.
Uh huh. Wait. I thought the worm was, through careful reverse engineering, established to have been released at almost exactly the same time as the Bushehr nuclear plant in Iran began having problems? I thought it targeted specific text segment strings in the PLC programs of nuclear plants? Now it's targeting millions of computers in China?

Are there millions of PLC setups in China?

People just make stuff up with malware stories. Maybe this is all true, but it's just as likely that none of it is.

"Cyberweapon".
Ask HN: Does anyone know of any .NET user groups in London?
I've found this one: http://www.dnug.org.uk/ but the register button is 404'ed and there's nothing about any forthcoming meetings.

Is anyone here a member of this one or any others in London?
Wait, maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but you've found that having people explicitly searching for you increases your bounce rate? Wouldn't those people be less likely to bounce? Your site is literally what they were looking for (even if they are disappointed when they arrive).

For what it's worth, while there are some visitors explicitly looking for my site, most are coming in from long tail search queries (and those are the ones that tend to bounce).

I'm just wondering if 75% bounce rate is something to worry about. My gut feeling is that this is too high. In most other sites I've worked with this was more in the 35 to 45% range, but those were entirely different businesses.
I am german also, and I never heard of people having to use vacation for sick days. You need to provide a doctors note (generally only after the third day of sickness) and then you are set. You just miss the time, but get paid and do not have to make up for anything.
For IANA -> RIR allocations, http://lacnic.net/documentos/lacnicvii/POLITICA-IPV6-IANA-RI...
and for an example of RIR allocation to ISP/end user:
https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html

Each RIR has it's own policy though, so check with the one you're concerned with (ARIN vs APNIC, etc).
Oh, sorry, just realized that may have been interpreted incorrectly. The page works, but only with the example CSS - the Adblock code on the page is uneditable.
FWIW, your math is off you state:
"35,000 miles per hour / 60 = 583 miles per second."

Really, this would be:
35,000 mph / (60 minutes per hour) / (60 seconds per minute) = 9.72 miles per second.

Then just decrease the distance traveled by a factor of 60, so instead of 386 billion miles traveled by V2, it would be about 6.4 billion miles.
I've always believed that I am a pretty terrible programmer.

I'm cool with that because I know I am gradually becoming better and better each day.

I invoke 3 core principals/ideals:

* No matter how good you are, someone is always better than you. Yes. Always.

* Surround yourself with people smarter than you, rather than shun them egotistically. Intelligence is contagious.

* Admit fault, show humility to others who do the same.
Clickable link: http://ShleppingData.com
Freelancers. Companies vastly more, or the same rates for inexperienced developers.
The pope is not our infallible leader. He's fallible just like everybody else. Popes are only infallible when they are speaking ex cathedra (from the chair). They don't do this very often. Most infallible doctrines have actually been put in place by the college of cardinals. I seriously doubt that Ratzinger was elected pope to avoid criminal charges.

I don't have the time to address these things properly, but here's the short form.

We are better now, at least in the US--and the other countries are starting to get it together as well. If I remember correctly, any case of abuse (not just child rape, I do mean abuse--rape is a terrible form of abuse, but there are other forms as well) is reported to authorities.

The one thing I will say about Africa is that the church teaches abstinence. If you're going to ignore the abstinence teaching, you might as well ignore the condom teaching as well. You can't just pick and choose which parts of Church teaching to follow (but everybody does, and that's why we have problems...)

Of the money I give my church, 10% goes to my diocese. I don't think my diocese has had the same problems that other diocese have--so no, I'm not supporting the practice. Some of the diocese's money then goes to the Vatican (and I think the USCCB, but I'm not sure), but I believe most if not all of that goes to charity work. You can't hold people responsible for actions that they did not know about. And I believe that these things are no longer going on.

If you want to continue this conversation, feel free to email me and I will try to explain more when I get enough time to properly research and answer things. I think that this is getting way OT for HN, so I do not intend to make any further response on here.

Have a good day!
How's Lucida Grande Helvetica-like?
It sounds like you don't have a clear voice.

To find that you might want to try defining clear goals for your blog and limiting it to a certain topic area and then begin to write.

By reposting comments there's no overarching thread that pulls your blog together into a coherent narrative. A good blog does that.

It seems like you're able to write well and have the time to do it so go for it.

PS It might help to find a comment you liked and then re-write it into a blog post, IE explain to your audience the context and then your opinion/thoughts.
Or may it's an honest question. May he's just skeptical(I am) and really wants to know. After-all there are no stupid questions, only stupid people, right?
Wait, what? OP claims that we are bad programmers because we use too many tools:

We can't remember all the methods our code needs to call, so we use autocompleting IDEs to remind us.

and then recommends using tools to become better programmers:

These tools flag common mistakes... really common mistakes.

I know I'm in the minority because I've had this debate with almost every programmer I know, but I do not use an IDE for exactly this reason. I want the "firmware" that knows how to assemble building blocks of code to be in my brain, not in my computer. To me, writing code is like driving a stick shift, for much of it I don't even think, it's unconscious competence. Can you imagine driving a car with auto-complete, color coding, or drop down menus? To this day, I get pissed off when something doesn't compile the first time, usually because of a typo.

There's a time and a place for every tool. An IDE or test suite is like a back brace or crutches; they are indispensable when you really need them, but they only weaken you when you're healthy. I guess I draw the line in a different place from OP (and almost everyone else I know).
For using Java. The joke being that Oracle are suing Google for the Java in Dalvik/Android -- next they'll be after Minecraft.

Dear HN: If someone asks a serious question in the comments -- there isn't a need to downvote them. Downvote crap like "f1rst p0st" - leave questions as they are.
I think your posts have good content, the key issue here currently is delivery and audience.

Normally creating good content would be the first challenge, but you seem to have good content already. Perhaps you should look to change it to fit the blog audience / open it up further for discussion.

They key problem is that currently your audience is 0 (or very close to 0). It is unlikely that your audience will go from 0 to big numbers over night. So it is something you will have to work on and grow over time.

Firstly, think about what streams you can use to gain new audience members per post (submission to content aggregators / forums / guest posts on other blogs).

Then think about building a consistent schedule for releasing new content. Currently you are doing this daily, but I would suggest weekly (to spread the content further). Make this known to the audience so they know when to check back for new content.

Finally once you start having an audience, you'll want to keep it. Use platforms such as twitter and email lists to help inform that audience when new content is released so they keep coming back.

Slowly over time this should start making your blog a success.