skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many linguists claim that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) has been soundly disproved. They have bags of evidence to show that the usual, strong interpretation is false.

And yet every programmer with proficiency in several languages knows that some problems are easier solved in Python, others in C++, and others in AWK. Further, every polyglot I know will shift language according to nuances in the thoughts they're trying to express, because some languages have more/better/finer distinctions about different things.

In Spanish the words for "to wait" and "to hope" are the same. In some contexts the words for "Even" and "Same" are both translated into the Frech as "meme" (as in "meme chose" - "same thing"). Perhaps these conflations of words show a conflation of concept. Yes, the differences in concepts exist in the minds of the speakers, but the language to express them precisely isn't always there.

There's a Spanish joke: "¿Cómo se llama a un ascensor en Inglés?" - "Con su dedo." It doesn't translate into English - you need to read the Spanish. Again, vocabulary conflation.

SWH has been debated here on HN before, many times, and no doubt it will again, with the research-based linguists saying there's no difference in lanugage chosen, and the polyglots snorting derisively.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658951

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218862

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595991

I've repeated this comment in a new submission since I think the subject deserves a discussion of its own:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814973
The Search for Grounded Architectures of Cognition
I'm not the least bit surprised that other people first thought to translate the example text. :)

There was a website at one point which would pass example text through babelfish's English to Spanish filter, then back to English to Russian to English to French to English to Korean to English (or somesuch), and the levels of artifacts introduced along the way sounded quite similar (though there was usually a random word in Russian or something thrown in). It was particularly fun passing legalese through it.
Language affecting thought - the question arises again.
Over here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1812165

the question has again arisen about language affecting thought:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1813181

I've replied there, but thought I'd start a separate discussion in case people are interested.
Please don't use montylingua. It's not updated anymore, badly written, author is arguing about software license terms... and it's generally worse than nltk in almost every way. You'll be better off leaving montylingua alone.
From the contact page:

MacRuby is a free software project by Apple Inc. Many folks inside and outside of Apple contribute to this great project and we have a MacRuby Project Team page to list them. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, ideas or bugs to report.
MacRuby and the Mac App Store
The impression I have of WP7 is that it's targeting the average user, where the average user is, for example:-

- Someone who listens to mostly major label music

- Someone who's friends store their mobile number in their facebook profile

- Is an avid consumer of social networks in general

Perhaps this is sensible on Microsoft's part but I definitely prefer a device that is less targeted in it's approach. Same applies to the Pre.
Clickable:

+ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1812165

+ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1813181

And my reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814970

Repeated here:

Many linguists claim that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) has been soundly disproved. They have bags of evidence to show that the usual, strong interpretation is false.

And yet every programmer with proficiency in several languages knows that some problems are easier solved in Python, others in C++, and others in AWK. Further, every polyglot I know will shift language according to nuances in the thoughts they're trying to express, because some languages have more/better/finer distinctions about different things.

In Spanish the words for "to wait" and "to hope" are the same. In some contexts the words for "Even" and "Same" are both translated into the Frech as "meme" (as in "meme chose" - "same thing"). Perhaps these conflations of words show a conflation of concept. Yes, the differences in concepts exist in the minds of the speakers, but the language to express them precisely isn't always there.

There's a Spanish joke: "¿Cómo se llama a un ascensor en Inglés?" - "Con su dedo." It doesn't translate into English - you need to read the Spanish. Again, vocabulary conflation.

SWH has been debated here on HN before, many times, and no doubt it will again, with the research-based linguists saying there's no difference in lanugage chosen, and the polyglots snorting derisively.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658951

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218862

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595991
Working With Linq's Expression Trees Visually
If you take expressions in the lambda calculus to be programs, then that's not too bad. You don't even have to be liberal in your interpretation of `run'.

Of course "computer term" is a bad choice. It's mathematics (or its hyped subfield of computer science).
My eee pc from two years ago doesn't have an optical drive. How is this news?
> I keep one in a small fireproof safe and the other next to my computer.

No off-site backups?
You will be surprised how much you can gain from weekly exercise: http://www.amazon.com/Super-Squats-Pounds-Muscle-Weeks/dp/09... and http://www.ironworkout.com/20_rep_squat.htm

And supersquats are extremely short exercise program: you warm up, you supersquat, you go home to eat and sleep.

About 40 minutes for all steps, except for going home. (40/60)*6 is exactly 4 hours. ;)

(if your supersquat weights are huge, you will need full week to rehabilitate)
Nokia further refines development strategy to unify Symbian and MeeGo
Opera 11 alpha
Really, that's very surprising. I'm a longtime Cyberduck user and had no idea...
Yeah, OSX's X11 is utterly dreadful.
http://venturehacks.com/archives
I don't think so. It makes it sound like if that's ever a bother, they'll drop it. But right now, they probably have the deployment architecture so no reason to ever remove it.

On the other hand, don't hold your breath for an OpenJDK release from Apple. In fact, that's very likely the purpose of the move: they're warning developers they will not port Java 7.
Well, maybe not, but at least I don't run around my beiberhood wearing a hoodie the color of the sun yelling BOOM HEADSHOT BILLY MAYS HERE TO EXPLAIN EASTER at 4:30 in the morning.
I said this somewhere else, but my Asus eee PC w/Ubuntu from 2008 does not have an optical drive and has an SSD. Apple's a little late to the game. Once again they do something that isn't new and the world thinks that it's innovative or earth-shattering.
Antilla Mukesh Ambani Home Photos Pics, Images
Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man and the fourth-richest man in the world, is likely to set a record with the world's most expensive residential home. Antilla is the new house of Mukesh Ambani. This house break the record for most expensive house in the world. This is the first home in the world that exceeds $ 1 billion.
> Their move from GCC to clang is no coincidence.

Erm... what? Clang has already been ported to Windows (and other platforms). Their move from GCC to clang comes from GCC sucking goat's balls at error reporting and being integrated into an IDE. You might want to note Apple produces an IDE so that's kind-of a big deal for them, and a big reason for the existence of LLVM and related technologies (Clang, LLDB, ...) is very much that they can be used as libraries and easily integrated into tools.

Seriously, you should be careful, your anti-apple-tag shows a bit too heavily in that comment.
How funny that somebody would laud the German schooling system. They also have enough bullying --- though I do not know whether it's statistically less or more than in the US. And I only know about the Gymnasien first hand. The other types are just awful, from what I heard.

In Germany people talk about the schooling system mostly in terms of it lowering social mobility and failing to give a good education.
I travel a lot and the space and weight saved by not having an optical drive would be great for me. In fact I'm shopping for a new laptop now (though not a Mac) and finding a reasonably-priced 14-incher without an optical drive is tough. Anyone have any recommendations?
It's meh. Not as bad as GTK+ by a long shot but still a far cry from native applications. And OSX users generally don't like non-native applications (for a number of reasons)
I'd love to try it, but unfortunately I don't own a Mac, nor an iPhone. Besides, I wonder how long it'll take before the perverts take over Facelette, it hasn't happened yet I presume?

For people without 'Apple products and stuff', try http://www.blurrypeople.com instead.
Photo folders wholesale
We offer you Photo Folders Wholesale that is not only good to look at but are also much significant to the boost that it can offer to both organization’s status and also its representation. In fact when it comes to the custom folder printing companies, they offer Photo Folders Wholesale in several designs and styles as they recognize it significance to a business at wholesale price.
Ask HN: Will you use an "Evernote for words" I plan to build?
I'm planning on building a dead simple word list app that lets you store difficult words that you stumble upon while surfing (via a browser add-on). This list then gets synced across your devices, much like Evernote.

The app then pulls the corresponding meanings to become your private repository of those tricky words that you tend to look up (and subsequently forget - only, now you won't) when reading articles online.

A few months back, I decided to use Evernote to consciously capture new or challenging words that I encountered while reading books or surfing. (If you read pg's essays fairly regularly, I bet you've stumbled upon at least the odd word you didn't already know). Alarmed at how rapidly this list exploded, I decided I could use an app that automated sorting of the words, fetching of their meanings and most importantly, syncing of the list across devices and browsers.

I'd like to know if there's an app out there that does this well that I don't know about yet. If not, is this an itch that we share? Do you see yourself using this app if I build it? Please give me a shout, it'll spur me on for sure.

[I'm aware that dictionary.com lets you maintain word lists and create flash cards. This, however, doesn't solve my "one universal account that syncs across multiple devices" need which is make-or-break IMO.]
The replica 1 is a functional clone of the Apple 1 computer created in 1976.
Most people lack the bandwidth to be able to stream 720, yet alone 1080 video.

A 1080p Blu-ray rip is usually around 10GB for a 2 hour movie. Streaming 10GB in 2 hours requires a connection speed of around 12Mbit/sec. 720p rips are 5-6GB, so they'd require 6-7Mbit/sec. Apple only offers 720p right now, so most consumer broadband connections should be able to stream their shows.

I in fact struggle to stream even low-quality YouTube videos without having to wait for it to buffer for a few minutes.

Low quality YouTube videos are 480x360, with bitrates around 900kbps (that's kilobits, not bytes). So there's probably an issue with your ISP or YouTube's CDN. Anyway, back on topic...

I'd bet against Blu-ray in the long run. Video on demand has quite a few advantages. It doesn't require the purchase of a new player or optical drive. It offers a shorter time from when you decide, "I want to watch this." to when you actually start watching it. If you don't have the bandwidth to stream a movie, you can still download it faster than it takes to ship the Blu-ray disc. Even if you run to a store and buy/rent the disc (let's say 20 minutes round trip), in that time you could have buffered 1.5GB over a 10Mbit connection. Blu-ray beats streaming when it comes to video quality, but connection speeds and codecs are only going to get better.
Google Investing in More Data Center Capacity
There are parts of linguistics that also apply directly to programming, particularly when working with compilers and parsing.
I love Qt, and much prefer working with it to Cocoa, but Qt on OS X is ugly and doesn't feel particularly native. I can usually recognize a Qt app as soon as it starts up. It still gets the job done in the cases where elegance doesn't matter (i.e. we have a tool for optimizing query parameters that has a Qt GUI that we just use internally), but for places where it does, it's better to go with Cocoa.
Resumption of the crypto wars?
Opera 11 Extensions: Quick Preview
Their hosting costs were around $35k according to http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/ctz7c/your_gold_dollar...

Since then afaik they've added more servers.

> "but they did make enough to stay afloat"

I think Reddit has been operating at a loss for quite some time.
I also read on TC: "WP7′s networking APIs currently lacks direct sockets support. If developers want to network their apps, they’ve gotta go through the HTTP protocol."

So, with the voice of the dude from WP7's commercial:

"Really?"
Steve, if hipmunk does well maybe you and friends and the reddit users can buy reddit back.
The Corporatization of the University: Part III --- Guest Post By Agnes Larson
FreeBSD's ministat (http://www.unix.com/man-page/FreeBSD/1/MINISTAT/) is a good one, too.
I love Vaio series, but isn't that 2x more expensive than Air?
Isn't this a rather old trend? As technology becomes more complex, we rely on the creator to make sensible decisions about the interface to allow us to focus primarily on what is relevant to achieving our goal.

Abstraction is the only way technology can become more powerful and more accessible at the same time.
Trance / Progressive / House music gets me into the flow.
The same kind of mode toggle switch you have on a camera should work.
I'm using catch.com for text snippets I need to have both on my computer and on my Android phone. So I wouldn't have a use for your app I think.

Suggestion: I could imagine to use an app that gives me a few new words to learn in a foreign language every day. Perhaps with a feature that tests previous days words when I log on to check what is new.
Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere
I used 20Mbit in the example because that's what I have. I'm on Comcast, which has a soft cap of 250GB/month. I'd have to watch a movie every day to get close to their limit. A 10Mbit connection would double the download time to 60-80 minutes, which is still fast enough to stream.
Clang/LLVM is BSD while GCC is GPL. That means Apple can extend them all they want without ever giving you, or their competition, any sources.

If they ever perceive a threat from their competition, Clang/LLVM provides a lot more maneuvering space than GCC ever would.

And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design.
Even if you are avoiding Google-sized tasks, there turn out to be advantages to treating your local machine as a dumb terminal.

One is that remote machines can be rented instead of being bought.

Another is that the configuration of everything becomes easier. You buy new laptops by taking them out of the box, running a handful of app installers, and moving over a SSH key or two and an encrypted password file. Your career as amateur sysadmin might just be over. (If you miss the chance to build your own Linux kernel, of course, there's plenty of work left for you as a cloud sysadmin. But cloud system admin is also usually easier, because machines in data centers come with nifty administration tools, like SANs and dashboards, that benefit from economies of scale.)

Security: When you lose the "dumb terminal" you lose no data. You do lose the keys that are on the machine, but you can revoke those. And it is much, much easier to get consistent automated backups on a datacenter box than on a laptop.

There are definite problems with the "cloud" approach, such as "who owns the data and how do you trust it is being handled properly", but the advantages are strong these days.
Yeah, very confusing. I thought it was some sort of interview at the bottom at first.
Your original text is:
With great power comes great responsibility.

Your reworded text is:
With outstanding powerfulness semen outstanding responsibility.

D:
Render WMF, EMF into Raster Graphics Format & Convert WMF to PNG
Aspose.Metafiles is your Java solution for effectively managing metafiles. It allows your Java applications to quickly and easily display and play both WMF and EMF files. It also offers support for metafile conversions. With Aspose.Metafiles your development staff will be able to convert metafiles to other popular graphic formats. It was built to work seamlessly with Aspose.Slides for Java. It enables you to add both WMF & EMF files into your PowerPoint presentations created with Aspose.Slides.
"or her". But then some team might complain, let alone all the transgender. Can we, just for a second, assume good faith and instead inspect your wise (but girly) words?

PS: As a foreigner learning German, do you notice the small differences in German? I have a somewhat disappointed view on the matter of these pathetic and almost zynic gendering of language. What's the point of it as long as women here in Austria earn 30% less than men do? It's wrong to believe that things can change by using a different wording.
Your comment was ignorant, arrogant and used one of the stupider (old) clichés around. It's a shame that it's up to +3.

You claim that people have been releasing desktop software just fine. Utter nonsense. If you're Microsoft, Adobe, etc. then it's been ok but if you're a sole developer making indie software the normal distribution routes weren't available. That meant going on some shareware site, freshmeat, make your own site or something else and hope people can find you.

The App store changes all this for the mainstream desktop [1] and it's going to be a big deal for indie developers. I'm surprised to see so many people on this site poo pooing it as this has to be one of the most startup-relevant things to happen to the desktop in decades.

[1] Linux has had this for a long time and it was one of its few advantages as a desktop system.
the illusion of freedom...
catch.com seems to be similar to Evernote or SimpleNote.
My app intends to be a dictionary-integrated word list for words that you discover and want to remember, not a note syncing app. So you might eventually find it useful.

That said, "words of the day" is an interesting feature (although it isn't on my roadmap for v0.1).
I don't understand why Google would use virtualisation. Why would they split a physical box up?

Ease of administration. It turns out to be much easier to have ten virtual machines running one daemon each than one virtual machine running ten daemons. Fewer interactions, cleaner process boundaries (the boundary between one VM and another is pretty thick), easier debugging. Easier to swap out parts without affecting other parts. Much easier scaling. (If you need more servers for Service X, launch more VMs; if your machine needs more RAM to hold those VMs, launch the VMs on a different physical box -- the system doesn't need to be changed to support that because it's already architected to assume separate "machines" for everything.)

For more on the subject ask Ezra Zygmuntowicz or his blog and books. I stole all of this material from him.
List Gorilla: Our project over the last few months
Time Management
Time Management: How to Avoid Fragmentation and Distraction
www.listgorilla.com

What is it?
List Gorilla is a place to find and create lists of all the things you care about. The items in each list are sorted and curated by you and the community. Whether you are into food, science, cinema or something more obscure, make a list about whatever interests you and watch how it evolves.

Feedback
Any feedback on the idea, execution and performance is much appreciated. We have some ideas about where we would like to take this idea but I'm also very curious to hear yours. You can also email me directly at oneintenthousand@gmail.com

Thanks,
Jason
Now deprecate your own OpenGL drivers.
Banning? I think that seems rather unlikely. To my knowledge Apple's never done anything of the sort on the desktop. On mobile platforms users are more accustomed to having restrictions in place, but if they banned Java on Mac OS the backlash would be immense.
I did not know that Naval had a site like this. Thanks!
I would certainly look into it. I regularly stumble upon words I don't know (or don't know the exact meaning of) either in my native tongue (Dutch) or in English even though my vocabulary in both languages is extensive. Sometimes I write them down or store them somewhere but mostly I do not because it's not worth the effort. If it's easy to store words into this service, through an extension or a bookmarklet, it might work for me.
A problem I come across with Dutch words is that there is no proper Dutch dictionary on the internet and I have to VPN into the university library to look up the definition, which is a bit of a hassle.

Aggregated data of the users might also provide valuable information as to which words are generally considered difficult.
The big question is whether the next generation of MacBook Pros will also drop the optical drive or whether they will wait another year or so.

The optical drive has been very much neglected by Apple: there is no Blu-ray drive in any Mac they sell. Removing all optical drives in the next year or so certainly wouldn’t surprise me. (I actually hope that they will do just that. I’m going to buy a 15" MBP next year and I sure would like it to be a bit lighter and with a somewhat bigger battery.)
Free As A Bird: Initial Thoughts After A Day With The New MacBook Air
This move is consistent with Apple's corporate strategy; a transition away from desktop computing and physical media, to a range of thin devices accessing online media via the cloud.

This was Apple's strategy well before the cloud, viz. deprecation of the floppy drive before most consumers even knew what the internet was.
> I'm quite disappointed that the discussion about gay founders was shot down

I really hope this hacker community isn't split on lines of gender, sexual orientation, nationality, age, dietary, operating system or language preferences. We should be supportive.
Last time I tried it worked in Wine with no problems.
Apple posts guidelines for Mac App Store (and we have highlights)
The flash future of the MacBook
Django's two flavors of model inheritance
Search Engine History
Awesome, the first HNer whose frustration resonates with mine!

I must admit, internationalization didn't cross my mind. It shouldn't be too hard though, all we'll need is a decent API / site that we can scrape.
Thank you!

We're in beta and are still figuring out the pricing as we go along. Absolutely agree that cost, among other things, stands in the way of many independent developers.
that's a great response, cheers
Ah, I didn't get that from your original comment. If you could figure this out you could probably.... erm.... <whisper>patent it</> and sell it for big bucks to any of the big phone players.
Conversation With Tom Perkins, The Godfather Of Venture Capital
Here's a good resource for LGBT entrepreneurs:
http://www.startout.org/

They have events in SF and NYC.
Great design, and although the idea seems trivial I clicked around quite a bit. I could imagine to visit the page with my phone occasionally if the mobile client is well-made. Can't test right now.
Thank you!

I hope my reply was somewhat helpful in terms of answering your questions. Always glad to meet other hardware folks here on HN.