skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unfortunately, it's also very easy for an engineer to jump ship after their training - meaning a very expensive loss of time and effort.

Keeping your employees is your job, not theirs. No relationship lasts when one partner starts neglecting the other and another interested partner comes in.
Knowing the answer and feeling somewhat nostalgic about it makes me feel old!
What does that have to do with the state of welfare? If anything economics is usually used as a justification for not having a very inclusive welfare system.
The #1 Goal of Your Website
As a Java programmer, I once was welcomed at a new job: "Here you are. Effective Java. Read it all, cover to cover." Having programmed in Java for a couple of years, it was like a punch direct to my face. And it was awesome.
Its amazing how many different ways to do something there can be, even when it may seem initially that the way you've been taught is the only possible one. The something in this case being language.

Which is one reason to speak or code in more than one language.
There used to be a website that would run this in your browser, and submit back to the server the length of the longest randomly-generated substring of Shakespeare. Not sure if it's still around.

I ran it for about 5 minutes on an old computer and got about a sentence worth. Alas I didn't have infinite time to spare.
You would get a SocketError exception from getaddrinfo because HTTParty (which uses Net::HTTP) can't lookup the hostname. If the hostname is already resolved, you'd get a Errno::EHOSTUNREACH exception from connect because there is no route to Google's servers.
It is interesting to see how fast this key spreads over the net. At the moment, a quick google search shows 26,700 results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22C0+CE+FE+84+C2+27+F7+5B%22
http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/08/apple-bans-flash-to-iphone...

Apple could support flash for nothing... Adobe has tried to do it for them, with both direct flash support and this conversion tool. Apple is making a purely idealogical decision.
I watched the Pixar Story DVD and when they mentioned that Jobs was writing a million dollar personal check every month to keep the company afloat my opinion on his running the company changed instantly. Most opinions of his role as CEO are really dismissive of him and give all the credit to Lasseter (who does deserve a lot of credit). But Lasseter, beyond working in the company, has no real skin in the game. He doesn't have to justify to himself that this investment may not work out, and continue giving it money...for 10 years. And if Pixar failed its not his bank account that would look like a crater.

So when someone opines that Steve didn't really influence Pixar, I casually mention that $100 million over 10 years gets you a lot of influence. And then ask them to read the pixar story.
தமிழக போக்குவரத்துகழங்கங்களின் நஷ்டம் ரூ.1000 கோடி
Yes, people have and received partial refunding from Amazon *, and people have also tried suing Sony as well in Europe.

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/amazon-s-plays...
Very misleading. It highlights Ireland as a CDMA country (there's a trial apparently) However if you had a CDMA mobile phone, it won't work in Ireland.
They may have even lasted into the release PS4 and so benefit from nearly zero piracy through the product cycle.
Surely the defacto standard is h.264 with FLV for fallback.

Can anyone name a single site with significant traffic cother than Google/Youtube who are doing WebM or Ogg?
There's a chance they might be sold out.
10 SEO Facts That Will Blow Your Mind
Actually what strikes me the most interesting is the fact that Stack's largest audience is still from the US.

I would think that by now SO would see (much) more international traffic.
Really? From my experience English to Spanish translation works pretty well in Google Translate. I've been using it a lot when I started to live in Spain and my Spanish skills were not too great yet: people were actually complementing me for how good my (written) Spanish is and were in huge shock when they met me in person and it turned out that I barely can formulate any sentence. True story.
As Pliny the Younger proclaimed: "There never was a book so bad that it was not good in some passage or another."
Disappointing. I was expecting it to be a wiki editable (only) by monkeys. I was looking forward to seeing their progress.
Nintendo 3DS stolen from production line and disassembled
Camouflage to avoid being eaten isn't quite the same thing. It is the difference between gaining an advantage as distinct from avoiding a disadvantage.
Twaves: How ZeroTurnaround follows team, app and business activity using Twitter
The one that gets me is paying to move a file across the internet. I've still not seen a good explanation of how that is possible even given the existence of patents on the process of creating or displaying the file at either end. (And note, you still have to pay this if you charge for access to the video or your site as a whole).
It's the other way around. You gain credibility by asking good questions and lose it by asking stupid questions.
Highlighting is neat; but concerning deep linking, the parent has a point: since the NYT controls the source, why not simply generate anchors for each paragraph?

The upside would be that there would be much less work needed to find edited paragraphs: a paragraph would be identified by its anchor and it could be changed completely, as long as the anchor is still there the link's fine.

This approach has certainly been envisioned: it would be interesting to know why it was put aside?
This is MySpace's dot com moment. To me it seems highly unlikely, short of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, that MySpace will survive for very much longer. The niche which they occupied has been successfully colonised by Facebook, and there are plenty of other sites where you can go to listen to and buy music, or watch music videos.
But still not as elegant as:
echo "Ciao mondo"->it_to_en();
would be.
It's nice to see that HN is thinking of us :)

My housemates and I had to evacuate our apartment building this morning. Our place is on the fourth story so our things should be ok, but we won't be able to get back until Saturday, if not later. After all the thunder, lightning, and rain over the last few days it was a bit surreal to be wading down our street (carrying my pack out of the water and trying not to let the cat drown) on a hot and sunny summer morning.
Slavery was once legal in the US, too.
I enjoyed the books for their ideas also. The fact that the presentation is flawed is unfortunately a hindrance that breaks the spell ("oh no, not that trope once again"). On the other hand, some authors are so good at the presentation that their writing also breaks the spell, but for the reason that I want to stop and admire it. The latter is a less hurtful problem of course :)
I'm not one of the libertarian crowd, so what I say below is not just a knee-jerk response, and in any case I don't really wish to pursue these sorts of discussions (politics) here, because they end badly.

Suffice it to say though, that you can't summarize the problem and solution in "lack of unions and labor laws". Italy, where I reside, has both, especially the latter, and they are quite detrimental in many ways.

It's a complex issue with many factors, and likely has both regulatory, cultural and economic causes and solutions, some of which are easy to change and some that aren't.
I think your example demonstrates very well why one would yearn for Ruby. The ability to give an extra method to a base class allows you to build very expressive code.

edit: and, BTW, the to_spanish method is not defined in the https://github.com/jimmycuadra/to_lang/blob/master/lib/to_la... module.
That's phase 2. Phase 3 is the middle way: be clever about balancing all those forces. Use the new library, but only if your gut feeling tells you that it's also the right choice for the future. Change the code without hesitation, but do hesitate if you think that it may cause more problems than it resolves. Etc.

Experience is a bitch. There are no blacks and whites, only a grey mess.
That is a very good article.

One architectural takeaway suggestion I've learned over the years, which is not obvious when reading that article:

"You should not assume that you can generate any part of any string visible to the user without the full context."

Whenever you design a localizable application, it isn't enough to provide a string that can be translated. You have to allow for delegation to the most specific piece of code dealing with the string, because only that piece of code will have the appropriate context to properly produce the string.

This means your code can't just assume it can generate strings somewhere deep inside the guts of a library. The programmer writing the final application that uses your library needs to be able to generate/override those strings on a per-case basis in the actual code that displays them to the user. The strings might be different between two UI windows.

Trust me, I know. I'm Polish. Few languages are as insane as my native tongue. If you don't believe me, take a peek at this concise 252-pages long introduction to Polish numerals: http://www.amazon.com/Liczebnik-grammar-numerals-exercises-l...
I think it is strongly related to the main point of the article, insofar there are types of books that allow you a broader margin for thinking and constructive critiques, and on the other hand, for technical books this is not so obvious. What don't you agree with? What and why is a big lie?
The reason why they are there because there were no installable apps at that time.

So now that there are installable apps, they can be removed, right? No they can't.
The JVM is safe for precisely as long as it's in Oracle's interests for the current situation to pertain. Oracle aren't capricious per se, but they are the very definition of capitalism, red in tooth and claw, in a way that Sun famously weren't. If they see a way to monetise the platform that as a byproduct happens to close it down as an open venue, I don't think that would stop them for a second.
I suspect the same. I've considered reading the one of the books in English also just to see if they are improved. I found Dan Brown to be slightly less annoying in Swedish than in English, since some parts had been cleaned up.
My suggesting punishment is a possible motivation, you are vindicating Sony's position.
Widespread support of WebM is likely to influence the chance of H.265 (the next one) either being royalty-free or at least having a royalty-free profile (and if not, then having a royalty-free competitor in the form of WebM version 2 or 3 in the early stages of its adoption). If Chrome uptake continues and Flash hurries up with their WebM support then a royalty-free subset of H.264 isn't entirely out the question, they've already softened their licensing once in response to competition.
Whatever you say bude, or you can just bomb Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia again.
For just this situation, Java offers the MessageFormat (and the ChoiceFormat refinement)

form.applyPattern(
"There {0,choice,0#are no files|1#is one file|1<are {0,number,integer} files}.");

http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/index.html?java...
Pin-Up as a Part of American Popular Art
Do they think an informed user is going to spend all this time trying to remove crapware he obviously doesn't want to use and finally give up and say "Ah well, you win verizon. $25 worth of hip-hop ringtones please."

No I doubt an informed user would say that. But a non-technical user might. And they get money for that.
For some reason, it does not work with my website:

https://secure.grepular.com/

I'm guessing it's because it does certificate validation of some sort? I can't see the point of a service like this doing any certificate validation?

It's a multi-domain cert (with *.grepular.com in subjectAltName) signed by cacert.org.
Collapse of Complex Societies
That's true. I'm assuming that you (the developer) will already be consciously making these decisions as you discover new things, and will only feel the 'fear' if you realize that you do indeed need it.

Thanks for your input :)
What is the appeal of Java?
This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.
Bill Cosby Kansas City Tickets 
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Someone has to train them. I mean, I understand where you're coming from, but the whole idea of employers wanting trained employees but only if someone else pays for the training ultimately benefits no one.
Think of it like the ads on Google's result page

The ads on Google's result page bring in about 75% of their revenue. If it's like that for telecos and crapware, they no wonder they don't want to lose it.
Ouch, languages are complicated. Two simple solutions that I think might work for a small packaged-software company like mine:

1. Just don't bother internationalizing. I think that's often not a bad solution for small software businesses anyway. It's not much use making a software package that works in French/German/Russian/Chinese/Swahili unless you have the language skills or partnerships to sell and support the software in those languages as well.

2. Design the software such that messages are whole sentences or phrases that stand alone and can be translated one-to-one. Nothing fancy like the %g type stuff for number inserts. Keep it simple stupid.
Rare people of integrity?
A very bad decision.

First, H.264 != VP8/WebM. WebM is roughly equivalent to H.264 Baseline Profile and can't get the quality/compression of even H.264 Main Profile. I won't even mention H.264 High Profile, which is crucial for HD content.

Second, there is no hardware support for decoding VP8 right now, while there is for H.264. Which means that if publishers indeed start dropping H.264 (which I hope won't happen), we'll get stuck for years with mobile devices that get poor battery life. Instead, we'll get promises of Great Things "just around the corner, in a couple of months". That's similar to the perpetual cycle of great, smoothly working Android devices which always exist in the future tense.

Third, no one knows if VP8/WebM is immune from patents. It most likely isn't, it's just that nobody has laid claims yet. Most modern video processing techniques are patented in some way and sticking fingers in your ears won't make those patents magically go away.
Registration conversion rate
Hey everybody,
I've been working for some time now on my private project called 9folds, and have been trying to understand conversion rates for users, and why users seem to drop out mainly on the registration/login phase, and how can I improve on that.

Currently I'm using Google Accounts login since I thought it's the easiest and most safe (to avoid spam). However, it seems like people are somewhat intimidated by the Google Account signup form. My idea is that people mostly do not understand the difference between a Google Account and GMail and end up thinking that by signing-in they give access to their mail account, which is of course spooky but completely untrue.
Also of course there are people that do not have Google Account or prefer to avoid using it for different reasons.

So I was thinking... maybe I should add Facebook Connect? Would that have better signup conversion? It seems to me that for some reason, people are pretty comfortable with that option even though it exposes much more private information than any other.... I couldn't find any statistics to support these assumptions.

Finally I was thinking I should just add a built-in registration... This flow is widely familiar for users... however people are mostly lazy going through the process and shut off the window as they see such a form...

So now I'm thinking which of the options should I choose:
1) leaving the current Google Account implementation
2) Adding Facebook Connect
3) Adding internal registration
4) Adding both

I'd appreciate any feedback or insight
That's sooo Kafka.
China rises, and Checkmates (continuation to "Chinese mothers" debate)
Coming Soon: Testing Tuesdays
Except that now you're no longer talking about something that requires the fuzzy handwaving of 'strong' vs. 'weak', which lack the well-defined one-way transformational characteristics of which you speak :)

The type-system property you're dancing around is soundness. A well-defined term that you'd know if you'd read the fucking article, which was written explicitly to teach it to you.

As for your example of what you consider 'weak' type-checking, I can see only two ways to make it 'strong'. The normal thing to do is a dynamic type-check resulting in a runtime exception if there's an invariant — in Python int(float("Inf")) raises OverflowError and int(float("NaN")) raises ValueError — would that satisfy you as 'strong'? The other option would be to use BigFloats and a fancy static type checker to ensure that you can never construct a zero value that could be processed as a float. Hilariously, GHC takes neither of these approaches: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3070 http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/CmmExcep...
I say this as someone who's been accused of having a poor attitude on many an occasion, but when you say the following...

> And will continue to be harder and harder as long as utter morons do the screening and hiring.

> They could easily save millions of dollars in marketing, research and development by JUST running decisions by me and having me nod in approval if it sounds good.

> You incompetent idiots.

I have to ask... Are you 100% sure it was because of django and agile skills?
Hackers could take down Wall Street
Thanks for the feedback. I have significantly updated the blog's design pursuant to your feedback. What do you think now, how should I adjust?
Core dev Kohsuke of Hudson welcomes Jenkins
Best comment: I never anticipated this day would ever come....
Got non-answer:

Thank you for contacting Apple Developer Support regarding the iOS Developer Program.

Developers should be testing and developing their apps in line with the Program License Agreement and the App Store Review Guidelines.

Please know that you will also be presented a copy of the Program License Agreement during the enrollment process.

Should you have any questions or concerns, we request that you review the iOS Developer Program License Agreement details with your own legal counsel.

If you are not yet a member of one of our Apple Developer Programs and are interested in finding out more about our programs, please visit our web site at:

<http://developer.apple.com>;

Thank you for interested in our programs.
and feeling somewhat nostalgic about it

And then remembering taking forever to save anything on a school computer, only for the floppy to read half the file and die when I got home. It's amazing - maybe it was the crappy quality of floppies I was using, or maybe I was using them for too long, but for me, regularly not being able to read data back off a floppy was a fact of life. Times have definitely changed for the better :)
Parslet - A Simple PEG Parser Framework for Ruby
Don't just read the newspaper your goverment gives you, Some times they are totally lies.
How low the IQ a person have to get to think that your so called "citizenry war"(if it exists) need a fighter?
Are you still thinking that the picture from Nepal's rebellion is from China?

Oh your holly god , I strongly advise you to go to China find out by your own eyes!
Me too. My first thought at seeing that question was, "I am too young to feel this old."
I remember having an Amstrad 640k. Two 5 1/4 floppy drives, no hard disk. Booting it up involved putting in about 5 disks one after the other and took about 20 minutes.

Ah those were the days.
I'd take the easy route:

printf("Directories scanned: %g", $directory_count);
Another slightly cruddier Facebook ownership piechart
Here's another copy of the 'interview' with a reply from Bjarne...
http://www.nsbasic.com/app/info/interview.htm
I remember a time when you needed to carry 30 floppies to be able to copy C&C:Red Alert... and it was worth it.
They can't be removed because there is no way to get them back. (They are not available in the App Store.)

Yes, this could (and should) be fixed. And someday, perhaps, it will be. For now, it's just not a serious problem, outside of Hacker News.

Having three different IM clients on a phone pre-installed and unremovable? Yeah, that's the kind of shit Apple doesn't do.
His advice of thinking of phrases as functions is spot on. However I think he's missing the easiest way of formulating solutions that would be usable by many translators/linguists: pattern matching.

Imagine your phrase/function is called:

"Found %n1 matching files in %n2 directories"

You could pattern match for one particular language like this:

%n1 == 0, %n2 == 0
%n1 == 1, %n2 == 1
%n1 > 1, %n2 == 1
... and so on ...

With the matching being any (simple?) boolean function of the operator, applied in order. At the point where this becomes too cumbersome, you could fall back to proper code. I bet that this would be much easier to use for translators, with an optional fallback to a programmer if it gets too complex to spell out all combinations.
Yes, Verizon sells dual-band phones. I have a Blackberry from Verizon for work, and it's CDMA/GSM, with the GSM specifically for international roaming.
Me too :\
BI at large scale
They might be, but battery life is an issue.

Hopefully SIMD and GPU in high-end phones can at least partially alleviate the problem (iOS has Accelerate framework and programmable shaders).
Who else remembers using the square punch to put a hole in those 3 1/2" AOL disks to reformat them as HD?
I started in computing with an Apple II+ (not really - my II+ was only the first to have floppies). I always wondered why those poor CP/M (and MSX) users had to put up with such nonsense as drive letters ;-)
My previous company produced a guide to internationalization/localization/etc for engineers (this is kinda helpful to have when a mixed team of Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Indians, and one very out of place white guy are trying to make multilingual software on top of business processes not designed with diverse client populations in mind).

The guide was somewhat whimsically named bluepill.doc and subtitled Welcome To The Real World. You have no idea how deep this rabbit hole gets. I did this for years and I am regularly surprised by novel, hard problems. It is like security. (It even intersects with security sometimes: since approximately no application developers actually understand encoding issues, there are virtually boundless classes of vulnerabilities arising from their (mis)understandings not matching technical reality.)

(I only found out later that the blue pill was the escape-back-into-comfortable-fantasy option. Whoopsie.)
Yes totally untrue. Every country I've been to in europe has this kind of plans and in the last year I've used them in Spain, France, Bulgaria and uk.

In Spain all providers have prepaid SIM's and you can use the credit on data. The best option right now for a short stay is to get a SIM card at the supermarket from carrefour (which is also a mobile operator) and pay 1 euro per day for unlimited data (there's a minimum of 3e per month).

You pay 10 euros for the SIM preloaded with 10 euros so you can connect a whole week cheaply at 100mb/day (after that speed is reduced to 128k)
That's just an out of date list e.g. Starcraft II used Theora (and Vorbis).
Trust me, I know. I'm Polish. Few languages are as insane as my native tongue.

I'm learning Polish and the crazy numbers business has really opened my eyes - doesn't the number 2 have something like 16 or 17 possible forms?