skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This isn't about local Swiss law. The clients broke U.S. law.

He was a banker in Geneva. He broke Swiss law to disclose to the U.S. government.

(Now the discussion becomes if it's okay to break Swiss law to protect American law, which I don't have a position on... hence, "this doesn't get into right/wrong, but is worth thinking about")
For me thinking in a foreign language came through immersion and doing a lot of talking to myself.

The following helped a lot also

1)Watch films dubbed into your target language. Turn on English subs if you find it difficult. choose films you actually want to see.

2)Watch infomericials. Seriously. they repeat the same phrases over and over again in a clear accent. The downside is you will randomly find yourself talking about the plus points of the world greatest mop.

3)Read comics before books: the pictures and context will help you figure you meanings

4) Forget fast and relearn by using srs like anki/mnemosyne

5)study mnemonics - roman room is very useful

talk to everyone

Skritter for chinese literacy; pimsleur for beginners

someone please develop some language learning software that isn't glorified flashcards, matching games. The stuff I've come across out there is lazy and unimaginative.

my dream is language software developed by Nintendo.
Fun and intuitive.
Skype releases a hotfix for Skype 5.0 for Mac OSX
Has richer interactions? Yup

Works across the 3-5 computers I use daily? Not really well.

Really the only desktop app which does any of this well, is perversely google chrome.
God... I LOVE HTML5 and Javascript/CSS etc, I wrote a couple of PhoneGap based apps, and to be fair I think 70% of the apps in the apple app store (Not counting games) can be created using just HTML5, most are simple list/todo/map/location apps and so on.

I want to write only in HTML5 to be fair, why? Deploy to multiplatform with small changes, no Objective-C or Java headache ;-P , but... it just feels as if it's not quite there yet, we are missing a little bit of performance in JavascriptCore, for animations (CSS the accelerated transitions work quite well) heck you can even achieve smooth parallax scrolling with some (mostly) css tricks on mobilesafari/UI WebView.

Now what's really missing here is a standard animation container, instead of doing CSS-sprite animations by creating loops that modifies background-position on elements (which will awlays be slower) there should be some other thing that lets you generate an animation (As a sprite or whatever) then play it accelerated in the DOM or Canvas... instead of using javascript to do everything.

Canvas performance is still horrible, but perhaps when apple comes around add adds more natively hardware accelerated stuff for the canvas and so on we could do some neater stuff.
Whats my point, you can develop the vast majority of "apps" with no problem what so ever for iPhone/Android with HTML5, you do need a "FrameWork" to deploy to the appstore, such as PhoneGap, but in the end it's basically javascript/css.

Games on the other hand is harder, we're still missing a standard animation container, performance amongst other things. Add WebGL on top of this and you can probably come up with some cool stuff, not sure if WebGL is supported on the latest iOS/Android?

For me, Javascript/CSS/HTML is the UI future of apps, the backend can be whatever, Java/Python/PHP/C++, but for UI stuff, Javascript/CSS just tastes damn good and gives you a lot of freedom... my 2 cents.
Spoken like a true novice.

Thanks for the assessment. I'll put that on my resume next to the 10yrs of web work.

search engine crawlers

http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started...

508 compliance

It may sounds harsh but most sites couldn't care less about accessibility because it's not required by law and because users with assistive devices don't account for a measurable portion of their revenue.

5-10% of your visitors with Javascript disabled

Not sure what kind of site you have there, my reports are more inline with what yahoo measures (i.e. hovering around 1%):

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/10/how-many-...

Starting with a site deeply entrenched in spaghetti Javascript code and trying to make it work without it takes a ridiculous amount of time compared to just building the site without a single line of Javascript written to begin with

Spoken like a true novice.
I have been through it all, at two companies I was at early on in my career, the executive team lied to the employees until the day the doors closed and those who stuck around did not get their last weeks pay or severance. I have also been at a company that handled the matter just like Autodesk did. Basically telling everyone we are in the shit, if you want to leave now is the time to do so, but if you stick around and we succeed the rewards will be great. They made sure everyone knew when we where out of capital and that the doors would be closing on that day. I was amazed at the effect this had, the rats left the ship almost immediately when the "whats in it for me" was gone. This lifted some of the financial burden on the company and ended up giving the "doers" more runway. We ended up pivoting the product and selling the tech to a customer that made it an in house product. While it was not riches, fortune and adventure, all the stuck it out did receive far more than their pay and offers where extended for employment at the company that bought the tech. The moral is that I was surprised to see the best of the best stick it out, they did so because they know they could get a new job tomorrow and where unconcerned with the prospect of their employment ending, many of us felt secure in that fact that we knew when that end would come and could time our exit. Conversely at the other two companies I saw the talent leaving as soon as their was a hint as to the writing being on the wall. When you lie to people you establish a relationship where their is no loyalty and in a situation like a company on the ropes loyalty can mean the difference between survival and bankruptcy court.
In this case it is statistical regularity. :-)

The primes act very much like they were a random set of numbers with n having probability 1/log(n) of being prime. (Mathematicians always mean "natural log" when they say log.) Except, of course, that this is obviously false. Because, for example, there is only one even prime.

It is more accurate to say that the primes act very much like they were {2} plus a random set of odd numbers with n having probability 2/log(n) of being prime if it is odd. Except, of course, that this is obviously false. Because, for example, there is only one prime that is divisible by 3.

One can continue refining this statement in the obvious way of special casing more and more primes. Other than the obvious corrections that come from these refinements, anything that you'd conjecture from this description is either known to be true, or believed to be true. The number of primes below n. The number of primes below n in an arithmetic sequence. The density of twin primes. And so on, and so forth.

Now let's focus on the average of primes below n. (Mathematicians call that number pi(n).) If the primes all were independently random, then you'd expect that to be close to the sum, for i in 2 to n, of 1/log(i), which is approximately the integral from 2 to n of 1/log(x). The usual name for that integral is li(x). li(x) is approximately n/log(n). This estimate is known to be true. That's called the prime number theorem.

One of many equivalent forms of the Riemann Hypothesis is that pi(n) - li(n) is O(sqrt(n)). From the "random prime" hypothesis we can see why this is reasonable. It turns out that for large n, (pi(n) - li(n))/sqrt(li(n)) should follow a standard normal distribution. From which it is easy to show that the Riemann Hypothesis should have 100% odds of being true.
I really like that integrated viewpoint. I'd always thought it to mean that "form follows function" in order of priority (rather than chronologically in development). But I really like the idea that beauty is the byproduct of functionality. That's a new spin for me.
Firefox 4 will let users opt out of ad network tracking
"I wish, unfortunately this is only supported in the very latest browsers (I've literally seen one website do this [1]). You can only change the portion of the address bar following the "#" with javascript, which is why you see URLs like "/content/30485#!content/9384" in some places."

Okay, you are clearly missing the solution here.

This is what the html looks like:
<a href="path/to/page">Page</a>

Then add a click handler to the link (using your preferred JavaScript library):
$('a').click(function(e) {
this.href = "#!" + $(this).get(0).href;
});

So this code mangles your URL into a hashbang with JavaScript when the link is clicked.
Now the rest of your code remains exactly the same, and updates the window.location.hash the same way as before - it gets the same value as before.

Except the benefit is that with no JavaScript - like a crawler - sees a working URL. And the JavaScript then mangles the URL appropriately, leaving your framework blissfully unaware of the difference.

This is progressive enhancement - using JavaScript to mangle links that are only meant to work when JavaScript is available (and in Gawker's case, make it to the browser).
If you're quite confident in your JavaScript skills, you can mangle all the links on the page in one go right at DOMReady.

The key is not expecting JavaScript to be running. And when JavaScript is indeed running, then mangle links to your heart's content.
There are two criteria for protection in the quote:

* Come in early

* Give complete and truthful disclosures

Come in early is a clear problem, I agree, partly because as I recall the way penalties are structured means everyone has an incentive to let it happen for as long as they can be confident that no-one else will implicate them.

However, the information we have is that he didn't initially reveal that he was a part of the illegal scheme.

The whole point of whistleblowing legislation is to permit those involved with conspiracies to come forwards and expose their fellow conspirators in exchange for their own liberty. I apologise for inadvertent selective quotation but he was trying to have his cake and eat it; to gain the credit for exposing the wrongdoing of others while withholding details of his own wrongdoing, thus distorting the evidential picture. Whistleblowing law is designed to let people in his situation bring down others by breaking the devil's pact of mutual downfall that would otherwise result, and so by definition to gain this unusual protection requires candid self-incrimination.
Obligatory mention of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...
Michelle Obama Doesn't Want Her Kids Using Facebook
Take Back Your Attention
Indeed, S.289 (Feinstein's bill) is even worse than HR 514. Here's a summary: https://www.popvox.com/orgs/getfisaright
To torture the analogy: trains have been ridden by billions of people, rocket ships by around 500. Less exciting experience, but far more accessible.
When learning functional programming (F#), there was a distinct point where I suddenly "got" functions and so many things suddenly made sense. I can actually remember the day and place where it snapped. (Perhaps if I had studied FP in school instead of just learning FP on the side after being conditioned by Basic and C, it would have been more natural.)
I just spent 30 minutes on your advanced section of your website, I like how it gets competitive with strangers, very compelling!
thanks! but i just tried to kid which i can't control sometimes.

anyway, i think that even if Latin chars weren't the most used in the world, it would be fair to keep them the primary charset for use in programming and markup languages, as no-one now complains that the international language of medicine is Latin, not, say, Chinese :) as computers started to be massively developed in America.
This subthread is unfortunately meta; I guess all I want to add is that I felt that your comment relied for much of its force on a rhetorical and psychological trick of associating the banking relationship with the relationship one might have with a doctor or one's spouse. I really do think banks gain a kind of veneer of respectability from their proximity to money, rather than an intrinsic worth in what they do. But scratch the surface, and atavistic greed oozes out.
The cited paper that found holes is from before the proof discussed in the article I pointed. The update points to a more recent paper that is behind a paywall, so I can't find what it says.
You might want to have a look at RSA encryption - which is the most commonly used asymmetric encryption algorithm, it is built around some properties of prime numbers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA
Indeed. Those who are interested (such as I) can go to boxcar2d.com themselves. A major technological leap/ton of new features/big milestone would merit a post, but not a slightly improved algorithm.
Proposal: extend Transfer-Encoding to allow gzip encoding of multiple responses in a persistent connection as if they were a single stream. This way, a browser which expects to request multiple pages from a site can keep the connection open, and the repeated content on each page will be gzipped into oblivion.

The problems I see is that this would require both server and browser support, and that leaving persistent connections open for minutes could be problematic.
Sunset of the Solo Scientist
Except that Nokia have been locking down handsets at the request of carriers for years (cf, earlier comments about VoIP on Vodafone on certain Nokia handsets). They really do have no special power to say 'no' to those guys. None whatsoever.
The #! syntax alerts google's crawler that the site supports their ajax crawling scheme [1].

The fragment (part after the hash), in general, is used to denote a specific state (or "page") in a single page ajax site.

[1] http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started...
I understood where you're coming from. Unfortunately, tax increases for any library services can be a hard sell.

Mainly, I just wanted to point out that it's a quintessential "Small Matter of Programming" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_matter_of_programming) issue in library policy, and people who have never worked for a library can easily underestimate the difficulty. My response was a bit over-bristly, though, sorry.
Also states "But the fact that very few, if any, choose to go HTML5-only is telling" and then "Facebook is seemingly all-in on HTML5 (at least going forward)" which seem contradictory statements.

How can it be telling when no one uses HTML5 completely, and then you follow it with an example of the hottest thing in tech since Windows going all HTML5. Doesn't make sense.
Well, Nokia is probably only GSM handset manufacturer who has their own baseband implementation. Modern S60 are smartphones that are implemented in same way as normal feature phones and thus incredibly energy-efficient (and relatively cheap). I think that this level of technical know-how can get them very far - even in today's market.
Alanis Morissette necesita un babero
Those phones will have been unlocked, either officially by the network or unofficially using unlocking tools.

eBay isn't a reliable place to get a sense of the realities of the retail mobile phone market.
Or water reservoirs: pump water into uphill into the reservoir when solar/wind power is available; run it downhill through generators to generate electricity when power from other sources doesn't meet demand. (Which is one of the more common ways of dealing with the problem right now: Google for "pumped storage".)
The most interesting part is the daily deal (prepaid couponing) as a progression of the CPM>CPC>CPA advertising model.

The opportunity to eliminate marketing/advertising risk as an upfront cost for small businesses is incredibly attractive. Despite the hype, countless copy cats, and bubble comments already, this market is still incredibly young and underdeveloped.

I think the real question is whether this new advertising model is best served by a consumer brand, where Groupon has significant first mover advantage, or an underlying technology solution for every publisher with an audience.
If you page through the Google results, there's actually less than 400 pages listed.

See: http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/04/trochee-chart/
Unrelated, but the case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Whitacre is also interesting.
Outside the US coupons are not a big business, at least in the countries I know. So I wonder if it will translate as profitably in the rest of the world.
Start local. Work with a couple of elementary schools and a couple of high schools. Ask them to beta the product in exchange for feedback. Help them load it on their server and start with a small group.

And then make it work for them. You have a good product.

Most schools have a curriculum director (or someone in that capacity) in charge of coordinating classes, adding and dropping courses, etc. They usually interact with everyone from admins to teachers.

Principals are the decision makers but asst principals do a lot of the implementation.

You'll be able to cold call with no problem. And now's a good time of the year to lay the ground work for 2011-2012.

Here's the key: be functional and very useful. Schools are up to their eyeballs with the latest wiz-bang gadgets.

Your product may qualify under some kind of Federal Grant. Many schools have part/full time people whose job it is to manage grant applications. They'd be able to help you as well.
They could run Myriad's Alien Dalvik engine. I also agree that official QT support for android would be great as well. I think 2 open source mobile OS's rising at the top of the mobile market would be a great thing for wold. I think Apple will provide enough contrast with their closed iOS platform to balance things out.
I'm actually enjoying the meta discussion, learning from it. It feels like the ol' days a little bit, when people had nuanced civil disagreements on here commonly.

As for rhetoric, I didn't come up with the idea that your relationship with your banker should be private - that's actually how it worked in classical banking. Switzerland inherited it because they've had the longest continuous government in the world - it dates back to the Middle Ages.

The idea today that your banker and you don't have a relationship like your lawyer and you... honestly, I think classical banking is far more of an honest profession than modern law, but I'm not a huge fan of modern banking either.

Anyways, good discussing and best wishes.
While much of what you are going to read from me is the same from other users, perhaps my opinion will help in that it's simply an additional opinion.

My first impression is that the design will need to be redone. As someone mentioned, you've got something prototype-worthy, but it will need to be significantly beefed up before it is shown to customers. If you can't do it, get a designer on board.

My second impression is that this is wufoo. I'm not sure exactly what you are offering that Wufoo or Google Docs doesn't already offer besides sharing a widget instead of a link. Have you surveyed customers to determine if they would respond better to a graphical survey (like a widget) versus a link to a survey? I'm not sure a widget would lower the barrier of entry enough for me to increase my desire to fill out a survey.

Finally, I agree you will need a copywriter/editor to clean up the text. Capitalizations are weird or explanations are a bit confusing. Cleaning up the copy will help significantly.

Best of luck!
I'm assuming that companies only higher rockstars right? Why else would you add someone to your team?
Didn't the article author assert that you can use click handlers on your links to achieve AJAX loading without a full page refresh?
Birkenfeld, a US citizen, was helping US citizens commit tax fraud. He now expects the IRS to pay him a percentage of the money he helped steal from the US goverment/citizens?

He is crazy.
And having the Swiss hide behind secrecy rather than give the money to the descendants of those who died because concentration camps weren't in the habit of issuing death certificates.

So the net effect of that secrecy was that instead of the Nazis getting that money, the Swiss did.

Secrecy isn't agnostic. The lack of scrutiny enables--even encourages--people to do things they otherwise never would.

What's more the purported need for secrecy is often used to justify unethical behaviour from those providing secrecy to their clients: banks in Antigua taking 15-20% commissions on money transfers they all but know to be drug-related, keeping the assets of those that died in the Holocaust and so forth.

Those people now have a profit motive for such behaviour.

Now I'm not arguing there shouldn't be any secrecy but the fact that people with access to such information will feel morally compelled (or simply begrudged) to reveal information on those who are doing something shady behind the veil of secrecy gives me faith that the system will ultimately balance itself out.

Secrecy doesn't (and shouldn't) mean immunity from accountability.
This is not a criticism, but an observation. I felt that the simplicity of the website itself (it was real easy to understand what you were selling, and what we get for our money) really helped.

My biggest problem is, i can never do a simple elegant design. Im not a designer and always have to rely on either wordpress or html templates.
Anki is indeed very nice. It's based on the same algorithm as Mnemosyne, but has made considerably better progress, IMO.
IRC notifications via SSH and libnotify
Field 3 of them in opposite orbital positions: problem mitigated. But cost per GWHr goes up some.

Article doesn't address the receiver. What's the efficiency?
they won a chance to take part in SC week, the winners of which will win 50k, afaik
How long is a piece of string?

Seriously: is there any possible situation where this could possibly matter?
He suggests using real URLs - instead of "/#!5753509/hello-world-this-is-the-new-lifehacker" we would have "/5753509/hello-world-this-is-the-new-lifehacker". Sounds great, but what happens when you click to a new article, which is loaded with AJAX?

Well you've already confirmed that the client is running Javascript so:

1. Use JavaScript to rewrite the existing clean URLs into JS function calls (or however you want to handle that)

2. Use window.history.pushState to push the clean (canonical) URL for the page you're viewing to the browser.

I'm not sure why this isn't obvious...
The platforms are oriented toward Earth so they present edgewise to the sun twice a day and have a rectified sin wave power output as a result. The solution to that is to have three platforms, offset by about 60 degrees each. Then the sum of your power outputs is mostly flat. (Or to use mirrors like the article mentions, but I have to wonder if the cost of a mirror in geostationary orbit is any different than the cost of a solar cell.)

Another problem is that for several months of the year, around the equinoxes, the satellites will be eclipsed by the earth for up to an hour or so each day. The mighty Goog presents this article that will tell you all about it: http://celestrak.com/columns/v04n09/

I think as long as you have multiple satellites spread over more than one timezone and an electric grid this problem can be mitigated.

-EOM-

I must append with my obligatory warning: Any nation which can put such a huge power delivery system in orbit would have to ask itself "Given the relatively minor changes to transmitters to make this thing into a giant aimable phased array at frequencies dangerous to humans, and the vast sum of money we are spending anyway: Surely it would be a negligent use of resources not to build in the secret death-ray capability."

Where I live we have developed a marvelous capacity for thinking the unthinkable. You don't want us to hasve space based solar power.