skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While the exercice is interesting in that it is humbling for non-native speakers, it does seem dubious. I repeated the test 3 times, and got widely different results (10400, then 16700, then 18300). Since they are all quite outside the reported quantiles for native speakers, it may be expected to have high variance for non-native, but that means the numbers are not very useful as is.
My front screen - the mobile apps I use everyday
24yo german with 19k here also. I'm not so sure if vocabulary size beyond a certain level is really that significant.

I got the feeling that that I could improve my score the most by thoroughly reading a 18th century novel.
Unless it's being used by a dystopian regime to decide who poses the greatest threat to the oligarchs.
Not really, MS still claims a patent against Linux used to bash Android OEMs ..accepting this means that we have still not forced MS into a patent lawsuit allowing us to invalidate the patents..
You can be that guy and it won't have any harmful consequence on me, or you :) Because I'm already aware of that.

There were other requirements for the cofounder, you know it's not easy to find the right one. I took English knowledge into account (also tried to have a native speaker as a cofounder) but it was just one out of several parameters with some weight.

Regarding the early employee option suggestion, so I should take that into account when estimating the size of a needed seed funding.
According to the article it's 81% in Pakistan and 79% in India. A two percent difference in a survey means that the two countries are basically the same.
Speaking English does not expand your vocabulary. You must read to encounter the larger portion of the dictionary. Does this test select for computer-users who don't read?

32800
No, but just like you have to pay property taxes, you have to keep the sidewalk adjacent to your lot free of ice and snow.
Facebook bans Google+ ad
I had a hunch you'd see that! There's no need to patronize you by saying your English is perfect, there's no shame in not speaking a language perfectly (I'm not a native speaker either).

Just find someone who speaks it well enough, it's not really even that big a problem. A good chunk of the world's population speaks English natively!
...if you think laminating is worth $10 per each sleeve, you should probably acquire the skill for yourself - it will pay for itself in long term. descent laminator costs <50 USD.
SEO | Search Engine Optimization Specialists
Polls are evil
Rent free, but living without water and electricity (not to mention the respect of your neighbors) has got to suck, especially in Texas.
23,700

27 year old native speaker in the US. I talk good English. I even properize capital nouns.
What devices do they use? Technically a good webcam that can detect and track head and eye would do the trick, but I've seen the head gear and other funny setups.
I’ve read some findings that saw depressive patients perform better on risk assessment tests than people who were not depressed. It doesn’t surprise me. Because having an accurate perception of reality is problematic. One actually needs an overly positive view of live to a) enjoy it and to b) get things done.

You can get consolation from your past only because you forget the pain more quickly than the beauty. You can look forward to the future only because you project the exciting moments rather than the boring ones (which will surely be more numerous). And the most relevant in the context of Hacker News: when you get enthousiastic about a project, you tend to grossly underestimate the time and effort it will cost to complete it. Had you been realistic at the outset, you might not have started at all.
Genius is made,  not born [pdf]
Hard work trumps ability. An article in New Scientist by David Dobbs (presented here as a PDF for those of us without New Scientist subs).
Is there some empirical measure of "the degree to which someone should actually be trusted," and if so, are the racially diverse societies less trustful than they should be, or are the racially homogeneous societies moreso than they should be?
I have washed a rented car, but then again I was 25, my dad gave me the skymiles, I was off in the foreign land of Kaua'i Hawaii and I didn't want to have to pay the cleaning fee, so i deemed the $4 potentially worth it.

Then again I am a bit older, arguably a bit wiser, and I haven't even considered cleaning a rental car since then.
For non-games usually Server-Sent Events (http://dev.w3.org/html5/eventsource/) may be simpler to use:

• it's pure HTTP, message format is dead simple ("data: payload\n\n")

• browser handles network failures and reconnections automatically.

• browsers can share same stream URL between windows

His use-cases with to-do app and analytics were good fits for SSE.
Here's a link to a PDF of the original 1978 paper:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132...
And third Finn here, but my score was mere 13,000. At least I have the excuse of still being a student :)
> The problem with the X community...

Isn't that painting millions of X programmers with the same brush?
But for all practical purposes, most of North and Middle India do not use Bharat, but Hindustan- which was also derived from river Indus.
tl;dr you're an Indian, you say that it's mostly the Pakistanis' fault.

Why does "fault" matter at all? One approach to conflict resolution is to admit both parties are at fault, and to agree that they are both _equally_at_fault_.

Or.. squabble forever about who is more to blame.
Stories about bootstrapping startups
Humidity's usually a bigger problem that the actual temperature. 100 degrees in drier parts of the southern US doesn't feel anywhere near as bad as 85 degrees in rainy towns up north.
Client<>Provider authentication method is not visible in the in OpenID protocol between Provider<>Consumer. Can you elaborate where the problem lies?

Why would different auth methods in browsers cause problems, when different provider's methods don't?

AFAIK client auth method is invisible and irrelevant, especially in the case where client and provider are the same thing (the browser).

In fact, in-browser OpenID (where browser is the provider) could skip client authentication completely and just say "yes" to every consumer (because browser knows and trusts its own identity).
The day Zynga gets my social graph is the day I leave.

I strongly prefer to keep my social graph private, and reveal it only to people who are in it. However, Facebook declared social graphs public quite a while back:

"Now when you uncheck the 'Show my friends on my profile' option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won't appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications." http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10413835-36.html#ixzz1SMg1...

So as I understood it, Zynga already has access to my social graph. But I'm not a Facebook privacy expert; I find the privacy rules confusing.
So http://www.getskeleton.com/ or http://html5boilerplate.com/ ?

Fight!
This is a completely substance-less post, with no established credibility, citing "anonymous sources", linking to Quora, where there are only further "anonymous sources".

I don't care about either Google+ (haven't been able to sign up yet) or Facebook (don't actively use it), but the linked post is dumb, reads like a poorly-executed drive-by hatchet job, and doesn't add to HN in the least. Why are people voting this post up?

(Flagged.)
About elnode - EmacsLisp version of node.js
Oh boy! So now instead of one going nowhere OS, there are two going nowhere OSes, only with one going nowhere slightly faster.
welcometo: http://www.fullmalls.com
The website wholesale for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan,prada,, also including the jeans,shirts,bags,hat and the decorations. All the products are free shipping, and the the price is competitive, and also can accept the paypal payment.,after the payment, can ship within short time.
free shippingcompetitive priceany size availableaccept the paypal
===== http://www.fullmalls.com =====

jordan shoes $32nike shox $32Christan Audigier bikini $23
Ed Hardy Bikini $23Smful short_t-shirt_woman $15ed hardy short_tank_woman $16Sandal $32christian loubo utin $80
Sunglass $15
COACH_Necklace $27handbag $33AF tank woman
$17puma slipper woman $30

===== http://www.fullmalls.com =====

===== http://www.fullmalls.com =====

===== http://www.fullmalls.com =====

===== http://www.fullmalls.com =====

===== http://www.fullmalls.com =====

===== http://www.fullmalls.com =====

===== http://www.fullmalls.com =====
> The Guardia di Finanza (GdF), the Italian police tasked with cybercrime cases

Bullshit.
Guardia di Finanza's first and foremost task is to prosecute tax evasion and smuggling.

Italy is a country with a very high number of tax evaders (I suspect we're among the top evaders in the world), which means that those idiots are not doing their job properly. Really, they don't deserve a minimum of respect whatsoever.

They're waaay too busy getting corrupted from the bosses of big industries who don't want them to stick their nose into their businesses.
Way too busy to bring down proxy servers.

Way too busy, in short, to put some effort into turning Italy into a decent place, and not a nation that others laugh at.
...says the company that keeps their search engine ranking algorithms secret.

...says the company that does not even share how much % of their adsense revenue goes to advertisers.

In short: Both companies guard what they consider important for their success.
There were some obscure words in there. Interestingly, I only ticked boxes that I could envision Pip Boy (Fallout VG) drawings of. Ending up with a score of ~23k, which was below average.
How do they know to look? That advertising works for expensive items is a good clue as to how much research people are inclined to do.
Why Quora is in trouble
> In China, when the CPC decides to do something, it happens, no matter how many heads roll in the process.

You say that, but China's government is in some ways no better than India's. Take a look at the high profile, recently opened Beijing-Shanghai high speed railway - which has already had several power malfunctions in the last two weeks. [1] The CPC has its own corruption and problems as well - they're just not as obvious as India's.

[1] http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iYyU6_FOL0...
Well this applies to nearly every thing.

Ie. You learn better french immersed in France than reading text books.

ie. You learn better python doing it than reading HN ;)
Any brits interested in starting a uk focused tech podcast?
I've been toying around with this idea for a while and think that it'd be really cool to try out.

If you're interested then email me and we'll have a skype chat.

I think that a format of 3 people would work well but not too sure about exact specifics right now.

Look forward to any interest!
PROTECT-IP Act could exacerbate DNS-related security threats
What means "Planning for Re-Use" for databases?
Non-Native speaker here. I found out that in almost all cases i knew a synonym of the words is didn't know. The problem is these are the ones that are used very frequently so i am rarely exposed to the other forms. While i know high literature in German, i must admit i just have read non-fiction in English so far. This is really a shame and i am going to change this.

This test made me aware of that fact, regardless of it's scientific accuracy.
That's for Spanish, though, which generally uses a somewhat smaller day-to-day vocabulary since it doesn't have the same weird Romance/Germanic thing that English does.

Most languages end up having about the same information bandwidth, but make different tradeoffs between the number of syllables per second and the entropy per syllable. Spanish and Japanese, for instance, tend to be spoken rapidly and have a more regular set of sounds, but languages like English or Chinese tend to be spoken more slowly and have more different sounds in each syllable. I'd imagine that low frequency languages tend to have large vocabularies that they use, but that's just a guess.
A hack to gain 80 percent efficiency when creating github projects
They don't need dosbox/wine -- "XP mode" in windows 7 is XP running in a virtualized environment.
Thanks for asking. Yeah, I actually do. Certainly when I'm programming in C, I use plain old routines, 'cause that's all I got.

But recently I even "de-objectified" a body of Perl code I wrote (a standalone server called "loom" https://loom.cc/source).

I systematically refactored it to get rid of all $object->function constructs. I ended up with a flat name space with names like trans_get, trans_put, span_encrypt, diceware_passphrase, file_update, dttm_as_cookie, api_grid_move, valid_id, trimblanks, token_get, etc. etc.

I even have a little script in there called "show_subs" which lists all the routine names in alphabetical order. There are 410 of them.

You might call that a "polluted" name space, but to me it smells like clarity. I can now look at any snippet of code completely out of context and know exactly what it does.

You might say that the downside is that each piece of code is not "configurable", meaning that it can't operate on different types of things depending on context. If and when that ever became necessary, I could easily manage it. But I never found it to be necessary.

By the way, this discussion reminds me of this article posted earlier: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058769... . I look at the list of functions he exports there and I think yeah, I bet I could use those in a heartbeat without a second thought.
Tradeoffs between owning and subscribing to music
I believe Trust but verify is the best alternative.
I agree that the quality of the result is highly dependent on the honesty
of the person tested, but with multiple choice, wouldn't you be able to
deduct the meaning of the word from choices you are given?

E.g.: One of the words I encountered in the test was 'terpsichorean'. While I knew that Terpsichore is one of the Muses, I did not know which one and left the box unticked. Had there been multiple choices, I might have guessed the correct solution.
It All Ends Here… bye Reza , you will certainly not be missed
best example of series of bad PR from the founder itself.
Even writers of high-brow literature use a much smaller vocabulary than the one they can read. Probably more than the newspaper, but not likely 35,000 words.

For non-native speakers, I would guess that there are quickly diminishing returns past about 10,000 words. Much more important is how well you're able to use those first 10,000 (or maybe even 5,000). It's one thing to recognize a word when reading it, and another to be able to use it in a natural way, choosing words with the right shade of meaning, and avoiding awkward constructions or unintended connotations.
It is approximately human body temperature. By design it should be slightly less, Farady intended 100 degrees to be the human body temperature but obviously suffered a light fever the day he took the measurment, so these days the human body has 96 degrees. 0 degrees Fahrenheit is defined to be the coldest it could conceivably ever be on the outside in winter, according to Faradays intuition when he decided that this is the coldest day ever. I don't know if he caught the fever during that measurement.
Ah, yes, that would complicate matters somewhat... High humidity is unbearable in the heat.
They don't. They are busy having fun coding. :)
I think to function normally is to not be disturbed by things which bear no reasonable relation to external reality - that to me is the fundamental indication that there's something wrong, which varies from serious mental illness (e.g. psychotic delusions) to low-level depression.

It's dangerous to dismiss the whole thing as b.s., it's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater - we don't want to validate the idea that 'we can't define normal, so therefore there is no basis on which to call somebody mentally ill'.

I think a lot of the reason these things are 'soft' is that we don't have a strong enough understanding of the brain, and certainly no strong diagnostic tools to be able to analysis what's going on in someone's mind in order to determine whether something is 'wrong' for a given definition of wrong. Until then we have to hack away around the problem.

I do agree, however, that skepticism is vital in this area as in every other.
> Because it's not Microsoft who is contributing. They just paying Linux Kernel developers

So it's Microsoft employees as directed by their managers ... but not Microsoft? What is the distinction.
The press always make it look so easy. This post was actually refreshing for the ones of us slaving away hours of their weekends working while others play.

So yes this helps.
My bank only allows passwords to be made of 5 numbers.

The interesting thing to note is that if they had any significant problem with this scheme, they would have changed it. Maybe we worry too much about the strength of passwords. The password verification process may be hardened enough, even for the needs of a bank.
Bye-bye terminal tabs, hello Byobu
Pakistan(24) is a happier nation than India(35)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2773105
You know, even when I did use OOP, I avoided inheritance altogether and stuck with containment instead. The semantics seemed clearer to me, and I later read some essays from excellent programmers who shared my sentiments.

Nice trick with your little module-in-a-box there. I think it's roughly analogous to the technique I used in my "handy_module" example here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2580717 .
You have to be careful with psychedelics - they can potentially cause very serious problems as well as (allegedly) improve things.

A close family relation and a number of his friends took relatively small amounts of LSD and as a result experienced very serious mental health issues, anecdotal but I think not unrelated, also I believe this is backed by studies.
International news from the command line
What does their lack of transparency have to do with portability? Google is accusing facebook of holding users' data hostage. Both facebook and Google keep lots of aspects of their business private for competitive advantage. Locking users in and intentionally making it as difficult as possible for them to try competitors is a crappy thing for facebook to do, and Google scores a legitimate advantage by doing the opposite.
Stain From Tabloids Rubs Off on a Cozy Scotland Yard
Looks very nice. It's a shame that the project doesn't have an explicit license attached to it (which means that I can't use it anywhere without getting permission from the author).
It could be an advantage as well. You won't end up naming your startup something like "diaspora".
What are your 5 top Linux software development tools?
Keep an eye on the very embryonic Fulcrum project: https://github.com/malclocke/fulcrum
The key sentence here: "recruiters made the rounds to stations occupied by a candidate, each of whom was required to have created a project they could demonstrate to show off their software, hardware or other technical skills."
Kd SQL is a cross platform MySQL Front End Database management utility.
You seem to be blinded by hatred towards Muslims.
Minorities include Muslims, Christians, Anglo-Indians and Sikhs.

British gave Autonomy to Minorities in 4th August 1932 Round Table Conference. But Gandhi manipulated, used and betrayed them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award
Speaking of animals, how is names of plants and animals counted? Is that part of a vocabulary, or is that special?

I'm also not a native English speaker, and one area where I know there's a huge difference between my Swedish vocabulary and my English is when it comes to names of plants and birds and spices and animals and trees and fish and rocks and flowers and vegetables and fruits. I know maybe thousands of names of such things in Swedish, but in English I know much fewer names. That's a few thousand words I lack and probably will never learn because it's so specialized.

(Btw, bananas are berries, but cows are not deers. :) )
We're only two weeks in and competition already turns out to be a good thing. I'm really hoping that Google releases an API soon because that's where I want to see changes: third-party social app development is quickly turning into a monoculture & we all know how bad that is.
http://testyourvocab.com/?r=55953

37,100 I'm ashamed I didn't do better. I'm considerably older than the average HN reader. I did degrees in 4 different subjects (mind you, I was classed officially as retarded at my high school - in the same classes as the arsonists).

So no-one should feel the score is that important. I'm a very mediocre programmer. I'd much rather halve my vocab score to double my maths ability.
I'm in Coral Springs actually.

I checked out the write up and it's a pretty flattering piece. I'm happy to recommend something that I believe is worth recommending. Unfortunately, your site is down and I can't play with it myself. I'm assuming you're finding yourself with some unexpected success. When/if you'd like me to take a look at it again, just drop me an email. (my initals at nobulb.com)
White Paper : Web Application Finger Printing
Looks neat thanks. I tried Less Framework a while back and for some reason, just didn't quite get on with it...so it's nice to have an alternative
Hi, creator of the site here -- I worked for several years teaching English to foreigners, and my own (informal) statistical research has found that native and non-native language acquisition, while certainly somewhat different, is not tremendously different. I've run this test on Americans and Brazilians at all different levels, and the size of the progression from known to unknown words is rather consistent.

That being said, cognates between languages can give an artificially inflated score. I intentionally avoided any words with the same roots in English and Portuguese (my second language), which should hopefully also be true for most Romance languages. This way, you shouldn't be able to "guess" meanings you've never actually learned. However, it wouldn't surprise me if German speakers, for example, were able to "guess" an additional number of words correctly.

Also, the 60-80 words are only what you are tested on -- the word selection on pages 2-4 changes depending on your answers on the first page, so it attempts to narrow down your vocab knowledge "at the margin".
The campaign to terrify you about EMP
Yes, it's funny how that makes you feel old, isn't it? Every friggin generation has people who complain about the younger ones lack of direction. I'm not worried though - They too will grow up.
How should one solve the menu issue for mobile devices? When the device is mobile, the menu on the left disappears with Skeleton. If one displays the menu, the user has to face it for every page.

Take a look at http://isit2013.org/ to see what I'm talking about, a page I made last year (it uses media queries, but not Skeleton). I'm open to any ideas on improving this site.
Original LWN article: http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/451243/060f24c5b1202513/
Correct. Most of the folks in question had filled in enough to be able to be straightforwardly findable in terms of linkedin, blogs, etc. It wasn't rocket science.
Thanks should go to Jim Davies at the Dept of Computer Science, University of Oxford for editing & releasing this updated version on the web by the way.

( http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/jim.davies/ )
Site creator here, again -- my research (small sample size) having Brazilians take the test is that a couple years of learning will get you around 1,500-3,000 words, several years around 4,000-6,000, and a good student with, say, 8 years of classes might get around 10,000.

Beyond this, it's pretty much necessary to live abroad for an extended period of time, or be exceptionally good (driven) at languages and watch TONS of TV, use tons of online chat, etc.