skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As businesses get more adept at gaming the online review process, the rewards for a system capable of a high "honest review" fraction will increase.
In my experience working on one thing for 8 hours isn't the most effective way to work. I find myself more effective when working on multiple tasks in one day if they require thinking effort. A lot of the thinking doesn't get done when sitting in front of your keyboard, but rather when you are taking a shower or taking a walk. But passively thinking about a single thing during those activities doesn't exploit your thinking potential fully. You can't think that far ahead.

If you have two projects you're working on, you can think a bit on one, and when you're stuck you think a bit on the other. When it actually comes to working, you have enough new material to work for a couple of hours on each project. This working will uncover new things to think about. If you instead work for 8 hours straight on a single thing, then after a couple of hours you'll hit things that require thinking before you can proceed, and doing that in front of your computer doesn't work but taking a walk or taking a shower isn't billable -- and even if it were I'd still get more work done when working on more than one project.
Funny thing, that Ancient North Arabian [1] sounds almost like Hebrew.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_North_Arabian
Except that for Arabic "dialects", the presence of Armies and Navies hasn't turned any of these dialects to a language.

On the other hands, Kurds have their language(s?) despite not having an army or a navy.
The GNOME 2 Fork ‘Mate’
Actually, there are better places than trying to differentiate on price.

Printing with the iPad is a prickly issue today. If HP were to even launch one printer that worked with the TouchPad, it would have been an opening salvo that Apple will have to scramble to catch up.

Secondly, cameras represent the last bastion of consumer goods that hasn't been computerized the way a music player has been computerized. HP could have licensed WebOS to camera manufacturers and build up a defense against further penetration from Apple. Nikon, Canon etc should be concerned that they have nothing if Apple decided to eat their lunch.
I wasn't referring to the DLI students there, but to a certain type of student I've encountered in (civilian) university Arabic programs. I've never met a DLI graduate but I know instructors who have taught there and they have a uniformly high opinion of their students.
Stallman: Avoiding Ruinous Compromises
A couple of corrections I feel I have to make as an Arab.

> There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored.

They are not ignored - when they are present, attention is paid to them. I think what you mean is that Arabic speakers, knowing what the diacritics are, do not bother writing them down. That is not because they ignore them, it is because we have paid such close attention to them when learning Arabic that we no longer need to be reminded of them.

> That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.

Arabic is highly phonetic, and if being phonetic was a criterion for being universal language of the internet, English should be disqualified immediately.

On arrival in England at the age of 10, I had no idea how English people knew how to pronounce their words. Now I know that non-Arab speakers may think the same way about Arabic because we do not write down the diacritics by default... but it is easy to buy books that have these diacritics written, and thus to crack the code.

But English seemed designed to trap foreigners into mispronunciations, to the great amusement of my classmates. (Traveling to America after college, it was mostly place names that tripped me up.)
It's certainly very ironic. So the OP is unhappy about people complaining (when the OP could certainly... I don't know, not bother to follow the issue?), and thus OP decides to complain about people wanting to use pseudonyms... while using a pseudonyms.

Maybe it's satire.
I would guess that the sluggish productivity figures are a result of the sluggish capital expenditures during the recession.
Yeah, I agree with you— his suicide isn't a reflection on his speech. Rather the speech is a sad insight into his depression.
Stop making this a moral issue. Did 20th century behaviourism teach you nothing? The human stock is only as good as the stimulation it receives.

The reason people have trouble learning is because they are victims of mass culture. When a child is raised on corporate propaganda from age 1 how do you expect him or her to be intellectual?

You phrase these things in moral terms and indicate that the failure lies with those in poverty. But we intellectuals discovered long ago that those in poverty behave in predictable, controllable ways.

Garbage in, garbage out. The public schools have become corporate propaganda systems and the Universities have lost all sense of public duty.

The poor can't educate themselves. They need an enlightened class to protect them (using government) from the powerful forces of propaganda.

You sit in your ivory tower and blame the victims, when you have no idea what it's like to be raised by a television and modern public schools bought and paid for by special interests.

Children are impressionable and stupid. Your classes have to compete for attention with the greatest propaganda machine the world has ever known: the U.S. corporate media.
That reminds me, HP acquired an Australian company Tower Software back in 2008 [1]. That was three years ago. I think these acquisitions have paid dividends and now HP are signalling they are "all in" and put up all their chips in the software and services space.

[1] http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080331xb.html
WANT TO HANG OUT WITH X PRIZE FOUNDER PETER DIAMANDIS?
Http://beta.omaze.co
When does the movie about his life come out ?
I will be first in line for tickets!
I am a fan of science fiction, but haven't been able to get in to his novels either. I think they're boring. His best stories, by contrast, are hilarious and very fun and easy reads.
The most important things for you to learn in the first few months are actually pretty language agnostic (e.g. what a variable is, what a function does, basic logical statements), but the big one that you should be looking for is a basic understanding of how programs work. The idea being, when you look at Facebook, iTunes or whatever, you should be able to start thinking about the high-level decisions that the program makes, even if you don't know how to actually implement that logic programmatically.

Everything else will naturally progress from there, but you can't progress as a programmer, until you start thinking like one.
Excuse my cynicism here but I think it is valid. No world is being changed efficiently or in a new fantastic way here.

They ALL appear to be utterly lazy ways of supposedly helping people whilst top slicing cash and creating tech jobs, management jobs and evade a chunk of tax. Generating money is intimately opposed to doing altruistic good.

Fly out, dig a well and work up a fertile soil and dig drainage and septic channels. Teach them practical skills to help themselves and teach them how to teach others. That would make more people's lives better rather than delegating it via a startup or technology outfit.

Technology is a bad solution when there is nothing to sustain it. Knowledge on the other hand is worth more than gold in an investor's pocket...
Great poem: Desiderata
You're wrong on #7.

I'm a native Arabic speaker too.

First, khadra خضراء really is the femenine form of "green". The muscular form is akhdar اخضر

Second, it really is true that we use feminine forms when referring to multiple "it"s. You probably never consciously realized it, but think about it:

beautiful flowers ازهار جميلة

beautiful girls بنات جميلات

beautiful boys اولاد جميلون

Note how jameela is the singular feminine form of the adjective.

beautiful girl بنت جميلة

beautiful boy ولد جميل
Startup acceleration: what on earth does that really mean?
Indeed. While there's always some one-star reviews no matter how good the thing being reviewed might be, the best guide is just to read them and see whether they sound like rational complaints from sensible people. If the one-star reviews say things like "the checkin girl rolled her eyes at us the third time we asked for our room to be changed to one with a better view" then it's probably an alright hotel. If they say "filthy, noisy, unsanitary" then I'm probably not gonna stay there.
Care to explain how you'd explain this [1] to someone else such that they could reproduce it in a readable fashion? Or one of these [2]?

[1] http://necromanc.blogspot.com/2006/05/most-complicated-chine...

[2] http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/437-most-comp...
I think his criticism is a bit overbearing, if not a bit curmudgeonly (in a high-brow sort of way).

Yes, without question most SF published today is tripe. Yes, without question, Dick is a visionary genius. But he is not the only one. There is still excellent literature to be found in the genre. The works of Mary Doria Russell, for example. I would also include Ray Bradbury. I would include Neal Stephenson, but that might be stretching it.

The landscape is changing. Though the pulp SF publishers are not willing to take risks on real intellectual talent, self publishing is beginning to bring excellent work to audiences.
It's not funny, it's inevitable - Arab and Israeli tribes were all Semites (which is why accusing Arabs of being anti-Semitic is annoying, as it implies that we are not Semites) they share a common genetic and cultural heritage, and their languages evolved from common roots. If you ignore the current crazies on both sides, Judeo-Islamic tradition makes far more sense that Judeo-Christian one does.
I agree. Building is probably the easiest part. I do not have a blog, but I'll start to post links of projects in my HN profile.
That's because the 'u' is really not the 'u' but the glottal stop ;) (hamza)
Ray Kurzweil thinks that will be possible by 2045, crazy, but he has been right before. Hope I am around to find out :)
I created this website so that people can let businesses know what deals they want.

How it works is people create rumors. Other people vote on the rumors (whether they think the rumor is true or false). The business can then settle the rumor. When a rumor is settled all the people who voted are emailed to let them know if its true of false. It's a great way to advertise for businesses.

Also, when a rumor (that has gone viral) is settled, the person who started the rumor gets 50% of the settling cost. Great way to make some money.
I saw the founder of Catchafire speak at an investor conference, and she bragged about "making a lot of money" off volunteers and the organizations they volunteer for.

I found it disgusting, but no one batted an eye.
If your answer to a bug like this, a week from the deadline, is that the only way to fix it is to rewrite the entire file structure instead of putting in a workaround... you probably deserve to be fired. I do wonder if they had someone else code up a workaround before shipping though.
I don't believe any of this is true. Read the middle essay in _Consider the Lobster_ about his engagement with his church in Normal, IL and hanging out with his neighbors watching the newscasts during 9/11. He's not a recluse withdrawn into his own head.

I think, based on the unfortunate tone you set with that first dumb comment, that you're drawing sophomoric extrapolations from a single essay that you are actually misreading.
IMHO any site that has a login form should use HTTPS.
Exactly my point and people are trained to accept it.
How do you clone Steve Jobs? Joking aside, can his genius be replicated? Does he have a protege? If not, I volunteer.
Price? If they got $10M in funding, I assume that they sold for more than 50M?
Make less money and do more good.
I dropped an CLEC DSL a few years ago because I was spending 2 days every six months babysitting their repair jobs. Considered Comcast, but just signing up was an immense hassle - phone reps couldn't find the offers I had in my mail, or on the web, offers weren't what they seemed - and so I went with a local wireless ISP that, AFAIK, is a two person operation. They are more expensive than cable internet, but I've never had to babysit an outage in two years, and they're always responsive when there is a problem. Recently considered giving Comcast a try, but have an almost physical aversion to it.
It's called 'pop culture'!

Or it's "the great wasteland".

Or it's the "message" in "the medium is the message".

But heavily it's the old tried and true of the humanities culture, 'drama' as in 'formula fiction', especially as in the 1000 year old 'morality' plays.

So, I'm reluctant to believe that more of the 'humanities' culture will have a solution.

Or, with high irony, in main results, if not in all intentions, the 'humanities' are a great enemy of humans!
What? No.

Black man = رجل اسود

Slave = عبد
What Do Project Managers Do All Day?
Hans Litten - The Man Who Crossed Hitler
I don't want to touch this developer workday thing with a 20 foot pole. Work however is productive for you to work. But don't communicate to your customer that you are billable in increments smaller than a day.
Thanks I managed to get funding for that one. I am now onto a new startup and prototype.
One trick that works for me, from time to time, when dealing with a CSR in person or over the phone, and running into roadblocks - ask them, human to human, what I should do. It obviously doesn't free them from their bureaucratic chains, but it sometimes frees them to give me insight into how to navigate the bureaucracy they know so much better than I do.
Yep, I know of quite a few people who are effectively doing that. If they have to have an address for anything, it's the hotel they stay in most regularly in Bangkok. Nice and central as a travel hub, and that Thai government doesn't want any money from you if you're not a resident of some sort which they aren't if they leave the country at least once every 90 days. Business is run out of one of the various offshore islands that doesn't want you're money unless you're living there, so all income if effectively tax free.
Exactly. I was amazed at how little ground was covered by the end of the post, off on a yak shave for the part of this problem that is not hard or novel.
I wanted to add my opinion as an Arab (from Bahrain), which is nowhere as scholarly as yours (I am so in awe of your linguistic nerdiness, thanks for such a lovely article).

Egyptian Arabic is dominant in a similar way to American English, i.e. Egypt had the largest movie industry and population, and everyone else could understand Egyptians while Egyptians had no need to understand other dialects.

What is interesting is the impact of satellite television. These new stations have global audiences and content that Arabs want to watch as opposed to their national censored channels. But their solution to pan-Arab broadcasting is classical Arabic, not Egyptian Arabic, and so there is a resurgence of the use of classical Arabic outside of courts and classrooms.
Poking around in those datasets is fun. That reminds me of a similar thing I did a few months ago with the same database (http://calori.org) as part of a tech demo/test.

There's a lot of data included which, quite frankly, doesn't
seem very useful (e.g. nutrient "22:1 undifferentiated",
whatever that is.)

One thing that struck me as well was the amount of cleanup necessary to bring this data into a somewhat presentable shape. I guess is that at some point they just dumped their messy Access DB into CSV and called it a day. But it's still great that they did decide to make this public domain.
There actually is a point about suicides and other problems: During the early 1980s when the Rust Belt was suffering, the rates of divorce, domestic violence, infant mortality, alcoholism, and suicide all went through the roof.

Sadly I blame the UAW, for then and for what's happened to Detroit since, but it still happened. It was grim. Sadly, a UAW like solution solves some problems but creates some bigger ones including just killing off the whole industry it tried to 'organize'.
One significant difference is that loss of a G+ account can mean loss of access to other linked accounts, including use of your Google-linked Android phone.

And that this is a highly arbitrary process.

And that the process occurs on a stated 4-day grace basis (what happens, if, say, you're offline / disconnected for ... 5 days or more?).

And that in actuality, the 4-day grace period isn't respected.

This is a royal clusterfuck for Google. The only firm resolution I've made is to as rapidly as possible dissociate anything I value highly with the company. And they're one I've championed and respected for most of its life.
ah! Wasn't a phrase I'd heard before. Makes much more sense in that context.

Thanks
More like 100M
All you said is right, but please don't mix concepts.

It's funny because Classical Arabic do not sounds like Hebrew at all (except some very basic words).
But Ancient North Arabic very similar to Hebrew and other Canaanite languages.

Languages and genetics are two very different things.
The reason, that Ancient Hebrews spoke Semitic language doesn't mean they were "Semites". Many people in Canaan were speaking Semitic languages, so it might be Ancient Hebrews just adopted local lingua-franca.
And in 1988 Tom Hanks, in the movie Big, described a interactive, digital comic book.
Deep packet inspection. More specifically, either block DNS requests for those domains or the actual HTTP requests.
I've ran into a lot of scenarios where a client doesn't know what they want, and creating a proposal for them involves more of my time than it should. So as a result I'll offer consulting for a fee in order to come up with their ideal solution. This in term gets me most everything I need for a proposal as well as helps them to know what they are actually looking for.

The value add of consulting ends up working way better than directly charging for a proposal.
DFW's short stories are great. But I found one huge hole in Infinite Jest: It was completely lacking hope. I'll take a long slog of a read any day if I'm not just going to walk away depressed. Gulag Archipelago was worth the read because Solzhenitsyn kept reminding the reader there was hope in humanity. DFW, well, not so much.
Rest of the stories on the page should be printed out as a reminder for everyone not to ever work in the games industry.
A de facto rule of spoken English: "Everyone should floss their teeth" - Singular nouns of indeterminate gender take plural, and therefore genderless, possessives.
It looks like the spaceship from Flight of the Navigator.
Affordability? I read this as twenty years ago it was much easier for people in the prior generation to pay $3200 (1993 dollars) vs. some today paying $1249 (today's dollar.)

"I finally was able to buy a Mac, a Macbook Air and I love it!"

Macintosh LCIII Macbook Air 13.3″
Release Year 1993 2011
Price $3200* $1249

* – Approximately what our parents paid for the whole setup we had for our LCIII (computer, monitor etc)

"There is so much to talk about and all the little things I am enjoying about finally being able to afford a Mac."
Sorry, This Is Not the End of the PC Era
Yeah, I'm sorry, I was highly unclear. What you said is what I meant :) I was saying that the Arabic character set is actually simpler, but vocalized Arabic becomes harder again.
"Cost of doing business" ... which eventually winds up being factored in anyway. I prefer the transparency that comes with listing how much I'm charging for the estimate as a line item w/in it. If they choose not to move forward, then no charge, else I treat it as billable time that lands in an invoice.
A TimePiece of C# and JavaScript - Would like feedback on next improvements...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism
cruise missiles are often better for assassinations anyway. They are stealthy, cheap, and extremely accurate - a mach-20 super-hot re-entering slug of metal that had to be launched into space isn't really any of those.
I'm going to work on making a video clearly demoing the site and probably rework the entire landing page somewhere along the way
That's the equivalent of explaining how to spell "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" -- yeah, it's an English word, but it's ridiculous and nobody really expects you to know how to spell it.

Most simplified characters can be explained with a handful of strokes. Furthermore, many of them can be broken down into "radicals" which are commonly repeated patterns.
For a reported $85M: http://dthin.gs/owvvqM
Maneuverable RVs have been flight tested - notably the US AMaRV.
Same reason Douglas Hofstadter doesn't read anything on the Internet, really.
Download.com wrapping downloads
Download.com is now wrapping downloads with their own installer.

I just tried a download of my product and I find it really sleazy the way they wrapped it. By default they install a toolbar, change the user's default search engine to Bing, and change the user's home page to MSN.

I wonder how Microsoft feels about being associated with such a sleazy activity which acts directly against the interests of developers.

They have a FAQ page here: http://cnet-upload.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2064

If you want to opt out they will "carefully consider your request on a case-by case basis" sent here cnet-installer@cbsinteractive.com
Yep. For further explanation:

http://codebutler.com/firesheep
American place names are a constant source of confusion and amusement even among Americans, largely because many of them are adapted from American Indian words. You might be a perfectly normal English-speaking American, but if you've never been to the state of Washington before you won't know how to pronounce "Puyallup" or "Sequim" just by reading them.
If you'd rather have it be offline, drop me a line from the contact page and I'll send you an Excel version.
"Generating money is intimately opposed to doing altruistic good."

This might be the stupidest sentence I've ever read on HN.

"They ALL appear to be utterly lazy ways of supposedly helping people whilst top slicing cash and creating tech jobs, management jobs and evade a chunk of tax."

Speaking of utterly lazy, why don't you tell us what you think after watching this clip of the 19 year old girl you just insulted: http://vimeo.com/26638815

http://twitter.com/paulg/status/29256073985
Startup weekend: chance to meet PETER DIAMANDIS? Founder of X Prize.
Http://beta.omaze.co
What are the most download mobile apps?
I guess I am not geek enough, but the description for this is SOOO opaque. I have no idea what this does - and I am a web developer!

Can someone explain, in simple English, what this is about and why it's good?
There are certainly some companies that pose as doing good while doing mostly good for themselves, but the inherent concept of what you're saying is incorrect. A founder that builds massive wealth and then uses that money to create widespread changes for good can do far more than the same person just volunteering their time. Example: donating $2M to an organization that feeds the homeless makes a bigger impact than even 10 years of working the soup line. Both are important, but in most cases the 2nd person can't even do their job without the donation from the 1st.
SO the worlds highest-bandwidth network protocol just went from a 747 full of thumb drives, to this scramjet full of thumb drives!
fireball is a visionary genius