skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting post but the OP is linguistically naive, which is generally what happens when English speakers encounter another language with more interesting (i.e. exotic") morphological, phonetical, etc. elements. If Arabic if your first foray into a highly inflectional language, it might look fairly exotic. If you had studied, say ancient Greek or Latin, first, it might look less so.

"you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper."
This comment about Chinese and Japanese (totally unrelated languages with very different writing systems, is laughable. The syntax of Chinese is simple (it pretty much has non at all) but Japanese syntax is complicated.

The OMG moment one faces when faced with thousands or weird Chinese signs is partly an illusion. Yes, you have to memorize a lot of things, like any other languages, but the meaning of a Chinese word can be guessed if you know the determinitve, even f you don't know the word. There are only about 200 determinitives.

An interesting thing about Arabic is that, due to its tie to Koran, it's been studied linguistically since early times. But other languages can also boast such long examined lives, e.g. Sanskrit or Chinese.
Per rubyrescue's comment, you should be trying 216.239.32.21
I've found that by far the best strategy has been coming up with a flat quote for the rough draft, and then billing the revisions phase by the hour.

This way, the incentives line up: the part that you have total control over, you are incentivized to go as fast as you can, to work as efficiently as you can, etc. Then once you've delivered a rough draft, the client is incentivized to be as clear as possible and not to endlessly change his mind. And even if they do, you're happy because you can bill for more hours.

I think splitting the difference in this way has worked very well for me in several years of client work.
Oh great, thanks for pointing out that it's him, not his idea, that didn't make the cut...
You are forced to pay for the DMV. Verizon has to EARN their money. Customer retention isn't a concern for civil servants.

Please stop comparing apples to oranges.
Politicians support software only if it furthers the interests of others to ultimately serve their own self-interest.
No apologies necessary, I did indeed use a newtonian object as the particular for ego in the first analogy. In regards to abstract forms and mental constructs as not existing in the same manner as objects, I'd disagree with you and the OP and hold that they do exist, at least in the same manner that everything else can be said to, if anything else is said to. In other words, I would assert there is no difference in types of existence nor duality between existence and nonexistence, object and nonobject, that is derivable and non-arbitrary. What I would concede is that an ego (and everything else) is "empty" of perfect causal independence. In other words, it must be emergent and generated.
There were staggering levels of corruption and mismanagement both in the Irish government and within the Irish financial industry.

Agreed. There was clearly very little banking regulation, and many private banks were let run wild, combine that with a massive property bubble (prices have falled nationwide by 50% since 2007), and a strong societal urge to get on the property market, and Ireland is in massive financial trouble.
Keeping Up with the Kardashians Season 6 Episode 10
ok friend today I will give you information that hopefully can be useful for you you know the movie Keeping Up with the Kardashians nah this film which I shall tell to you Keeping Up with the Kardashians has now reached Season 6 Episode 10,
Scaling is exactly the reason I failed to buy bitcoins a year ago.

However, here's an argument that they could in fact scale up to VISA levels:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
ok, but now I have a generic logger that I can send all kind of messages to. I can use the source channel anywhere and pop a new data source into it etc. etc.

channels rule :)
What proposal are you referring to? I don't see any mention of one in the submission.
東京都訪問看護師求人口コミランキングで比較！！
OpenID may prevent stealing login credentials, but it doesn't prevent stealing the cookie which identifies your session.
This is of course strictly anec-data, but my experience has been similar in dealing with both the DMV and telcos. Broadly speaking, you have pockets of excellence everywhere, as well as pockets of apathy. But, as Winer says, the idea that "private businesses will provide a better customer experience because there's competition" doesn't really hold up when you have so many distorting factors (de-facto monopolies, outsourced customer service, warped retention incentives, etc).
Anti virus available for free
Can't resist this classic quote by Stan Kelly-Bootle: "Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration."
There are US-based shippers that redirect your delivery to international. http://www.hopshopgo.com is one that my brother-in-law uses without problems to ship to Australia.
This is a pretty awesome. Seeing how a developer makes his program(game in this case, which is even more interesting) evolve! Thumbs up!
Show HN: Save reading time with the TL;DR PLZ bookmarklet 
Hey all, this is a small bookmarklet my partner made last week to save short summaries of long-winded web posts. Hopefully you can help others save time by sharing your TL;DRs with the world. You can also up/downvote the TL;DRs other users post. It should work with your iPad, too.

http://tldrplz.com
OpenID doesn't prevent session hijacking though does it? It would just prevent the credentials being stolen.
No, I haven't. When I looked at it, I didn't see a well-composed thing like Epigram or Agda2.

So I decided to stick to Haskell for a while and then slowly work my way to Agda2, if I would feel the need.
link: http://tldrplz.com
They only lose money if the number of bitcoins increases more than the demand for bitcoins. So far, the exact opposite has been the case, and the coins' value has increased by several orders of magnitude.

Bitcoins will max out at about three times their current number. If they were to scale to, say, VISA size, they would be far more valuable than today.
I was at a conference recently and saw somebody start Firesheep -- HN profiles showed up. So the choices were: use HN on open wifi but risk having your session stolen, don't use HN, or connect to a VPN. The VPN is probably the smartest thing to do on an open wifi network, but it's nice to know that HN is now safe to use without it.
Wouldn't "countries" like this be super vulnerable to attack? A few well-placed charges and it's like the place never existed.
Argentine president Cristina Kirchner is an authoritarian thug with a long record of abusing private property rights, and now, free speech.
Well, I found the best thing for me is to create an estimate based on my hourly rate. Clients generally don't care a lot about the hourly rate but the global cost.

Since it's an estimate, I draw the client attention to the following facts:

- If the requirements change the estimate will change too.

- I work on an hourly rate. If I think that the project will cost more, I'll notify you why and by how much.
Rules of thumb for 2011:

• If you are generating your content in a dynamic creation system, the encryption overhead of SSL is not going to matter.

• SSL initial session latency is highly variable based on packet round trip time of the user. Some people will be irritated, other's can't tell the difference.†

␄

† I suppose there is room in the world for a CDN-like entity that places anycasted SSL entry points in strategic locations (or topology sensitive DNS lookups), then uses a zero-turnaround at startup encryption protocol back to the "real" servers. (Say, HTTP over a VPN or something more clever, after all you are the client and the server, life is easy). You'd even beat straight HTTP since by keeping alive the HTTP link to the real servers you'd save the TCP SYN turnaround. 👍

‡ Unrelated: The unicode committee has lost their mind. OS X Lion users will be seeing a flesh colored thumbs up symbol at the end of the previous paragraph. I suppose now that PILE_OF_POO and NAIL_POLISH are taken care of the committee will add everyone's avatars from all systems.
Dirty Coding Tricks (page 4)
Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c3bhh8fqYs
Pretty cool, any reason why he is doing this? Also would be awesome if someone recorded this from the start.
Actually, you don't need a Forth implementation to benefit from compact code. Take a look: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.37.3...

They split program into slow and fast parts, slow parts used compact byte-code interpreter, fast parts were compiled into native code with optimizations.

They didn't used "code compression" like Forters do - Forters refactor common pieces of code into separate definitions. Nevertheless, they made quite balanced system.
My weekend project: accounting.js, tiny JS library for money/currency formatting
What were the topics of those two blogs?
At one point, I saw a huge switch statement comparing the value of "col" to a list of twenty or thirty long hexadecimal numbers and returning objects like "LockedDoor". Is that kind of thing common in game development? It looks like a nightmare to maintain, but maybe that doesn't matter in a 48 hour competition?

Also, what is the engine that's rendering the maze for him? Is it a publically available library?
Since governments make the laws, lots of things prohibited to private entities turn out to be legal when governments do them.
Well thank you very much, sir.
It's for Ludum Dare (http://www.ludumdare.com/), a 48-hour game competition. It's quite common for entrants to record their development sessions and release a video at the end, so I'm sure Notch will do something similar.
For some reason it's now impossible for me to connect over normal http:

manila:pieter$ curl -I http://news.ycombinator.com
curl: (52) Empty reply from server
manila:pieter$ curl -I https://news.ycombinator.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2011 15:09:27 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: private
It looks like their financial model revolves around skirting regulations. The example they give is "medical tourism". But it's basically going to be floating casinos and brothels, right?
HP paid $1.2bn for Palm and all it's IP just over a year ago. If they were to open source webOS in any meaningful way (meaning, people could actually use it), they would have to similarly release the Palm patent portfolio to the public domain. For leadership in a publicly traded company to do this, they need some kind of plan to show that this would enhance shareholder value, and it needs to be a strong plan.

Have a look at Google's strategy. Google maintains an open source mobile OS as a strategy for controlling the platform that delivers their product to consumers. Along with this major benefit, there are other strategic benefits as well. Giving away Android applies pressure to other competitors that encroach on Google's search product (Microsoft Bing) and other developing markets (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc).

HP has, until recently, been a hardware company. It's hard to make a case for open sourcing the mobile OS you just paid $1.2bn for when there's the very real possibility that your competitors will pick it up and make a better device than you.

I guess I need help seeing the strategic benefit to HP for open sourcing webOS. The two ways I see them extracting shareholder value are:

* Selling the Palm patent portfolio outright

* Identifying companies that encroach on their patents and extracting licensing fees
not bad, more websites are blocked in china
If you're looking for something that is terrific for real, read up on Japanese - its entirely syllabled nature is fascinating.
I think it's misleading to quote a day rate and then work less than a typically expected number of hours. The client will make an assumption that a day is approximately 8 hours and wouldn't be happy if he/she found out that you were only working 4 hours per "day."
Its how he loads level data from image file using RGB values
I laughed when I saw this because MY Twitter account is @paulgraham and I get mentions all the time where I get credit for @paulg's writings.
Elycharts: simple charting js library
I think that's the map loader. Rather than writing a special map format, it reads the map from a standard image, with each colour defining a different type of block.

This makes it easier to make a map in a short space of time (great for contests), although as you said it makes it's not really maintainable in the long run.
DMVs across several states have improved drastically over the last 15 years.

I remember when the DMVs were utter chaos - prior to automated ticketing. It used to be a mob scene. One of the reasons why it has improved so much was that people were furious every time they had to go to the DMV. It used to be the prime example of everything that is wrong with government. There were frequent jokes and water-cooler griping about it.

One state, I forget which, started the automated ticketing and improved the work flow. The other states eventually followed suit because it was an easy way to score points with the public. I can say the last several times have been relatively pleasant experiences.

Regarding Telcos, they are still highly regulated, highly unionized operations and in many areas they are quasi-monopolies as mentioned by kgrin. My suspicion is that this contributes to many issues when dealing with telcos...
Same here. In my experience, if you're dealing with de facto monopolies: cable, telco, healthcare, or banking it's actually a far worse experience. You are placed in some ring of hell of outsourced lowest cost customer service, nonsensical automated phone menus, and customer hostile corporate policies.

In my area, the employees of the DMV or post office employees have generally provided more friendly and positive customer service experiences.
Direct link to the paper: http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-1032.pdf
The OP knows Polish and Russian, so it's pretty safe to say Arabic isn't his first encounter with inflection.
Actually, if you flip a coin 1024 times, the probability of getting 10 heads at some point is about 63%.

I was actually wondering about this myself the other day (https://plus.google.com/101522949595361604155/posts/Vhdist7x...), and so I build a little script to calculate it. Calculating the probability of a run is actually not very straight forward.
Better invest in lots of defences... If you're an independent micro-country, nobody's going to rush to defend you from pirates.
Sounds pretty awesome, had never heard of it, shall definitely check it out.
My experience is that the DMV is fine and reasonably efficient... as long as something out of the ordinary doesn't happen. Then they're hamstrung by convoluted sequencing, seemingly arbitrary rules, and zero initiative on anyone's part to make things easy or pleasant.

The last time I needed to do something at the DMV that I couldn't do by mail, I made an appointment and showed up on time. Their computers were down. They couldn't do anything. Could they at least look over my forms and see if there was anything I forgot so when I came back it would be faster? No. Could they give me an estimate of how long the problem might last? No. Could they tell me how long it lasted the last time there was an outage? No. Is there a website or a phone number I could call to find the status? No. Could they give me the phone number for this location so I could call tomorrow before I drove all the way there? No. Could they move my appointment because it was their fault I couldn't process my business. No (I had to either make another appointment two weeks out, which would have missed a deadline, or I got to come back and wait in line for an hour).

Not a great experience. If a business was that lacking in customer service, I'd go find one of their competitors to give my money to.
Okay, then don't worry about it and stop posting defending them. I find the outrage warranted. It's a personal thing and a lot of folks on G+ and on here just want to be the loudest about it.
I use an hourly rate to calculate my fixed prices based on estimates.

It's rare that on a large project a client will accept an hourly rate (hourly rates usually occur on maintenance agreements in my experience with a cap over which extra approval is required).

The trick to staying profitable is to iterate in very small chunks, the earlier in the relationship, the smaller the iteration.

Deliver discrete value with each iteration so if they're not happy, they can walk and reasonably expect another competent contractor to finish the work (this means using popular tools and good documentation).

As you get further along in the relationship and on each project you get a better idea of how long things typically take and can provide higher fixed price quotes with less risk. Also as the relationship improves and your client trusts you more, you can do things like give "best case" estimates with the proviso that it may be revised upwards if a task turns out to be more difficult than you'd thought (in exchange for this, you can charge the client less money because you don't need as much "padding" to absorb the risk yourself).

Eventually you move into the maintenance phase where you bill by the hour and by that point the client generally trusts you enough so they know you're not trying to screw them.
Ship It - Tales from the Trenches
Mother of the bride dresses plus size
Next Step Infinity
Sadly because he had to switch streaming providers, the actual recording is split between livestream and justin.tv/twitch.tv. However, you can definitely go back and replay it all if you know where to look. Markus is also taking screenshots ever x seconds (sorry, no idea how big x is) which he'll use to make a video for his entry. That should give you a 10,000ft view of the process he went through to develop his game.
They will probably fly a flag of convenience. No state actor (well, maybe North Korea) will attack what is basically a cruise ship. Pirates might be a problem.
Hebrew has a vocalization system to signal it, though (for educational purpose, for example).
The Beatles
Toute la vie et l'oeuvre des Beatles
I love the "libertarian" basis for it as well - loose building codes, few weapons restrictions - just what you need in an experimental floating structure thousands of miles from help!
I don't know if this is part of the rules, but it appears he's using a minimum of existing libraries. For example, he hand drew the font earlier, and spent a great deal of time at the beginning getting the basic 3d system to work.
I noticed that too. Spanish is my native language and, unless Google wrote that translation themselves, the machine translation from Spanish to English is spot on!
dates in Arabic are not read right to left as the author suggested. They are written and read left to right.
"The news page is even worse. And when it finally downloads, what do I see? Some scientist complaining that their budget is going to get cut."

My mistake, it's an actual cut rather than merely a proposal.
It's helpful if you let people know as early as possible if you're going to go over the estimate by a substantial amount. In the example in the grandparent comment, I can understand why the client would be unhappy paying $30,000 for a project that was estimated at $15,000 if they didn't find out until the very end. Imagine if you had to get your car fixed and when you went to pay the bill it was twice as much as the estimate, and compare that to the experience of getting a call part way through to inform you that the fixes will be more expensive than originally estimated.
I've seen it, in various strengths/flavors, in the southern United States. My guess is that it's more common among people whose complete life experience is so far removed from any scientific endeavor that they've never needed to understand how science works or how it gets turned into technology.

In the interest of fairness: the opinions of some scientists, whose complete life experience is so far removed from any blue collar work that they've never needed to understand why some people don't know anything about science, are often equally as uninformed. (Note: I'm not suggesting Dr. Plait is in this category.)
I am really curious about what will similar articles look like in 50 years from now: "Angry Birds and Doodle Jump on iPhone - are they still fun today?"
Also, if you can hijack the http, you can link to a phishing site which prompts users for their OpenID provider (typically their google account) credentials. Maybe they would notice that the domain name of the phishing site (say googleopenid.com, which is available) is fishy ...

https gives you more than just encryption.
Ron Paul's extreme-right position definitely attracts its fair share of loons, but to write this off as a stunt by his supporters is a double-conspiracy sandwich. The Reddit crowd aren't the only ones who have noticed the apparent blackballing by the mainstream media. Jon Stewart did a bit on the topic the other night.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/ron-paul-he-wh...
I meant why the fact there was a way to do it already actually related to the debate overmuch. This protects people who just use a bog-standard HN account, and further secures all users when actually on the site regardless of login method.
The numbers are written left to right, but dates are indeed right to left.
Thanks for saving me a minute or two. :)
Not necessarily so noticable. I've been running my personal site with https and the effect is fairly minor on the whole in terms of load times. Not zero, but low enough that your average user on the other side of the Atlantic wouldn't notice much of a difference to normal.

Admittedly this is a poor comparison vs a huge site, but then you'll probably find the server processing time is your greater foe.
So, serious question - how often do people actually switch their cellphone carrier or ISP due to poor customer service? From what I can tell, they're all pretty much universally reviled (especially Comcast, Verizon, AT&T), but manage to retain customers due to [actual monopoly over cable, unsurpassed coverage, device exclusivity, lock-in contracts, etc]
I was refering to my own feeling when loading HN, a (in comparison) very simple website.

I am sorry if it sounded like I was talking about any website in general. That is not the case.
As I read this, I kept thinking of the movie American Beauty. If you found this post through-provoking or disagree with it, watch this movie.
Hmm - 6 hours and it still hasn't been deleted.

What a surprise. Perhaps your conspiracy theory isn't as sound as you thought.
Seems maintainable to me.
I'm headed up to Ohio to visit with my business partners in early September. One of them recently found a Magnavox Odyssey and a TI-99 in his atic. He mentioned this on Friday, and this article shows up on HN today. What are the chances!? We're totally hooking it up and giving it a try. Thanks for the fantastic article.
Learning coding is easy and fun with Codeacademy.
Yes, the blog poster states that the brain consumes .25 calories per minute. But we are more than just our brain. The brain is part of a complex system. And so we can reasonably ask if our willpower, or other mental measures, could be affected by non-brain parts of the system.
One advantage I think the parent is alluding to, is that zero-based indexing makes it a bit easier and more natural to generalise between continuous (functions on R) and discontinuous (functions on N) situations.

Since the latter are often used to approximate the former, this is quite handy.