skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> knowing a second natural language does give you a new perspective on your first

I agree with that, however I disagree that having a different perspective on English makes me a better English speaker. Writer -- perhaps -- but still nothing that a smart native English speaker who spent some time in school reading Shakespeare and the classics could not beat.

> If you don't feel knowing a second language is helping you use your first, maybe you need to look more closely at how you use both.

I can speak English, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and French. The last two are a bit rusty but I bet I could catch up pretty quickly if I had to. The problem is that, while I speak and write English very well, I possess no "secret power" that would let me beat native speakers of English. Proof: nearly all great writers who wrote in English (or any other language) were native speakers. Knowing the ways of Lisp gives a C programmer a "secret power" which he or she can apply even to the procedural language that is C. Knowing the ways of Russian or French gives me no such advantage with English (except obviously for the occasional French phrase or word root -- but those advantages are insignificant compared to the tremendous advantage of being a native speaker).
Yeah, we so agree. Your feedback has been replied to. We'll soon put up pricing.
> and why do we need it?

If you're on an unsecured wireless network (e.g. at a library) and you don't want someone to see your HN password when you log in.
Quantum entanglement could mean completely secure data transfer
>English in the 10th century was basically the same language as German (Althochdeutsch or Old High German, to be precise). In 1066, the Normans conquered England, bringing French which became the official and court language of England for several centuries.

Old English and Old High German being "basically the same language" is a very ignorant thing to say and categorically wrong. Old High German might have been much more close to Old English than modern standard German is to English but they weren't mutually intelligible and they were clearly different languages even at that time. Major differences between the two had arisen many centuries earlier. Take for example the High German consonant shift. Now, would you please explain why you would say that both were "basically the same language"?
This looks great in concept. Anyone tried it?
watch the movie Demolition man. It's from 1993 and you see the first appearance of a tablet like an iPad ..
I am with you on the patent reason, but I think they are going to sell them. They probably figure they are worth more than a WebOS-based device would be to the PC division.
Interesting. I am a fan of Dick, but before now had never heard of Lem. I found this a moderately interesting read but nothing that would make me seek out Lem's other writings. I'm curious what he's done that could inspire such esteem. Is there anything in particular of his you'd recommend?

Edit: thanks for the recommendations, everyone.
The engine he is using, he wrote yesterday. It should be available after the game is finished.
To Suck Out All the Marrow of Life, A Smartphone Is Worse Than a Cigarette
Good use of Twitter's new Bootstrap framework http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
I like this idea.. Walmart isles would be funny and helpful
To each their own, I guess - I specifically wanted the wide screen aspect ratio because of reading a lot of documents. I have a nice PDF application that automatically zooms to the text instead of the margins, though.
It doesn't depend on the case; it's a question of how you frame the project.

If you need to design the product before you can estimate it, you propose a design project. You should propose to produce a design deliverable; you can offer your client a price break to skip that deliverable and plow ahead into implementation.

Or, you can quote the project "blind" but structure it so that the client bears the risk; for instance, by quoting a fixed number of billable weeks with a "if you tell us by week N, you can get more contiguous weeks at this rate" clause.

Or, if the client is really worth having and the project is good, you can do enough design work to do a realistic proposal gratis, which is what we invariably end up doing, because we don't do projects that aren't worth doing that for.

But in no circumstances should your proposal itself be perceived as having a price tag. One consultant did that with us once and I had to talk my parters down off the wall against ending communications with them right there.
More like $17,000 I believe.
Created popular game, can't manage alone. What do I do?
I created a social web-based game in Rails (my first Rails project, actually) and in just a few days it's really taken off. Gaining almost 200 self-proclaimed "addicted" users, and ~60,000 page views, with little promotion.

This has huge potential, but I need to redesign and rewrite the thing from scratch. Several ideas need reworking, and new features desperately need to be added.

I know I can't do this alone in a short enough time, but I don't know anyone who could help.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm based in the UK.
Dictionary compilers create endangered words list
I don't know if it's completely true that English has less character variation than Arabic— as you say, in English there is a choice of upper or lower-case, with occasional changes in meaning. In Arabic, the form of a letter is completely determined by the letter it follows. It's purely a display difference, not a separate character set. There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored.

That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.
And also replace a value with normal, arbitrary javascript...

Still, neat idea.
I wrote a program to detect this. Without markov chains to analyze the structure of sentences this is pretty useless. If the structure is too clean with too many common expressions the review is fake ..
Speaking of logical fallacies, science sure looks a whole lot better if you only look at the benefits it has brought to society, and not at any of the harms.

When the vast majority of the people who promote science are just as intellectually dishonest as any other variety of religious fundamentalists, I think it rightfully raises a lot of questions about the true value of the endeavor.
"What gets on my nerves"

is irrelevant to the discussion of how others want to use a third-party service. make a valid point, or recognize your incessant axe-grinding for what it is.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yanw
Default pass-by-copy with specially enabled pass-by-reference isn't that uncommon; it's how C++ works, for example.
I was attempting to be facetious.
The effect is the same, and the intention is just as reprehensible.
I'd say the fact that Japanese is a head-last language is enough to complicate the matter greatly for any non-native speaker of Japanese.
Superfast military plane hit Mach 20 before crash
It hides the referer which is unfortunate. Maybe an option only to login, register, etc via HTTPS?
Finnish, my native language, has this to a lesser extent. Historically, there has been a significant regional variation in spoken Finnish (although modern communications and inexpensive travel have greatly diminished the differences), but the more formal the context, and the more diverse the audience, the closer one's speech tends to the Standard Written Finnish.

To some extent, isn't this true for English as well, at least in the UK? Many regional dialects are almost mutually unintelligible, but everyone understands Standard English (aka Received Pronunciation or "BBC English".) Perhaps in Arabic the differences are even more about vocabulary and grammar, not just pronunciation?
And coming from a medical family, I don't think most CNAs are thinking of the greater good when they're wiping those asses.
Solaris.
I think a video is clearly needed. Although it might take me a while to put one together.
The Rise of the Idea Entrepreneurs
My Asus Transformer has shown me that I do not need a tablet (but I like having one for the oft-mentioned couch-surfing), and the ideal tablet for me is one that can easily convert into a laptop form factor.

I'm actually very much looking forward to Windows 8 because the one failing of my Android-based Transformer is not being able to run "big boy" apps like IDEs, Photoshop, etc, when it is in laptop mode. I really do like the simplified UI/OS for doing all the basics -- email, web surfing, reading news feeds, etc, but having one device to act as my tablet/notebook/productivity machine would be absolutely ideal and while it is somewhat possible to mix Linux in with Android (I've done it on both of my Honeycomb tablets) the results are pretty hacky and it looks like Microsoft is the only player who is really going to push a meshing of the desktop and tablet ecosystems into one OS.

We may be moving into a Post-PC world, but I for one am not nearly ready to step into that yet.
Awaaz.de is not a non-profit. It is a for-profit venture and is making money. I think it has more to do with the reporting than the companies.
Don't forget retreat from the Zombie Apocalypse:

http://zombiesafehouse.wordpress.com/2010-zshc-winner/
Fetch Notes
agreed. saying it'd take a few months to fix a save problem? hard for me to believe. maybe it is true but it's difficult to imagine.
> If you need to design the product before you can estimate it, you propose a design project. You should propose to produce a design deliverable; you can offer your client a price break to skip that deliverable and plow ahead into implementation.

I guess this is ultimately what we did (had they turned us down on the main project, they would have walked away with the design spec). That's the standard policy now.
Do you want to start at the heavy end or the light end? Solaris is heavy. The Cyberiad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad ) is light.
>I believe Arabic is the language with the largest variety in sounds.

You believe wrongly. There are languages with far bigger phonological inventories. Practically every language spoken in the Caucasus region would fit this criteria.
Firing Steve Jobs was the best thing Apple could have done, long term.

Apple is where it's at today because of what Steve Jobs learned and grew from his "failures".
> We learn Latin in high school specifically because it is like a key to learning other languages

I would say that this concept that Latin is a key to European languages is a big fat lie. In the former Soviet block (which is where I'm from), Latin was not taught in schools. About half of my former high school classmates now live in a different country and are fluent in the language of that country, whether it's English, German, Spanish, or Italian. Most of the Americans I've met know only English, some bits of French/Spanish, and some bits of Latin.

I'm not saying that learning Latin is completely useless -- I am simply saying that I believe that whatever advantage it gives is insignificant compared to actually going to the country and speaking the language. As a matter of fact, I believe that teaching Latin/Greek in American schools is a giant conspiracy designed to making pupils appear educated without actually giving them practical knowledge.

Which is completely different from the situation with programming -- where, if you are really, really good with math and logic, you can pick up pretty much any programming language relatively easily.
This is a great concept...of course, it needs many users to be effective. A couple suggestions (that you probably are already thinking about):

1 - You need a distinctive favicon, because it is so important

2 - When you submit a summary, it should show you the summaries, rather than just give you a new Captcha...it makes you think you got the captcha wrong, even though you write somewhere that it was a success. I think we've been too conditioned to think seeing the captcha change means success.
Your complete and full name? Able to identify you uniquely? My name's "Corbin Simpson"; see what happens when you Google it.
Argentine ISPs Use Bazooka to Kill Fly
I think it's important for start-up to understand that generating wealth is utmost important, a lot of fun and of course a legal fiduciary duty of the founders. However, it is possible to both make a lot of money and make a positive impact in the world.

For many start-ups today the motto isn't just 'Do not evil', it's actually 'Do good in the world.'. I know our motto is definitely that, so I believe is for companies like SwipeGood and the ones on this list. I hope to see more start-ups with a similar double bottom line.
Updating tends to be awkward and haphazard. You end up wasting huge amounts of time solving arcane problems (on Windows and even more so on Linux).

Updating on Ubuntu is way simpler than on a Mac. No competition. And I reboot less often with updates on Windows 7 than I do on Snow Leopard.

I'm glad you like the iPad. I picked one up and found it too heavy to be practical. Likewise I find the OSX GUI sort of sucky, preferring my KDE3 set-up.

But that's me; it's all anecdotal.
Yeah; I think I sounded pretty pedantic back there, so let me just say I don't think you're suggesting anything wrong. I'm just saying, I've seen fledgling consultants accidentally let themselves be perceived as billing for the proposal work, and I'm pretty sure that's a big mistake, worth calling out.
Hm, I'm wondering, what if you travel around and you never spend more than 186 days in any single country? Assuming you visit only the countries that use that same approach, does it mean that you never pay any taxes? Doesn't sound plausible to me...
If it was that easy, why did their human judges fail at it?
The "sci fi" distributions channels that you're describing were taken over by the "horror/moneymaking" people. I wouldn't even call most of that science fiction.

For more recent works, you might like:

Vernor Vinge
"Rainbow's End" -- more near term and what you describe
"A Fire Upon the Deep" & "A Deepness in the Sky"

David Brin
"Earth" -- again, more near term, although with a fantastic ending
The Uplift Trilogy (a bit more fantastic, but very well done, particularly the 2nd and 3rd novels)

There are many "classic" authors and novels. One novel that receives somewhat less attention/accolades, but which I think speaks to some of what you ask, is:

Arthur C. Clarke
"The City and the Stars"

Neal Stephenson' The Diamond Age might also resonate. And while both more "near term" and historical, his Cryptonomicon has some very worthy reflections and speculations.

And I guess I really can't pass up suggesting Carl Sagan's Contact. Superb.

As for films, I'm not the most versed, but the following, more "real" science fiction films come to mind:

GATTACA
Blade Runner (yeah, yeah, but I just re-watched it)
And I'll mention that Star Trek (particularly, for me, The Next Generation), is now on or coming to Netflix

P.S. And of course, William Gibson's Neuromancer and, was it the next one or the next two novels? His short story collection, "Burning Chrome", fits well into these two or three.

And as for a certain pragmatic perspective on human psychology, behavior, and possible near term societal/political developments, the classic Heinlein ouvre, while perhaps sexist or interpretable as such, and also in other ways somewhat "archaic", is nonetheless insightful.

Probably not what you're looking for, but now that I've rambled on, there it is.

P.P.S. I found Asimov's original "Robot" trilogy a very insightful allegory for the competing demands of public knowledge and privacy in the modern world. Set aside the robotic aspect, per se, and look at how the different societies lead there lives and social conduct.
Thanks! One thing I'd really like to see myself is an in-browser environment like this for a capability language like Newspeak or E.
Yeah, the CRM was a very interesting side note for me. I wish more companies actually used a CRM and could "personalize" my experience for me, it doesn't even need to be anything big.
There are some differences in the way the way the characters are laid out in English too, unless you use a monospace font.
personally I focus on negative reviews.

But then you have to grapple with whether or not the bad review is true or not(i.e a competitor posting it). In those cases it's best to focus on places where the reviewer's reputation can be checked.

i.e. all those review sites that let anyone review are more or less worthless. But a blog post by someone with hundreds of posts is a lot more likely to be a real story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
You seem to have missed the point. The problem he points out is that in the Java world, it is popular to use a domain specific language like XSLT to handle some tasks and that's an external tool that does not nicely embed into Java. In the Haskell world, domain specific languages are also popular but they tend to be embedded in Haskell, which makes it easier to do the non-domain-specific stuff (like writing the results of the XML transformation to a file). In Java land, many tools can be extended through plugins which can get the same effect but the result is not as easy to follow.

He also has some critisism towards Java the language, but it played a lesser role in the article. Some of the targets of his critique (like the lack of sum types in Java) are also reasons why Java does not have cool embedded domain specific languages like Haskell has.
Thank you for acknowledging my right to an opinion, although I'm not sure why it was needed. I don't think your credentials put you in a better position to comment on this particular matter, but you're still entitled to your opinion anyway.

It takes very little effort to implement STS, and there are significant tangible benefits from doing so. For this reason alone, I would recommend that all HTTPS sites use it. I acknowledge that using the "secure" flag with cookies provides a bigger benefit though.
Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) was a Low German dialect, closer to Dutch in many ways, and to Danish in others, than to High German. Which isn't surprising when you consider the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came from the North Sea coast region from southern Denmark to the eastern Netherlands.
It was decent of the columnist to provide a response to his earlier column, which was much discussed here on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907187

But if the comments he responds to in his latest column are the best he received, and if he really thinks his responses are the best possible responses to those comments, I have to wonder what the editors of Forbes are doing both to choose such economically ignorant columnists and thus adversely select for a readership that mostly doesn't think deeply about economics. Steve Denning still seems mostly to write his columns to tout his latest pop-lit management book rather than to encourage readers to think deeply about economic policy. Again, I have to point out that the well established economic law of comparative advantage,

http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/cadv_e.htm

http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv...

http://www.unc.edu/depts/econ/byrns_web/Economicae/Essays/AB...

aptly described as "one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial," shows that all countries, and all consumers, gain if producers in various countries TRADE and exchange what they have a comparative advantage--however derived--in producing for other goods that other producers have a comparative advantage in producing. Americans own a lot of Kindles. Many other Americans can afford Kindles if they ever decide to buy one. The manufacturing workers who produce Kindle components in various places around the world work in their workplaces mostly because they think that offers a better trade-off of money for time than some other kind of work they can do where they live. The world gains in prosperity year after year, both in the aggregate and on a per-capita basis, because countries trade and because enterprises decide what to produce based on what they can produce most advantageously to trade for something else.
I second the recommendation of The Cyberiad... especially for people interested in computers, robotics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. It's really brilliant -- and a very easy, fun read.
I am a native Arabic speaker, I enjoyed the article, however there are a few mistakes.

In 2. The exceptions are called plural exceptions which happen much less than the general rule, Otherwise most of Arabic follows a very specific rule to making plurals from singulars.

In 7. Adjectives have no gender, and therefore al-kutub hadra' (الكتب حضراء) "The books, she is green" this translates to the books are green (hadra is an adjective and has no gender)

In 9. Formally Arabic numbers are read right to left, i.e. we read the least significant digit first. Although very few people do this.

In 10. It is next to impossible to understand any written text which is a 1000 years by the average Joe, including the Qur'an
Saying "you have a right to your opinion" sounds better than "I'm pretty sure you're just totally wrong about this", doesn't it? :)

HN doesn't have a framebuster either, but you didn't call them out on that. The security nerds we work with are far more likely to call us out for not hyperventilating about clickjacking than about HSTS, which, again, is not widely supported in the field to begin with.

There are actual apparent problems with HN's HTTPS; it will for instance happily do SSLv2 with 40 bit RC4. Let's advocate for those fixes first.
Great! Let me know how it goes! I haven't been able to get actual hands on to one in decades.
Atleast now HP now has a pretty valuable portfolio of patents of Palm
Solaris is a neutron star. Heavy.
That plane will render anti-ballistic missiles useless and make possible long-range targeted assassinations.
Well, the syntax and vocabulary (keywords and such) of even a large programming language like Java or C++ is regular, and tiny compared to a natural language.

What is hard about programming has very little to do with learning a programming language and everything to do with more abstract concepts and ways of structuring solutions. The equivalent of CS concepts like object orientation or functional programming would be types of writing such as essays, or newspaper articles.
Even though I can't write Russian, I still know how I'd structure an essay written in Russian. Even though I've never used Ruby, I have a fairly good idea of how I'd tackle any particular category of problem using Ruby.

The difference is that the vocabulary required for writing Russian is vastly larger than the equivalent vocabulary in Ruby.
Thanks for the great article. I'd completely forgotten about the details of the Odyssey system and only vaguely remembered that a babysitter of mine had one that I'd beg to play with her when I was 3 or 4 years old. Reading about the screen overlays brought back a flood of memories of the different "games" that they had.

A big part of why I'm so into computers today is likely because of those early experiences with the Odyssey (which was then followed by a TRS-80 Color Computer of my own).
I wonder what do you think Hurd was a good CEO? I understand that HPQ stocks were going up but the raise was based on eating the future.

Hurd made HP very toxic place to work (I know that first hand): and how the heck you can compete with Apple when your engineering force is demoralized?

Also what would be HP future under Hurd helm?

As of Larry's comment... Larry talks his book. He does not care what will happen to HP and he needed a guy to clean up Sun hardware division. So of course he will praise Hurd.
Port of PG's "On Lisp" to Clojure