skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you ever wondered why numbers are written backwards in English? Why do we write the highest-order digits first and proceed to the lower-order digits?

Well these numbers originated in Arabic, and since Arabic is written right-to-left, writing numbers in Arabic actually follows a more logical order: start with the lowest-order digit, and move on to the higher-order ones.

Apparently when the concept was brought into Europe, they failed to account for the different writing directions.
View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode

Interestingly Chrome auto-corrected this.
Everything. But we clean up the incorrectness, sweep any inconsistencies under the rug and then publish the corrected proof as if it sprang, fully-formed, from our mind. This, much to the bewilderment and bafflement of students thereafter!
mwahahaha! http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Evillaugh...

If your viewpoint is the history of mathematical proof, then the answer might be "Everything up to the early Greeks." Here's a nice link: "The History and Concept of. Mathematical Proof" by Steven G. Krantz http://www.math.wustl.edu/~sk/eolss.pdf

But if you want to really understand then take a look at the book

Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by G. Lakoff & R. Núñez.
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Bring...

The introduction and first four chapters [PDF] are available at

http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/INTR-04.PDF
Florida Gulf Coast Small Craft Festival
People are already making games in OpenGL and C. This was totally impossible before, using JavaScript. Redesigning the whole API would delay the process, and it would have to use OpenGL as it's own backend anyway, so you'd inherit a lot of the problems.

If you want something that's easier to use, wait until game engines for JS appear. This is supposed to be low level.

With NaCL you might end up being able to use OpenCL to construct your own 3D rendering stack and use it in the browser.
I believe Arabic is the language with the largest variety in sounds. A lot of these sounds don't exist in other languages, such as the deep-throated 'ain and the seemingly many different ways to make an 's' sound, each with subtle differences. A friend of mine said it makes speaking very relaxing as it involves so many parts of the throat and mouth.

I read somewhere once that Arabic is also the language with the largest vocabulary of words - something like three million versus one million for English. Don't know if this is true or not.
There was a floating abortion clinic off Ireland at one point. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1382412.stm

And of course there used to be pirate radio offshore from the uk beaming pop music, bypassing government broadcast regulations.

So there have been other uses...
Show HN: Rasta.js, anonymous domainless key-value store for frontend JavaScript
The linked hymn is also very beautiful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdCPDP5qHy0&feature=relat...
As a side note to the side note, the "Arabist" tradition in the US State Department has been around since the mid 1800s. Robert Kaplan wrote a great book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Arabists-American-Robert-D-Kaplan/dp/0...

(The OP made it sound like elites studying Arabic for their ambassador posts is something new. It just faded in popularity when religious fundamentalists started to rise in influence.)
Great Anna Hazare  We are supporting, Are You? - Lazy Pro Blogger
Your browser probably auto-detects the encoding as Western (ISO-8959-1). Change it to Unicode (UTF-8) to see the Arabic characters.
Actually not. Agressive war is no longer legal (you can end up in Hague).
Protip: Don't take advice on how to live your life from a man who killed himself aged 46.
> I thought the same thing for English and French, no? When I learn English and French in school, we join letters.

No, English and French don't have a concept of "different characters for different places." The "c" in "cat", "act" and "topic" are all written exactly the same. It's not "cat", "a#t" and "topi*"

There are many languages, besides Arabic, that have a concept of distinct initial, medial and final characters. For example, the dozens of writing systems derived from Sanskrit.
Firefox 6 gave me Western ISO (on Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit).
> Unlike with the English language, rarely do you find someone who follows grammatical rules in everyday speech.

Surely they do follow grammar, albeit the grammar of whatever colloquial Arabic they are speaking, rather than the grammar of Modern Standard Arabic?

In terms of colloquial Arabics, do they have less complex inflexional systems compared to MSA (in the same way that Italian and Spanish do compared with Latin)?
Arabic has a large variety of sounds - but I think no more than other languages do. For example, Arabic does not have a p sound or a g sound. My native language, though, has 4 types of t and 4 types of d, 2 types of k, 2 types of g, etc.
I really like that middle-ground solution. I might do something like that if I get another free-lance job. Thanks.
Is there a good reason why such API can't include low-level function and high-level functions for common use cases?
Smaller Island House Design
Yelp has had this for a while: when you visit a business page, the first reviews they show you are ones from your friends, if available. It's a good way to make sure you're not seeing spam reviews right off the bat, but it does rely on you actually engaging with Yelp's social features.
I had a very roughly similar reaction as yours.

My impression of the article is that it was written for women who may already relate closely to the hypothetical depressed friend or family member. I wonder if my negative reaction to most of the advice was based on how uncomfortable I am, as a male and as me, with the idea of someone trying to relate that closely to me in most circumstances, never mind depression.
But in cases where you earn days of PTO, aren't you allowed to take them anytime you want, because you earned them?
What's your OS? Here's how it looks to me:

http://twitpic.com/69kqzg

Mac OS X 10.6.8 / Google Chrome 13.0.782.112
You actually only need to invest 500K if you're investing in certain qualified investments or regional centers with high unemployment rates.

If you're lucky you might make a large portion of the money back or even earn money on it.
I use a Greasemonkey script called Hacker News OnePage [1] that I customized to fit my needs. It puts HN in a sidebar and opens links in a frame to the right of it. Comments are also shown underneath that frame. It's very similar to HN Vue [2], but I have more control over the layout and can customize exactly how I want to consume HN.

[1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512
[2] http://www.hnvue.com/
Lying well is actually really difficult and doesn't come easy to many people. The differenced between a review written from experience and a review written from someone's imagination may be slight, but I think there will always be markers.
This is why I love linguistics. Languages are so fascinating. Humans invented so many different ways to speak and write down ideas.
Why not just have one extremely low tax regime? They can still keep their cash where they like, but without the effort of evading taxation. Also, why do they need to live at this place? If they had visa treaties, this citizenship could be essentially digital. Or, if there was a locale, you could just have an address there.
>Yet, the fact that "Hacker" has a masculine article doesn't bother the
>German female hackers.

Why would that bother them, if they have their own term ("die Hackerin")?
> No, English and French don't have a concept of "different characters for different places.

Yes they do, at least the way handwriting is sometimes taught. For example, "s" in handwriting sometimes looks like a slash ("/") followed by a backwards "c".
Observations on social experience design
What makes you think that "keeping their cash there" is beneficial to any society? I am obviously getting political here, but money for its own sake should not be a goal. Money should be invested or taxed.
Chicken Coops To Build / Best Source for Your Chicken Coop Building Plans
Mattresses especially fall into the 'dangerous' category from what I recall; the sewing machines would be extremely easy to run a hand or finger into if you make a mistake.

Lightbulbs are probably similar to Pato11's original story; robots which can handle the glass and construct the filament supports require extremely delicate and precise control, so it's cheaper to use people. For now.
you'd have to adjust for cost of living.

Someone living in SanFran, or New York will get paid multiples than someone in the Midwest for the relatively same skill set.

Your survey may suffer from selection bias, if most of the respondents are from the major tech hubs, or are working in startups.
If you read the article, it's a system to detect fake reviews in general - there's no mention of bots or spammers at all. By looking at their methodology it's clear that it targets people who write fake reviews, not bots.

Also, it's not as if every spammer in the world is aware of this software and will adjust to it accordingly. In fact, I'd say the vast majority wouldn't even be aware.
Firefox 6 seems to ignore the encoding declaration in the xml prolog. Setting a content-type meta tag should fix this (or setting the encoding in the http headers).

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
What is a Two-Way Firewall?
"I am in competition with no-one." The voice of all true art.
Renovation cuisine
Care to explain why Dijkstra arguments for zero-indexing hold any less true today than in 1982? His arguments make a great deal of sense to me so I take exception to the assertion of cargo cultism.
Shrewd (though likely just very lucky and timely) choice of topic. Looks like they can either (i) take their talents to any one of 10-15 companies that desperately need improvement in this area OR (ii) create a very promising startup and perhaps get taken out in a talent acquisition.
Swimming is a very good exercise :)
DFW's depression was clinical and a lifelong battle.

Your statement is akin to saying "Don't take advice from a man who died of cancer at 46."
>Money should be invested or taxed.

Agreed. But there is what should be done, and what is done. I don't think this is anyway admirable, or of any benefit to society, (it's basically taking wealth harvested within a system out of that system) but I do see that it might be a possible solution for a perceived problem that exists for very wealthy individuals.
Funny! And it's a more concise and effective call to arms than a 30 page peer reviewed article spilling with data.
Customers, Traffic, and Users
You disagree with both points, then reiterate them? Read moar, plz.
I highly recommend the audio version of This is Water.

You get to hear his intonation and his interaction with the crowd...I found it much more moving than the transcription.
Boston Globe Photographer Captures all Three Outs in a Triple Play
In a world of 6 billion people, 1000 is metaphorically a handful, as far as I'm concerned. In the context that we're talking about, there's certainly more than 1000 "good programmers".
"while", "friends", "good", "you're", "you"... yelp spammer!
That's wrong in a couple ways:

• "Arabic numerals" aren't Arabic. They're Indian. They come from the Brahmi script, which is written left to right.

• The prevailing numeral system being replaced, Roman numerals, also placed the most significant digit on the left, so it's unlikely that this was something that was simply forgotten.

• Western languages (usually) mention the most significant digit first when reading the number out, which makes it convenient for it to be written that way as well.
Jules Verne’s _The Floating Island_ foresaw ðis. Its conclusion? Inhabitants could not agree on much, so the island got torn apart.
Why not also have an automated script for the vast majority of sites for which people don't upload their own summaries? First two paragraphs and last paragraph seem like they would do the trick 80-90% of the time.
concluding paragraph:

Customers - You have a respect for what someone does when they pay for
your product. You understand that someone paying $20 for your product means
they gave up an hour of their working life to pay for what you have to
offer. You treat them well for that sacrifice.
How does that compare to the other languages in the Bantu family? Long ago I studied Ichibemba, and think it had something like 18 noun classes, too.

IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.
Perhaps, but you'd be stretching the definition of "legal".
A few notes:

a. this is awesome

b. the "documentation" link halfway down the homepage goes to an anchor tag that doesn't exist, rather than the actual documentation page. At first I thought there just were no docs, and I was disappointed.

c. After reading through the docs, I can see how to create cool classes but am not sure how to instantiate them on the page. Is there a Smalltalk image-style system to marshall instances to disc and back? That would be fantastic.

I have so many other ideas for wonderful things this could do. Breakpoints in event handlers to let you change the code without reloading the page. Including less/scss with view classes and live editing of that on the page.

But there are also lots of challenges. To get good performance you will need to have access to lots of front-end-specific tricks, like event delegation, spreading long computations out with timers, etc.

In sum, then, super-exciting, hope to see more docs and details soon, let us know how we can help. Can someone comment on the status of server-side ST frameworks if I wanted to try a small, all-ST webapp?
Really? There are valuable lessons in this speech. How does DFW's suicide affect his messages?
This is great. It would be even better if HN would use the Strict-Transport-Security header so that browser remember to prefer https instead of http for this site.

See http://blog.sidstamm.com/2010/08/http-strict-transport-secur...
Can someone explain NewLisp's memory management model to me? The description here: http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html makes it sound like NewLisp essentially uses something like an std::auto_ptr from C++ for all its references, but I'm not sure how its possible to write a Lisp where you only ever have one reference to things.
Molly Wood's Verdict on WP7 Challenge: No, thanks.
Is it possible for HN to use Google's SPDY protocol for better performance?
Someone who can turn over design of both hardware and software to a single team with a clear vision and give that team the authority to make any and all of the tough decisions required.

So far I haven't seen this from design-by-committee Google or the-enterprise-doesn't-need-that RIM. WebOS seemed like the closest thing, but it was buggy and hampered by slow and buggy hardware.

Apple's competitors are right to imitate it, but they imitate the end result rather than the process that led to that result, and so they end up with a product lacking a clear vision and goal that can't compete.

That and they always aim at where Apple is now, not where they will be in a year.

(Disclaimer: this comment written on an iPad.)
That's not fair. Judge the speech on its content. The man died because his meds stopped working.
Or: I'm pointing out that it may have been the team members of the similar idea (or the fact he was a sole founder) that made the difference.
Show HN: A Hacker News Android Tablet app (weekend project)
Sivers is Right: Customer Service is the New Marketing
I don't know either language, but Modern Hebrew's regularity may be due to the fact that it was constructed (or reconstructed) less than 150 years ago.
I think if the rich seceded from the other nations, they'd find they'd need national defense pretty damned quickly. Economies of scale would probably make the seceded "nations" look a whole lot like all the other nations in short order.
Try living in the Internet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8
I would agree with you, but the comments were initially upvoted a lot, which tells me some people got it. I think it's my mistake to write it without providing context in the first place. The comments probably made sense to some, but not most because I presumed too much prior knowledge. The comment assumed that every one had more than a cursory idea of peer review. I have worked with people who have published in the best of places (including the venerable Science) and still think that process in badly broken and flawed. And I have seen pretty bad stuff make through great journals. Now this experience is probably different from that of most HN readers, who would view peer review as a purely benign thing. I agree that I did not provide a good enough context to what I was saying.

Also to talk about 'Aspergistic tendencies', it's a negative term and I used it because I was irritated. But I would like any of you to please answer this. How should I have phrased the first line any other way, and not appear arrogant. 'We all' is a construction of language thing, to take all off you in the fold. And I think it was pretty obvious 'we all' did not mean literally all. And anyone engaging in a bit of second-order thought could have deciphered that. One can say that the problem is partially because many HN readers are not native English speakers, but I would say neither am I, and it's more of an attitude thing. Programming is almost completely literal, most life is not.
I don't see this as something just for the very rich. Citizenship is less of a big deal for Americans because they're so geographically isolated, but elsewhere, people cross national borders very often indeed. (Compare it to how often you cross state lines.)

Wealth has very little to do with it globally, at least beyond a certain value. It's to do with mobility of assets, of yourself, and of the people and things you care about.

I'm actually pretty convinced that borders and nations as we know them are another example of a bottleneck that is ripe for innovation by a new model - think of AirBNB or GetAround as tiny little proofs of concept for a much bigger possibility.
Made this a couple weekends ago as a first foray into Android tablet development. It's very far from polished, but I don't think I'm going to work on it anymore, so I thought I would put the source up. Despite the lack of UI effort, I find it to be reasonably usable.

There is a debug APK available in the GitHub downloads section.

The code style isn't great, as this was a weekend hack, but I would definitely appreciate advice on general project design. Thanks!
The entry level positions I am talking (Licensed Practical Nurse) about don't require a college degree, just a 6 month certification. There are also tiers of nursing available via an AA program. Regardless, they are decent paying jobs, and they are hard to fill.
2-2-2 is fine or not fine. As a practical matter, if anyone is counting minutes to response for a text, it doesn't always work. There are often minutes of delay between transmission and reception.

It's like trying to count rings and hang up, as some sort of free, coded message transmission. The thing that makes rings on your end is independent of the thing that makes rings on their end.
Developer slips schedule. Pay whatever you want until the app ships.
The Sad Statistic That Trumps the Others
Oh, you're correct, sorry. I didn't read the link, just the title.
It seems like writing a naive Bayesean classifier for "Was this written by a Turker" should be like taking candy from a baby who hates candy, has very slippery fingers, and is unconscious.
Exactly. Seems perfect.
In theory, yes. But can you name a place you've worked where this was actually the case?

If push came to shove I could probably take vacation even if my manager didn't think it was a good time, citing mental health/family issues/whatever. But that would involve spending the same amount of goodwill as declaring "I've already earned this PTO so I'm using it whether you want me to or not", and I would be hesitant to do either of those if I had even the slightest bit of respect for my company or co-workers. And if I didn't have that respect for the job, why would I be working there in the first place?
You've misunderstood this part. The unusual behavior is not having grammatical gender, but treating all non-human plurals as feminine singular.
Get Notified When Socially Influential People Sign Up For Your Email List
That's right. Polish adjectives agree in number, gender and case with the nouns they modify.
The related parent article is worth a read as well: "In a Race to Out-Rave, 5-Star Web Reviews Go for $5." (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/technology/finding-fake-re...)
Most Arabic dialects are just that: dialects. They have no grammatical rules, nor a official written form for that matter, and are ultimately used for nothing more than speech.
The options I'm referring to actually give you a second passport. I don't know much about green cards, but they aren't passports.
BANG
FUCK, I"M DEAd!!!!
Arabic programs were tiny pre-2001, and now they are extremely oversubscribed. Curiously enough there are still very few people who make it past third-year level :-)
Note that these already exist. There's a few retired oil rigs that serve as server farms and mini-states.
Detox Guru - Colonic Therapist 
Healthy is Sexy : Michael Perrine Interview - Raw Food Chef - Detox Guru - Colonic Therapist
Yeah, there are some selection bias issues here. From what I have seen, anomaly detection especially graph based ones can be pretty robust, but they break when the person has written only one or so reviews- which is what I guess the majority of reviews are from.
The Tacit: hand-mounted sonar for the blind
It seems you didn't read my post at all, because this is a complete non-sequitur. Look at the only sentence in which I emphasized a word and notice that it is exactly the same as the opening sentence your rebuttal.

This tells me that you are operating off of some mental model of what you've heard from FP proponents in the past without actually giving what I said proper consideration. The irony is that in your other comments you decry the religion of such debates with FP proponents, but in this case you are the one bringing a religious view. Nowhere did I say that FP languages are generally superior for real-world problem solving.
As far as I know, in Arabic, it should say "The books are green". "Green" has the same form and pronunciation that singular feminine has. However, green is used as an adjective here for the group of "Books", not "she is".
The profit motive will never increase the quality of service, and anybody who doesn't include the profit motive and profit margins in assessing the relative merits of privatizing bureaucracy is an idiot.
Arabic doesn't have a very large sound inventory, but some of the sounds are pretty unfamiliar to people from an indo-european background. I believe there are only two kinds of /s/ (س and ص).

The root/pattern system and degree of inflection makes it hard to count words in Arabic (since things like pronouns tend to stick to the ends, throwing off the count). But it is very rich in vocabulary. Arabs love parallelism in writing, and seem to have three versions of every word for that purpose.
In Regard to Marc Andreessen’s “Why Software is Eating the World”