skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might be interesting that at UIC, we do a data mining course research project on this topic - http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/#projects. We used resellerratings.com and apart from a handpicked, there is no way of determining a pattern. There is no luxury of mechanical turks for a course project, and we are strictly forbidden from writing any reviews. I had to use the #of reviews, variance in similarity of the review text, time interval between posts, user since date, helpful review count, average rating(user/review/store),etc. and calculated the Mahalonobis distance[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalanobis_distance] to separate outliers as the spammers. Then with these as labeled spammers, used graph based semi-supervised learning to classify the reviewers as spammers. Its a wild open problem - and very easy to argue on both sides of any method :D
The Glee Project Season 1 Episode 10
The Glee Project Season 1 Episode 10 Glee-ality: Hey guys today I give a few comments are of interest to you and that is the Glee Project Season 1 Episode 10 Glee-ality,
He'd probably have to stop and think more often if he hadn't built a dozen or more similar games before.
One of my friends (who studied philosophy) and I had a discussion the other day about differences between natural and programming languages. I made a point that my knowledge of Russian in no way helps me speak better English (we both agreed on that), while a C programmer who also knows a language that relies on a different programming paradigm, for example, Lisp or Prolog, is likely to be a more effective C programmer than someone who hasn't been exposed to that paradigm.
People need to stop reading so much crap and so many summaries, and learn to focus on reading a long article for 20min.
This is really awesome... I too wanted to create a site like this... something huge like disqus... but u made it very simple and its indeed nice...
Why a Nylon Backpack is Useful 2011-8-21
I find “these guys” arguments are perfectly unenlightening — though some prefer the phrasing “those people”.

One should respond to arguments Thiel is actually making, if he is making an argument at all. He thinks it’s an interesting idea. If it turns out to be stupid, great.

Nobody does things “for ideology”. People do things they think are correct or useful or interesting, not for straw-man “ism”s. Is the criticism that he is insufficiently ideological?
8 start-ups that are changing the world
Is it "naive", or is it totally harmless? I've been using HTTPS Finder, which probes for HTTPS versions of websites for quite a while now, without any noticeable negative effects. I'm sure sites out their exist which have this IDS configuration that you describe, but none of the ones I've visited do. As for the positives, I can't remember how many HTTPS versions of sites that it's alerted me to, but it's a lot
Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans
Thanks, hopefully this is now fixed.
See also Erlang, where one commonly encouraged way of handling errors is to crash a process, and let another process restart it.
Idea: Become a brand ambassador online - Ideaas
nothing yet, I just wrote it. But basically, the idea is, you no longer need a backend to store some simple data.
Summaries are not necessarily crap and people need some way to tell if what they're going to read is worth their time.

In reality, all this script does is make it easier for people to filter for what they want to read.
The main point of the article is not that Arabic has a list of things that are impossible to find in any other language. It is that Arabic has many intriguing features that are in contrast to what a native English speaker might be used to. (This is about native English speakers learning Arabic, not Arabic vs. The World.)

When English speakers look to learn an "exotic language", the general go-tos are Chinese and Japanese, which have comparatively very simple grammars. Thus in the exotic language category, as the author points out, Arabic is a very intriguing choice. (And while many Indo-European languages may share a few related grammar rules, using the Latin alphabet hurts your candidacy as an exotic language.)
There's some discussion of this exact topic on Language Log here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2989

From the post and the comments I found the following two links interesting:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/02/libya

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/513/how-are-you-sup...
My first job was employee #1 doing software development and sysadmin work for a non-funded startup in south Florida. Essentially, I was the IT staff for the company. At the highest, my wage was about $7/hour, with no insurance or equity. I was there for about 2.5 years.

My most recent salary was $55,000/year at a megacorp as a "customer engineer", effectively doing sysadmin, development and project management, complete with frequent meetings, on-call and weekly after-hours maintenances.

I have 7 years of experience where someone has paid me to keep things running, 11 if you count the side projects and open source project dabbling, and I've never even come close to a 6 figure salary. Now I'm feeling bummed that I read over this thread.
It's hard to take Molly Wood seriously when she is the type of person that does hold a bias to whatever she fancies at the moment.

The review (of a beta) was weak. She attacks the fact that you 'have' to upload files from your computer to get music on your device while forgetting what she just wrote earlier about Zune Pass and that you have to upload your music library to Google Music for the service to work.

The other main complaint that she uses is Skydrive. While MS does need to fix the web interface, one could easily argue that WP7's UI is vastly superior to Android and possibly iOS as well.
Agree that our Amazon overlords have what it takes to challenge Apple in the post-PC era. Bezos has always taken price-competition to the bleeding edge of what can be accomplished. He's willing to lose money on a product to build marketshare, which is what it will take to compete with Apple.
Is this OSS? If so, where is the un-minified version and repository?
WHEN DO YOU KNow IS HABIT OR Love?
VC Roundtable: What makes a great founder?
We just added clojure support today. That counts as a lisp, right?
Just to pile on: 0-based indexing is also more convenient when you want to build a multi-dimensional array from a one-dimensional array primitive using the integer division and modulo operators to map between 1D and nD indices. E.g., a matrix with M rows and N columns can be mapped to the range 0 <= i < (NxM) by letting i = (row * N) + col, and the backward mapping is row = i / N, col = i % N.

If instead you use 1 <= i <= (NxM), 1 <= row <= M, 1 <= col <= N, then the mappings aren't nearly as clean. Sure, you could hide all this behind some kind of API, eg. Image.getPixel(x,y), but if you work with multidimensional arrays very often, eventually you'll need to marshal arrays back and forth between different containers that use different access APIs, and the simplest common representation to use for this kind of data is as a 1D array, so being able to work with nD data that is stored in a 1D array comes up fairly often.
This dilemma is where an iterative approach to development can really come in handy. Charging $200/hour for an open-ended project is challenging to get any client to accept. Charging $x/hour for a 3-4 week iteration (where the deliverable is a functional, but not necessarily complete, piece of software) is much easier.

I have been burned so many times by fixed-rate projects that I generally turn the work down every time the client insists on it. It throws the alignment of the developer and the client completely out of whack, takes away the paltry amount of leverage that the developer has over the project, and it basically assumes that you won't run into unknown unknowns. This means it's terrible for the developer, but it's actually quite a bad deal for the client as well.

Fixed-rate coding assumes that software development is at the same general level of predictability as having the oil changed in your car.
"Publishing your ideas and having someone tear them apart definitely is the idea behind science."

Peer review is definitely a part of science. But not the complete idea behind it. If it were, then slowly the whole field would converge to publishing "safe" ideas so lesser and lesser of it gets torn apart. Because torn apart means rejection of papers (which translates to no research done). The complete cycle of science involves:

1. Understanding the different ideas and problems that are out there.
2. Manifesting a different perspective on the matter.
3. Understanding and experimenting with this perspective.
4. Publishing the result
5. Gaining feedback and talking to people about the results.
6. Continue.

"Better someone nicely points out that his math is wrong and he can change his design."

Exactly. Calling it "nonsense" on a public blog where thousands of people can read it is not the best of pointing out mistakes.

Yes, it makes for good news, and thousands of people will think this is good news, but for anyone who seriously does solar cells, will either find that this is impossible or as the author of this pointed out violate the basics of solar power technology.
Just because of Anglicization and no standard way to do this. His name has 2 Arabic letters that are not found in English, 3ain and Qaaf. The rest of the variation is also due to English not having a consistent way to spell itself and no consistent way to transliterate Ar --> En.

You can also see this in the most common Arabic name as well: Muhammad. Some spell with three ms, some 2. Some spell with u and some with o.

Personally, to be pseudo-unique snowflake (and to give myself a leg up in SEO) I spell my name a little unusually as 'Mohomed'.
Google translate accepts contributed manual translations of any particular text. (Try double clicking some words on the page.) We have no way of knowing how much of that was done purely by software and how much was touched-up by human contributions.

Not to take anything away from Google, but I suspect software-only translation isn't quite as good as this seems yet.
I think you'll need several of them linked together before you get any useful testbed for government. Most systems of government can work at small scale. They don't break until you get lots of people. The whole thing should also wind up being more stable socially.

I really like the idea of ocean-going governmental experiments. Let's have socialist experiments and parecon experiments while we're at it. They really need to be sovereign, or they're just big cruise ships. They need to have complete ownership of the platforms, which almost means they need to be donated.

Obviously sinking is a big risk. Make sure there are well-drilled emergency procedures, and that the links between platforms are such that one sinking will not bring down any others. And keep lifeboats and dual citizenship, so if it goes south you'll have somewhere to go when they pick you out of the ocean.

I suspect that even if the first few iterations of this idea suck and/or are used for crass commercial purposes, it will likely get ironed out eventually. I think seagoing countries could be an important part of the future someday.
Unminified JS: http://rastajs.errorjs.com/rasta.js

I am putting it on GitHub right now.
I think he meant - physically, HOW does this work. As in, where is the data stored and how?
I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
Localize It: PodPonics Grows High-Tech Organic Produce In Shipping Containers
I thought of the exact same thing when I read this. I still like it though.
Someone will produce a good product in the next 18 months. It's not rocket science, and there's an enormous pile of money. But adopting Apple's integrated model is a) not a sufficient condition and b) very threatening to existing business models. Apple's monopsonistic position w/r/t componentry is also going to mean that whoever intends to compete is not going to be able to do so on price, the traditional domain of the PC competitors.

I'd expect the best competitor to be a hail-mary type of move from a dying supergiant (Samsung?), and the most successful to be from Amazon.

Standard disclaimer: former AAPL employee.
"Either a proposition or its negation" is the logical principle of the excluded middle, which is not a fallacy.

The fallacy of the excluded middle is considering only a small subset of possibilities. It applies here, not with what was explicitly stated, but an underlying assumed view. It is assumed that arguing against spending current amount X of money on science, means arguing for not spending any at all. Obviously that would be bad, because we wouldn't have the current benefits. In fact, we can also spend somewhere in between 0 and X (e.g. X/2) or even more than X. We'll get some non-zero amount of benefits for these, and it's not as clear that it's worse off, unlike spending nothing.
>There are plenty of reasonable ones out there.

That may be true. I have a good middle class friend that move from the US to Norway for higher taxes but great social programs. If you can handle the winter, not a bad deal. He loves it. Interesting that the citizenship decision might be moving closer to something like the job search.
ARMing Linux
"The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations watching Arabs calibrate their language based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor."

Nope, not unique.

Tamil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language) is the same way. I am a native tamil speaker.
You can work towards making userspace crash only. Generally you want to make it stateless as much as possible, ie avoid writing to lots of files, only config databases that are crash proof.

A few people have been looking at stateless userspace eg see http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Runtime-Changes

Current Linux distros generally have too much poorly documented state in the filesystem, much of which may not be updated in a crash proof way...
There is a quit option in the menu, so no. I think it can be configured to restore state on a clean exit. Chrome can.
Heroku API is down
That's horrible the us and eu countries must be going before the Hague then for the Libian bombings. Oh wait that's right they write the rules so it does not apply to them just to governments with less military might.

What is "non" Agressive war is always defined by who holds the biggest gun.
These stupid grades kind of drive me nuts, but they really should disable SSL 2.0 and the export ciphers.
That does not explain why the Indians did the same thing (I'm assuming) without arabic influence.
You'd still have to bank in other currencies, and you'd have to put your money in the markets of major economies, on which you would have to pay taxes. And you're not getting rid of social welfare like minimum wage, you're getting rid of the society. Is that what libertarians really are, at heart, merely anti-social?

For you the Randists and anti-Randists, and techo-utopians, feast your ideals on the great Adam Curtis' latest social hackumentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz2j3BhL47c
A fascinating read. I'm no fan of Dick (I am a raving Lem apologist, however), but the case made here is really compelling. Too, it's a nice long read.
How about ذ (zal), ز (zaa) and ظ (sor)? Perhaps they are more 'z' than 's'? Then there is ث (tha) though that is more of a 'th' sound I think, but people in the subcontinent pronounce it as an 's'. The differences are really subtle to me.
It could be argued that this reasoning alone is not sufficient since we live in a world with third and fourth generation languages. I suggest you read the paper if you are interested in what the paper has to say.
Thank you for posting this. I'd not heard of David Foster Wallace, but having read this and watched an interview, I've ordered a copy of Infinite Jest. Sounds like he was a brilliant man. Thanks.
It's a tough choice choosing between variety of PMCs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_military_company) like Xe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xe_Services) or paying up to join an alliance (http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/index.htm).
That's interesting. I found my German lessons did help me better understand the underpinnings of English. Of course, that may owe more to the teacher, and English being a Germanic language probably helped, but knowing a second natural language does give you a new perspective on your first, and additional languages broaden that even further. 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.
"The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese in a couple of years"

I assume this in reference to the predominant 2nd language for most people? If so, something I've always struggled to agree with is the implication that English is the second language for so many people only because of some fortuitous timing on the part of the British Empire. Technological advancements have certainly helped, as has the fact that as the British fell from their peak the US (also English speaking) came to take it's place. But is it really just a matter of timing within a generation or two most people will be expected to be somewhat fluent in Mandarin?

Maybe I'm a bit naive because I was raised speaking English, in an English speaking country, and only fumble my way through a couple of other languages enough to not get entirely lost as travelling. And I can understand the reasons why English can be so difficult for foreigners to learn because, even moving to the UK I discovered entirely new ways to pronounce words I thought I already knew. But... and I think it's a big "but"... something that has always seemed almost unique to English in my limited experience is that you can speak it badly and still be understood. You can speak it really badly, and while people might chuckle at the way you've turned a phrase you'll still get help. When I compare that to my experiences throughout south-east Asia, Italy, France, and Spain nothing further could be from the truth. Inflections or emphasis on the wrong syllable can have drastically different meanings that elicit confused looks or something altogether wrong.

I just don't see Mandarin doing the same. But maybe I discount the importance of the economy as a driving factor too much.
Well, whole numbers come up in mathematics in different ways. Of course if you're talking about cardinality you should include zero: it simply is the cardinality of some set, you can't avoid that.

I was talking about a completely different use of numbers: numbering, that is assigning numbers as labels to things. There I think mathematicians on the whole prefer to number starting at 1 (or not to number at all and work with abstract indexing sets). Sometimes it is convenient to number starting at zero if it simplifies some formulas, but usually it doesn't matter.
If they were taking credit card numbers, STS would be worth the trouble; otherwise, it's not something I'd recommend going out of your way for.

For non- HTTPS- nerds: STS resolves the problem where your first contact with a site is via (insecure) HTTP, and a MITM makes all subsequent contacts lie to you about whether HTTPS is available. Since we've lasted many years without even having HTTPS, I think we can all just look at the address bar carefully instead.
I'm talking about the language of the perceived (US) national enemy. This used to be Russian and is now Arabic.
For a democratic nation, super-rich citizens who essentially flout the rule of law is a problem to be solved.

If a democracy establishes workplace safety and minimum wage laws and a super-rich citizen sets up an ocean-liner/sweat-shop just outside the borders of the nation, what should we do?

Super-rich individuals often already can attain citizen status which puts them further from any jurisdiction that will given them problems. That would only exacerbate the problem.
Who cares about ASCII (American standard code for…) in a British product? This, of course, would use BS-4730 (BS = British Standards Institute.) it has £ where ASCII has #.
Apple gets with the wireless revolution
Reminds me of this:

"Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world’s eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God."

- 1 Corinthians 1:26-29 (NLT)
You can use money to compensate a male or female to marry you and live with you for say 10 years. I think this would work in most nations.

With enough money, you could purchase nations and then make your own laws to your hearts content. Give me control of a nations money supply, and I care not who makes laws.

If you have money, then anything is possible. Without money, nothing is possible. That's why everyone is trying to get money. Money is life.
I don't think you quite grasp the amount of variation there is in the Arabic alphabet relative to the Latin alphabet. Sure, there are few letters that look slightly different in cursive depending on how you write them, but they don't even compare to the fact that in Arabic, every single letter has a completely different form depending on whether it's written as an isolated, initial, middle, or final letter (four forms). Sometimes these forms are completely different, /and/ there are very specific rules that specify which form to use depending on the letter it follows. (That is to say, not only are there 4 forms, but they're not even uniform. You will either write the initial form or the middle form of a letter depending on the letter it follows). This is a good order of magnitude above Latin.

Take a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Table_of_basic_...
> Except deadlocks have nothing to do with sharing memory, and everything to do with sharing state.

Other languages using 1-indexed arrays: Fortran, Cobol, Smalltalk, XPath, Erlang[0] and Lua (and a bunch of other very old languages like PL/1 or Algol).

All Wirthian languages (Pascal, Oberon, Ada, etc...) use configured index ranges (and provide primitives to query the array for its bounds), but I believe the convention is to use 1-index arrays when there are no special index semantics due to their strings being 1-indexed.

VB has configurable index ranges as well, but defaults to 0-indexed arrays.

You can also "configure" initial array index in Perl by setting `$[` I believe. Doing this will lead to you being beaten to death with ethernet cables by your colleagues. And if it does not, it should.

[0] though direct indexation is rarely used in erlang
Funny, my wife, friends and I were making a short-list of some reasonable US alternatives last night (we've both lived much of our lives outside the US though are in it now) and all our top picks were cold, northern, and civilized. Norway was on it.