skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice post!

While this probably sounds a bit strange, babbling in freefrom gibberish and stretching your mouth / jaw muscles can also help to relax sub-vocalization. It seems to relax an underlying vocal fidgetiness the same way a good stretch/workout does for the rest of the body.

In other words, additionally approaching sub-vocalization as a physical phenomenon might be helpful.
Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age by Robert Gates
> have auto-complete, parameter guessing, getter/setter creation, auto-builders, and real-time code syntax/quality/checkstyle/pmd/findbugs/etc... validation

You can do all this from Vim.
It's said I once wrote a Perl script to obtain queue times in a call center that took a screen capture via VNC, then carved up the snapshot into tiles for each queue and then OCR'd each tile to get the queue time. The time was then shoved into memcache and the process repeated. I acknowledge nothing.
A = You have a good sperm

B = You are intelligent

In logic, the argument translates to :

A <=> B (quality of sperm depends on your intelligence), B <=> A (and vice versa, intelligence depends on your quality of sperm)

<=> is a connector wich means "A is true if and only if B is true". Therefore, you have a good sperm if and only if you are intelligent, wich is the logical twin of "you are intelligent if and only if you have a good sperm". It is a tautology because the 2 expressions are equivalent and the meaning of the first is included in the second.

Even if it sounds superfluous, this kind of exercice actually helps you to spot the weakness of this study, because it logically excludes any other parameter than intelligence to determine successfuly the quality of sperm (depends can be translated to "is a function of"). <=> is a very strong connector. In their study, men with low intelligence and a good quality of sperm don't exist, neither do highly intelligent men wich poor sperm, then they draw conclusions. Wich is convenient, but dumb.
There's a flaw in the analogy: Very few of the original monkeys have been removed from the Python community. What Python programmers think are annoying has always simultaneously bugged the hell out of the people working on the language.
"Imagine what it would do to the VC business if the next hot company didn't take VC at all."

No need to imagine. Just look North -- this is reality.

Neither RIM (makers of the blackberry) nor Cognos (now IBM) took VC funding.

VC has imploded in Canada and startups are surviving as they have always.
This is a great idea for a niche site/business. I'm curious about your price. Jack Cheng's review (http://www.jackcheng.com/stuff-i-love-muji-chronotebook) mentions that the notebook retails for $4.95.

Have you gotten any pushback on your $19.95 price?
The reactions listed in /reactions/ are general types of reaction. There may be 100,000s of individual reaction between each type.

I will definitely be making it more clear that you can draw the compound.
The problem is that it's harder to write good working code in an unclean language. Look at the Unicode situation for example.
Tetris Challenge
I wish I could make it on that day, but I'm at chinese class till 9pm unfortunately. I'll try for the next one though, you should make a mailing list or something!
Me too... Except I pay my own allowance. ;)
The particular hangup I faced when using regex was with this URL:
http://vi.ebaydesc.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemD...

>>> x = re.compile('(?:(item|t|hr)=(\d+))')

>>> x.findall(url)

[('item', '290277158797'), ('t', '1227377775000')]

I can't for the life of me figure out how to get the hr value. I started messing around with regex again, but no luck so far.

I can do the same with Python's string methods:

>>> hr_start = url.find('hr=')

>>> hr_end = url.find('&',url.find('hr='),len(url))

>>> url[hr_start:hr_end]

'hr=http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40'

It's just messy as hell, it'd be nice to do everything in one swoop.
Same story with the other forum I spend time on: everybody wants to hear the numbers. Nobody wants to share.

I sell a wee little software application as a sideline. I also publish sales stats and have since I started. You can find them all here:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

Summary for terminally click-averse: first month (7/2006) was $25. Sales for 2008 are around $20k. My market has a funny business cycle so "per month" tracking conceals as much as it reveals, but October (best month, typically) was $2,450 and November (worst month, typically) was $1,700.

Services rendered: I sell something people want, where "people" are overwhelmingly elementary school teachers, "something" is a program that makes bingo cards, and "sell" means "transfer, in exchange for money".

Phase startup is in: we'll I'm sitting down with the VCs next week to discuss a Series B round to... no, just kidding. Next week I'll probably also be selling products to customers for money. Next year? I'm thinking selling products to customers for money.

Incidentally, organic sales growth + pending second application = eventually quit day job.
You can also Cmd-click the title :-)
Microsoft partners with Strawberry Perl to improve the CPAN
Language = Culture (for e.g Japanese)
Some chemical names are displayed as regexp... Not sure if all chemist understand them :)

ex: 1$l^{6}-thiacycloprop-2-yne 1,1-dioxide
Native and non-native (even if fluent) speakers recruit different areas of the brain when speaking or comprehending a language. This is now well known from fMRI studies.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... : From the abstract (Listening to comprehensive but non-native language seems to demand more networked co-processing.)
Another one:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

Non-native speakers recruit more brain regions, suggesting that more "concepts/whatever" are being invoked in the formulation or parsing of a sentence. With this in mind, it would seem that even people who assume they are thinking in a certain language, are only accessing a post-conceptual process (language formulation). Conceptual relations between objects or other concepts may still have been put in place in a ways influenced by the language in which you picked them up.

For the same reasons as above, verbal encoding of empathy is probably not the succinct representation the brain uses; you just happen to have conscious access to the verbal encoding only. I would guess though, that something like the Implicit Association Test would uncover more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_Association_Test

As for your Spanish, you will stop using the English-to-Spanish pre-processing crutch once you get more fluent (with practice and repetition).
That's interesting -- I never thought of it in terms of context, but I had similar issues when I returned to the states after 7 years in Germany -- I would go into shops and order things in German, because my "talk to shop people in German" bit didn't turn off right away. Some confused/amusing looks when you say "Ich moechte gern ein Hamburger, bitte" in a restaurant; and it takes a few months to switch back.
I'm sure we'll go later than 9:00 p.m. The last few times we've done startup-y dinners here there were folks around until 1:00 or so. :-)
Workers Lock Themselves In Shuttered  Plant
I completely agree with this -- I am bilingual too, but the words seem to spring out of the flow of thought, not to "be" the flow. And when I'm learning a new language (or enough rudiments not to be impolite when visiting, say, Lisbon) I never have this "translation table" issue the OP mentions -- at least, I don't think I do. There is no transitional linguistic step between the thought-flow and the words, new or not. (Of course, that doesn't mean that language pickup is necessarily easier -- just different.)
I think such a developer (one that has strong knowledge
of both JavaScript and Java/Python/Objective-C and still
feels compelled to use one of the abstractions) doesn't
really exist - at least not in any significant numbers.

I thought as a member of this mythical group I should speak out. I'm sure there aren't many of us.

First, history: Roughly ten years spent programming in JavaScript (it's hard to believe it was that long) before GWT came out in 2006. Immediately tried GWT, found it too heavyweight, and returned to JavaScript (jQuery, specifically) for another two years, before finally really moving to GWT over the course of the last six months.

Experiences: It really is not possible to write a significant GWT program without good knowledge of JavaScript. I think, on average, every Java class I write has one JSNI (JavaScript Native Interface) method, usually to work around some deficiency in the library but sometimes just to circumvent Java's type system. That's not counting the classes that are pure JSNI that exist to wrap up some JavaScript functionality.

It has also been my experience that it takes roughly 4 lines of GWT code to do the work of 1 line of JavaScript (with a good library such as jQuery). That's from comparing LOC counts on a handful of medium-sized projects I implemented with both technologies.

So, why? The thing that keeps me using GWT even though it is an incomplete abstraction that requires more code is organization. Partly that comes from the fact that OOP is a better fit for GUI programming than the functional paradigm. Mostly it comes from having a nice build system that lets me organize my code in the traditional Java hierarchy. There are lots of ways to try to organize large JavaScript projects---I think I've tried them all---and none have every really felt satisfactory to me.

In the end, most of the time when I'm writing a web page I reach for jQuery first. But when the functionality of a web page crosses over some ill-defined threshold such that I start thinking of it as an application in itself, I change my tools and reach for GWT, all for the benefit of (to me) better organized code.

YMMV.

(Edited for formatting.)
I think in which ever language I have been using the most recently. This varies between English, Welsh, French, Japanese, etc.
Temple Grandin also famously speaks of thinking in pictures; could this + Einstein be related to Simon Baron-Cohen's thesis that autism can be defined as an "oversystematizing" brain?
Australia's Internet filtering too ambitious, doomed to fail
Intel works on tiny devices for eco-technology
Ok, mission accomplished methinks:

>>> x = re.compile("[\\?&](seller|item|hr)=([^&#]*)")

>>> x.findall(url)

[('item', '290277158797'), ('seller', 'la-wheel-and-tire'), ('hr', 'http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40')]
Asymmetrical Follow: A Core Web 2.0 Pattern
A Look At Failed Social Networks
Pirates of the Amazon Abandon Ship
Thanks for the Juana M tip. I hadn't heard of it, but I'll definitely check it out.

I love the steak here, but a real salad is a rare treat in BA!
Your Spanish may be a bit rusty. But I think you will be able to become fluent very fast if you had a chance to practice more.
edit:grammar
Detroit gets minibailout.
How do magazines do business? They have stories suggested and paid by PR firms who are paid by other firms. So this is really an advertisement.

Eh, and I actually like Google and the Economist..
I think that there's a forcing function with using a non-IDE environment that makes me, at least, write better code. I have to navigate it and understand it without (easily) jumping between files/methods/objects.

For me, that leads to better organized and better encapsulated code.
My understanding is that this is a very well-chosen phrase. If you check out this page:

http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/MySQL_vs_PostgreSQL#Partitioning

... you'll see that the MySQL section on replication has a short, consistent, confident story:

MySQL ships with replication support.

... while the PostgreSQL section offers an excuse, a list of choices, an explanation, a caveat, and a promise:

PostgreSQL is modular by design, and replication is not in the core. There are several packages that allow replication in PostgreSQL:

[List of packages here]

It is a common misconception that these "third-party packages" are somehow less well integrated. Slony, for example, was designed and built by Jan Weick, a PostgreSQL core team member...

...However, Slony is considerably slower and uses more resources than MySQL's built-in replication, as it uses SQL and triggers rather than binary log shipping to replicate the data across servers. That may make it less suitable for larger cluster deployments with high performance demands...

Recently, the PostgreSQL core team has announced that basic replication is planned as part of the 8.4 release.

The moral of this story is: Both databases support replication! But their marketing (their "replication story") is different. MySQL has superior FUD-proof marketing while PostgreSQL offers you choices up front -- which is often a marketing mistake, because it's easy for your opponents to cherry-pick one choice and then FUD it to death (see above), and because people who aren't experts generally get paralyzed by an excess of choices (the pros! the cons! Who understands all that stuff?!) and will often leap at the chance to escape paralysis if you offer them a batteries-included option. See Schwartz, Barry: The Paradox of Choice.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_par...
Furthermore, keeping the state in a web application is harder. For example in a desktop application you can open a dialog box and when you are finished you get back to where you were. You can call the dialog box from several places and you always get back to your previous state. It is like calling a subroutine and then return vs doing a "goto" and then another "goto" to get back. You end up with a lot of spaghetti code.
This is a dichotomy. Complexity is really many choices and detailed control. The real barrier to simplicity is reaching a firm decision. You either have flexibility or simplicity.

Once the larger community decides what it wants, and how to do it, all the complexity disappears inside the machinery. Writing web-apps doesn't require low-level network wrangling, because the choice of TCP/IP etc. has been made: you simply use it as it is given. The higher levels of web-apps still present more complexity than they ought, though -- so we still haven't made enough limiting choices.

Overall though, the prognosis would seem bad: It is the essence of software to be parameterisable, to be changable. So it will always be able to produce choices at a greater rate than they can be well-chosen.
Yes, and at least for me it takes some effort to switch from one to the other. But to be fare with the previous post I do not know if it is the same process when you are speaking and when you are thinking about a problem.
> Yes, there's a tone of self aggrandizement throughout the book that can get annoying. But there's a lot of really helpful ideas which are worth the read.

... or worth summarizing:-)
I made a website that helps you get free shipping on amazon.com(have not worked on it for years and it shows)
http://www.filleritem.com
thanks, these have been removed
for #2 the search can be too slow for auto-complete
Not really any earth shattering revelations offered in the article but it was interesting to see the crazy amount of networks that have actually been released. It's also interesting to review the evolution of Facebook. I got in when it was only available to 10 or so schools and it was an entirely different animal. It is really hard to pin down why it was so much more successful than others. Some say simplicity, but then why did MySpace ever become so popular?
Superbly written, and a sobering read. As a proponent of small government, the ideas themselves are echoes, but I appreciate the wealth of evidence provided.

The big governments of the past sixteen (or, arguably, eighty) years have provided quite a bit of ammunition for political conservatives, and this spiraling crisis to me resembles an endgame for big government. Its bloat and poor decisions will result in bankruptcy and a timely education for those who've forgotten that the US government is inherently inefficient. This inefficiency is by design, for fear of a hulking administration was the primary motive in drafting such a constitution.

Or, this will become a runaway train, and the government will grow like a cancer til its collapse. Let's hope not.
What kinds of things actually pay well?
Ask HN: How do you deal with a boss who is stuck in the past?
I'm working for a small startup that has chosen Rails as its development platform. A significant portion of the application has already been coded by my boss and he continues to participate in development. The problem though, is that while he means well, his many years of C experience and his lack of web application development is causing me some serious pain. I am continually refactoring his code and trying, to the best of my ability, to help him understand basic principles of Ruby style, web design patterns, and basic OOP. It's getting to the point where he is becoming very defensive about his code. How the the HN community deal with these situations?
Great stuff... hopefully these sensor/wireless/energy-scavenging chips appear on digi-key soon (and thus, on octopart.com)
I'm Dutch as well and with work (software dev) and most of the stuff I read (HN, books) mostly in English, the language of my thoughts tends to follow the language of my current activity.

Whenever I'm speaking Dutch and an English word better conveys what I'm trying to say, I just use the English word. Most people barely notice. For extra fun use German and French words too!
MOTOROLA KRZR K1 BlACK MOVISTAR UNLOCKED
Motorola KRZR K1 with performance oriented services with 2G network and having many different Features. If you are interested in search of very good look having phone with each and every function then your search end here with your full satisfaction.
Re: Readings in Distributed Systems
Also MLM is, crucially, legal.
On Design, Learning and Self-Improvement
Also if you are in a open file dialog, type "/"
Are you familiar with the literature dealing with subvocalization and reading? Any recommendations?
A significant portion of the application has already been coded by my boss ... his many years of C experience ... I am continually refactoring his code ...

Several responses come to mind here:

1. Unless you're working for a very unusual startup, your time would be better spent writing new code rather than refactoring existing code.

2. You speak of experience as though it's a bad thing. It's possible that your boss knows what he's doing.

3. Ultimately, he's the boss. If you don't like his code and he doesn't like your suggestions, either quit or be fired.

How the the HN community deal with these situations?

I think the usual solution here is to quit and start our own companies where we don't have to put up with a boss we don't like. :-)
Prime Minister Brown urged to keep hacker in UK
One reason I might do well is that it is far, far easier to profitably invest 70 thousand dollars than 70 trillion.
Preparing for Programming (with Greenfoot)
I would say most people don't actually "think" they're hungry rather than perceive they're hungry. The hunger response is not a higher-level cognitive function; it is regulated by the lower brain. When it reaches the level at which you can reason about (and picture a hamburger), it is more than likely that you already are aware of your hunger.
Video: "Startup without Investors" (Expirience from Eastern Europe) (rus)
Other videos can be found
http://video.yandex.ru/users/blogcampcee2008/collection/1/
Most of the presentations were in Russian, only several were in English.
NE555 - Single Timer
The NE555 (datasheet) is a stable controller which includes 23 transistors, 2 diodes and 16 resistors. LM555/NE555/SA555 was called The IC Time Machine.
Not an investor, but...

> They don't do so well. Why would you?

Maybe because an individual only has to resolve a handful of ideas in their head, rather than thousands? Or perhaps due to the absence of competitive forces involved with ulterior motives.
Tightly-Coupled Systems, Airlines and Error
Strangely, for me, in imagining empathy, all that comes to mind for me, is an abstract understanding of it. I can "feel" its meanings, almost in the sense that the meaning flows through my fingertips, but I don't experience imagery or episodes or sounds.

Similarly, when I need to use an abstract word, I translate these feelings into words. Often times, possibly as a result, I come up with strange words that fit the context but in an unconventional manner.
English is my primary language, but I also picked up a fair bit of German and Danish as a child from my grandparents.

I mostly think in English when programming, but when I get into either specific relationships between elements of the program or high level conceptualization I tend to slip into German. Names for objects often come out in Danish if I don't stop and translate them into English.

In college I had some unfortunate partners on a programming project who were subjected to code written late at night and very quickly with comments in both English and German and with many Danish identifiers. Fortunately they were up to the task, and as they were Italian and Norwegian with English as a second language, they gave as good as they got with the multi-lingual coding.

Our professor requested a full English translation to accompany our source when we turned it in.
Lots of people here probably already understand this, but: User agents being stripped out says nothing about the OS, only the browser. The OS has no involvement in the user agent string. Most browsers happen to include an OS, but that is their choice, and they are free to lie.

My guess is that either Google has a critical mass of privacy nuts that use readily-available Firefox extensions that do this, or, probably more likely, that there are internal builds of Chrome floating around that have been programmed not to send their version number freely out. It means... nothing interesting whatsoever!

Speculation that Google was building a browser was obvious and flowed freely long before it was found to be true. Speculation that they are building an OS is the same, except it hasn't been shown to be true yet. Well, except the Android OS, which I'm sure there are NO PLANS WHATSOEVER to bring to the desktop in any form, ever. (I mean, obviously it can't be a straight translation, but...)
I desperately needed to find a way to change the java.library.path at runtime, which is technically forbidden.

I finally stumbled upon this beautiful ugly hack (it opens up Sun's non-public class and hacks it via reflection):
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=707176

It even works on Mac OS X.
Happiness is contagious in social networks
I take a medium-strong form of S-W. It makes sense in the connectionist model (which I also take a medium-strong interpretation).

The strongest form says that concepts in one language are completely alien to another, such that if you don't know the concepts in one language, you cannot perceive them. This is obviously false.

However, as related concepts are evoked by spread-activation, it is completely plausible that one language allows more efficient retrieval of certain concepts, such that very strong biases result.

The famous example of the many Inuit words for snow comes to mind. It is true that a non-Inuit speaker is able to discern between different kinds of snow, but the language guides the mind in terms of where to look for details. Without this guide, it is easy to get lost and confused.

Here's the familiar example for hackers: code in C/Basic/Pascal for a while, and switch to Python/Ruby (or vice versa). After you get used to the target language, and look back at the code right after the switch, you'll notice that a lot of programming constructs are out-of-place and "counterintuitive." This is, so to speak, Sapir-Whorf "at work."

This is also why when LISPers say that you should learn lisp, because it will make you a better programmer, they are correct. :)
Funny, most programers who make heavy use of macros heavily rely on IDE-like features such as macro-expansion.