skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I looked at the estimates for learning difficulty for English speakers (http://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY-...) and saw that they mix together the language difficulty with the difficulty of the writing system. For example, Japanese (labeled hard) and Turkish (labeled medium) are similar (relatively speaking, looking from a English speaker's vantage, also add Korean to this group). In the explanation for why Japanese is so difficulty they mention the three different writing systems, etc., which is true (some consider the convoluted Japanese writing system to be the most complex in the world, on par with Maya hieroglyphs). But what if you want to learn just spoken Japanase? Similarly, what if you wanted to learn Turkish in the 1910s when it was still using the (modified) Arabic alphabet?

As for the "thousands of characters" scare for Chinese, I've read estimates that for daily communication you can make do with less than a thousand characters.
To answer the question "why would you want to do this in Python" - I have the simplest answer: Because the rest of my sysops code is in Python. And porting 400k lines of Python code to bash script (or Perl for that matter) is not worth a slightly cleaner (and potentially less flexible) subprocess framework.

I use subprocess on nearly a daily basis to automate database actions, and while the api is not the most appealing, it actually does its job very well, letting me coordinate 2-3 processes in a chain that's moving 100's of gigs of data on a regular basis.
Ask HN: Does anyone use the iOS Story Board functionality for non-trivial apps?
I've been mucking around with it and it seems pretty cool. Has anyone used it for anything more complex than just "trivial" apps with 1 or 2 UIView's?
Best Buy's policy makes sense.

I think they are trying to avoid the probably very common scenario where you forget your headphones for a trip, nothing to worry about, just buy a pair from the Express machine, return them as soon as you are back home.
I don't think we're in a bubble, I think we don't have enough investment vehicles for rich people and so the lack of supply has driven up prices. Imagine you have $10M, how do you get your > 10% annual return now that the ponzi schemes have been rolled up? Not a lot of choices.
Wow. This press release even got covered in the NYT!

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/supercomputing-rent...

The actual feat accomplished here would not surprise anyone involved in supercomputing, and companies have done very similar things with non-scientific tasks, such as this article from 2008:

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times-...

describing how the New York Times itself did a similar computation.
The commit is here if you want to see what they did to fix it:
http://cvs.openssl.org/chngview?cn=22447
Bootstrap, JSHint, and Recess
"We need an army of founders, policy makers and government officials..."
This is at least equally interesting and insightful as the original article if not more so.

Steve Jobs would never have promoted RSS. He would, though, create user experiences based on it. Which really jars my reality to even say it, but your comments/observations and my own experiences (I use RSS exclusively on my phone as an offline info gatherer mostly used when I'm on subways out of Internet range) that 1) RSS is really cool and 2) there are no compelling end-user RSS-based tools.

Thanks.
Kind of surprised you didn't do a sale to Heroku or DotCloud (or another PaaS or an IaaS), maybe as an aqui-hire. If nothing else, convert income into capital gains.
"Context"? Don't you mean "design"? I regard the fact that I don't have to view most blogs in their original look one of the best features of RSS, saves me from activating Readability all the time.
The donate button stays disabled if there's an error.
Trademark Infringement and Dilution
I _really_ don't get the Pinterest connection. This is more like MakerBot & Etsy joining forces.
From the numpy mailing list (http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2012-March/...):

(summarizing how Numba differs from Unladen Swallow)

-----

>> what is the difference to http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/ ?

To fully expound the difference would take a lot of discussion. But, summarizing:

* Numba is not nearly as ambitious as US (Numba will be fine with some user-directed information and with a subset of the language that gets compiled)

* Numba will focus on compilation rather than JITing --- in other words it won't be trying to detect hot-spots and compile segments (actually LLVM is not a good candidate for that sort of thing as it is not a very fast or memory-efficient compiler for a lot of reasons, I believe this is why PyPy does not use it anymore, for example).

* Numba will be much closer to Cython in spirit than Unladen Swallow (or PyPy) --- people who just use Cython for a loop or two will be able to use Numba instead

* Numba will borrow the idea of call-sites from IronPython wherein a function is replaced by a generic function that dispatches based on input types to either cached compiled code for the types specified or the generic function.

* Numba will be mainly about trying to leverage the code-generation of LLVM which multiple hardware manufacturers are using (Intel's OpenCL support, Nvidia's PTX backend, Apple's CLang, etc.) for NumPy arrays

-Travis
Likely yes. But what matters is return on time in contrast to any of the other things you could be doing. "always work on the most important thing". Even small percentage point improvements in conversion go directly to the bottom line, which is far from obviously the case when fixing bugs or adding features. And if your bottom line is already pretty big, the marginal value of someone working on optimization is likely to continue to be high, regardless of how plucked the fruit seems to be.
That is an excellent point. I have some videos up (https://vimeo.com/user6866395/videos) but I neglected to add them to the new site.
I didn't know, won't happen again.
When the terms explicitly state no refunds though, "returning the product and canceling the payment" is not an option. You bought it, you own it, and the store is under no obligation to either take the item or give you your money back.

I'd fully expect to be sued for fraud and lose if I attempted what's being described here.
Ridejoy's searching for our first engineering hire (YC S11)
Nice. I think your topic categorization needs some work, but I dig the idea and think the API would be useful for a startup I'm working on now. Would love to talk more; drop me a line at the email in my profile?
Ongoing revenue stream and one of the few consumer apps to really make a freemium model work right.
When you said DSL I head Regex.

Honestly, your competing with inhouse scripts people spend a few weeks / year maintaining. Which is not to say you can't make a lot of money doing so. Ideally, your saving people significant time writing these scripts, but tossing out buzzwords just alienates your users.
Well at least he's got a platform to probably get a refund, as for the rest of the world who doesn't write for Time...
It is already done to an extent (high-throuhput machines), however, there's still a lot of old timers in biology who spent too long pipetting and haven't invested yet.
Your tool is very useful in finding domains but you're likely leaving a bunch of money on the table by only monetizing via domain affiliates.

You should consider a premium subscription where members pay 5-10 bucks to see even more domain options. Folks who buy lots of domains should have no problem paying for the utility you provide.

I say this as someone who has found bunch of domains using your site but not once used your affiliate link to buy because you don't have my preferred domain registrar choice.
The comment I was replying to said "People hate PayPal because their TOS are restrictive." I just tend to feel that PayPal hate is rather overstated here... people just have PayPal indifference for the most part.
Except... isn't Chrome written in C?
Nothing they're watching for is technically illegal. Nor should it be. One of the biggest things they're looking for is simply how much time you spend on the road, for example.

No, safe driving is not cut-and dry. Nor are the terms of their program. The discount you can get can fall anywhere within a very wide range, and depends on multiple non-binary factors.
Why it is irrelevant? I want to sell my application via AWS so users can deploy my AWS image with my application by I want to protect my IP. How to do it?
There's a Feed view, which is what you're referring to, as well as an Original view. There is also a Story view, which shows you the click-through of the story, which is convenient for some feeds, like Hacker News.

The majority of sites that I personally subscribe to are individual writers. I want to read their writing in the exact format that they intended it to be read. Daring Fireball comes to mind.
I've wanted a service like this for a while but haven't had time to make it. A few other ways you could get photos from users:

- get a picture from their phone. This seems really important and useful, but I'm not sure the best way to do this. Ideas:
1) let them email it from their phone to a special email address
2) give them a url that takes them to a site that opens up an "upload" dialog
Both of these my be accomplishable w/ a QR code

- let them paste in a URL of an image. I've used embed.ly for this. It will take all sort of urls: plain images (rare for non-technical users), Flickr URLs, etc
The problem is that such a conclusion is too tentative at the moment. It's possible that the old version is 5% better than the new version. My guess is that 5% of revenue over the next 10 years could be around $40,000 - that's a lot of money to give up! Why not keep the split test running until you can be statistically confident that the two versions make similar amounts of money?
I'm going to assume you know about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML
Even so that facebook button is sitting there acting as the gateway to investigating further, with very little information provided so far. To me it's almost like a site that says "Give us your credit card information now. We promise only to do nice things with it. Later we'll tell you what we did"
I apologize from Patrick and the readers if my comment made more harm than good. That wasn't my intent. Sometimes I'm a bit of an "asshole", and I have to acknowledge that. I thank you for taking the time to correct that side of me.
Current HBO subscribers = 28M
Revenue per subscriber = $5

Households that can support HBO Go = 5M
Revenue per subscriber = $15
Assume 100% of eligible households subscribe.

(28M * -5 * x%) + (3M * 15 * 100%) = y
x = 32.14%

For y to be positive (net gain for HBO), the chance that cable companies drop HBO needs to be less than 32%.

If we assume HBO Go adoption rates are the same as cable subscribers (26.6%), that means 800k subscribers.

(28M * -5 * x%) + (800k * 15 * 100%) = y
x = 8.57%

For HBO to have a net gain, the chance that cable companies drop HBO needs to be less than 8.5%.

Another way to put it, in order to risk $140M to gain $12M you need to be more than 91% sure.
If he's so anti-originality, he should have stolen Fabulous Fab for his nickname.
I initially shrugged and said "gee, another programming language," but as I've been looking, I just see more and more to squee about.

They aren't the decisions I'd have made but they're good decisions. The inlined state stuff especially looks exciting and clever.
Adam Langley's the one who did the real explaining on this thread; thank 'agl. :|
Another option for building static websites is StaticMatic[1]. It uses Tilt for templating, so you can use mustache, haml, sass, coffeescript, or whatever. There's also a nice "upload to Amazon S3" command.

Some have said StaticMatic is good for building PhoneGap clients. Personally I just use it for small sites.

[1] https://github.com/mindeavor/staticmatic2
I didn't say that it would cost x sales in y time, or even that it would harm sales at all. My point is that it would be interesting to see the interaction between a car manufacturer's EULA, and a dealership's retail staff. I mean, do car salespeople even understand what a EULA is?

It's not like selling Windows 7 in Best Buy. The cashier at Best Buy does not care whether I hate the EULA or buy Windows. The car salesperson probably cares very much about whether I buy the car, and they probably don't care much about some random EULA term.

Granted: a bit off-topic perhaps. I would hope that such blanket permissions terms on sales contracts would be overridden by the protections written into the law. For instance I don't think health providers can undercut HIPAA protections no matter what their contractual terms say.
Yep, we have thought through a number of different monetization strategies including sponsored challenges, private games / events, virtual goods and paid / ad-supported versions. The most important thing right now for us, though, is building a product that people love. With that in mind, we'd love any feedback you might have from that perspective.
That's one of the reasons most stores have such generous return policies. There's a cost to having an upset customer whether they're right or wrong... at least, when they pay with credit. Sometimes it's cheaper to take a loss on the return than to deal with a chargeback -- which costs time and money even if you successfully dispute the customer's claims.
I would suggest adding some human faces to the design (e.g pictures of a classroom, family playing bingo). Add a tutorial video on the front page displaying how "easy" it is to use bingo card creator. Also remove the "try now" button since you already have a 30 days return policy and see how it goes.
NYU EEX Summit Tomorrow (Friday) #BuildSomething
http://nyustern.campusgroups.com/eex/nyc-events-feed/

If you mention Hacker News you can receive the $20 price. Thanks!
Why do you care what other people think?

Seriously, just whisper and accept the stares. That's what I do. People lose interest in you after a while anyway.
i think the facebook integration is less than optimal. If my site uses facebook login, and a user is asked for facebook again on initial use with filepicker the experience would be confusing.
Who's this Linux Torvalds fella?
Videos from Rhizome's 7on7 art/tech conf 2012
I understand why it makes good business sense for a company to offer a good return policy, but that is different from me as a consumer buying things on impulse and then returning them a few days later when I regret my decisions.
Really? Google's slides include numerous direct quotes from people at Sun and Oracle saying that everything Google did was fine and basically reiterating Google's core arguments, which seems pretty damning to Oracle's case. On the other hand, I don't see how the fact that Google would have liked a partnership with Sun but couldn't work out a deal demonstrates any wrongdoing.
So let me see if I have this straight: you differ from other file uploaders out there (e.g., https://github.com/blueimp/jQuery-File-Upload/) in that you allow "upload from anywhere", plus a quite nice interface? Not to belittle it, those are solid additions to the space.

edit: Btw, if you're looking for IE support on the from-computer upload, look into using iframes for transport.
SEO Analysis Via Aggregated Data: Importance of Domain Age
Can you talk more about this? Process, pricing, et are all interesting to me.
I have a beard, can code in Python, and wear lumberjack shirts. Will you join my hacker club? We can call it "Lumberhacks".
Rather than just shouting "bubble" why not take an analytical approach to this by comparing them to other consumer SaaS companies.

Last year DropBox made $240m from from 2m paying customers (out of 50m users). So about $120/customer. DropBox's valuation is around $5-$10bn, around 20-40x revenue. Which given their growth rate seems a reasonable revenue multiplier.

Over the same period Evernote made $18m from 750k paying customers (out of 20m users). So about $24/customer. A $1bn valuation would give a multiplier of 50x.

LinkedIn is currently trading at 45x revenue - a figure that's been relatively stable for a while.

So arguably 50x is high but not ridiculously so, if Evernote manages to double their customer base over the next couple of years (or their revenue per customer) which isn't unfeasible, it'll look cheap at that price.

(Given Evernote costs $45/year that presumably means most of their customers signed up relatively late in the year resulting in the average revenue per customer being $24/year, so even if they only managed to keep their current customers they'd make 34m this year bringing their multiplier down to 30x)
Visualizing iOS Text Editors
meh, I enjoy it, I understand it's meaning, and it's crept into emails between my friends and I as well. Just another mannerism creeping into casual electronic communication to convey meaning whilst not face to face isn't a bad thing. Go find someone else to kick off your lawn.
I thought that Pimsleur was basically a language podcast: i.e. unidirectional content. _Hearing_ someone speak a native language is not the same as having ones pronunciation evaluated, which is also separate from learning proper pronunciation.

But yes, after hearing all of the raving reviews in this thread, maybe I should give it a closer look.
Some background (announcement, talk): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3692055
Thanks for the feedback... will definitely watch out for those 2 things going forward. Were the contests you were running for groups of friends or for the broader public? (we're experimenting with both)
Fujitsu Says "Big Data" Pushing Supercomputing into Mainstream
There has been considerable inflation since the last bubble.
hum. that was pretty much my point. not sure if you are agreeing or not :)
Right. Our goal is not only to be a great uploading experience, but also to tie in all the cloud services, like Dropbox, Facebook, GMail, etc.
Not completely accurate. The hundreds of princely nations invaded and fought among each other on a daily basis. But I agree, nukes are required.
Verizon interested in Windows Phone as its 'third ecosystem'
Out of curiosity, what do you dislike in Python regexes? I switched from Perl to Python years ago and didn't notice much of a difference, other than that you have to write `value = re.sub(pattern, repl, value)` instead of `$value =~ s/pattern/repl/;`.
All of the things you mention have flat or very simplistic security systems. In other words, access is predefined. X can do Y.

That's not how high-level software design works. You're at the top of the chain. The security that you engineer will vary based on the very content that's being accessed! Just because you're a user with the right password doesn't mean squat.

Facebook is a fine example. Just because you can view the profile of one of your friends, doesn't mean I should be able to as well. I'm not his friend.

How do you define that in Firebase? if(you_are_friend) allow_access? What the hell is a friend? How does Firebase know what a friend is? Now you're setting up complex rules that access multiple databases/tables/rows just to make a decision.

That mountain of code that manages the core operations of your software can't be wished away by happy thoughts.
An entrepreneur can't have a better last name than Grinda.

Pronounced: "grinder"
Simple tools for building a recommendation engine
Awesome story. I had to laugh at the part where you linked the language difficulties. I had a somewhat abortive attempt to learn Chinese last year (we have an office over there). I don't think I've ever come up against something quite so hard as trying to get the tones right in Chinese.
Wow, hats off to you. I love the part when it watches cpp files for changes, recompiles and then uses the library to patch the live application.

Who said C++ is not productive, please? Alright, all credits goes to Paul. :)
Mike Meyers taught us that in '97: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118655/quotes?qt=qt0367876
This is total BS, at least in my case.

1. I refuse to pay for premium Comcast at 2x the price of my very nice Internet connection just to get one channel.
2. I am very happy to pay $8/mo to Netflix.
3. I'm also very happy to buy LOTS of physical media; I own over 600 titles on DVD or Blu-Ray, and counting. Many of these titles, I have bought two, three, or even four times in different contexts (DVD, Blu-Ray, iTunes, etc.)
4. I'm also happy to pay for all of HBO, even though I don't really want to watch all of HBO.

I just don't want to give money to my local cable monopoly, a lot of money, when I only want about 3% of the content they insist on bundling together.

I really don't think I'm the bad guy here.
True, I was also hesitant to check out the site. Glad I didn't resist the temptation!
Fraud is "intentional deception made for personal gain". By attempting to return, he would make no deception.

Also, the stuff printed on a dot-matrix receipt does not have the force of law. A store's policies describe what they normally do. That's just where you begin the negotiation.
Putting exits into perspective
and one that most establishments treat as a mere nuisance

I'm skeptical of this... I'm struggling to think of any reasonable bar in my area (i.e. anything below, say, nightclub level) where, if someone caught you having sex in the bathroom, you wouldn't be asked (politely) to take it elsewhere.
Outsource Your Weakness
I was actually really surprised when I discovered this when developing the bulk upload facility I did. It wasn't great when 9/10 computers in our office are Macs. Didn't make it worthwhile showing it off to people in our place!

I'm sure they will all support it soon enough and my days coding it will be worthwhile.
Not so much wrongdoing as bad faith. If Google offered Sun a good financial deal (they might have: certainly they had a lot of cash) but Sun walked away anyway (because they wanted to preserve control of the platform, say), then that puts a pretty firm cap on the damages Oracle can be awarded. If Sun represented to Google internally that a deal was likely, and then yanked the rug out at the last minute, then that's straight up bad faith.
Some retailers require different SKU/model numbers from other retailers to prevent return shifting.
Linux has been growing ever since, and Linus is still in charge of the whole thing: http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges http://youtu.be/yVpbFMhOAwE
Rethink Books Launches BookShout Platform and Targets Christian Audience
That's a great thought. Custom stylesheets is on the feature map, but we should also be looking into someway of reducing the facebook double login as well. Thanks for this feature idea.
One Day Every Week Without Tech: The Digital Sabbath
Judging my what I heard, Numba was quite the talk of the town at Pycon (though this could be totally biased - I wasn't there so can't comment first hand!)
Augmented Reality linking to Wikipedia in a museum
How is it even possible to overlap the browser sidebar? Never in all my years of webdev have I even seen it hinted that anything like this should be even remotely possible ...
so did anyone actually get this to install? I legitimately cannot get it to work on any browser on either of my macs...
Exactly, so it really doesn't "pop" then, except in the sense of drying up access to cash in our own little community. That doesn't sound so bad. Remember YC was founded in an environment of limited venture funds and those early startups seem to have done quite well on the whole.
If you feel any guilt or have buyers remorse about a purchase you have made, there is a lesson to be learned. You shouldn't be buying frivolous items on impulse. As the cost of something increases, you should spend proportionally more time researching and thinking about if its really more valuable than the cash you are about to exchange it for.

People are simply looking for a quick fix rather than addressing the root problem.