skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me summarize: you've had two years of French as a foreign language before you came to France, you are a top 1% language learner, you've spent all your five months in France just learning language and you haven't taken any formal exam which would prove that you've actually reached a C1 level and not B1 or B2. In short, you didn't show that it's possible reaching C1 in five months from zero knowledge even for a top 1% person. Thank you.

(As a top 1% language learner you must have reached A2 only "by osmosis" in two years of French as a foreign language, before you came to France, then reaching B2 (again being top 1%) in five months there is fully realistic.)
seconding this. awesome app.
9 Apps for Meeting People and Hanging Out with Friends
Now that we’re all addicted to Facebook, a bunch of new apps want us to step out into the real world and (gasp) meet people in-person.

One of the newest is GiddyUp, launching today. GiddyUp helps you plan meetups with your phone contacts. If you don’t know where or when you want to chill, invite your friends to “Drinks tonight” and figure it out in a group chat. You don’t even need the iPhone or Android app to get an invitation; anyone with a smartphone can see invites and RSVP.

How does GiddyUp fit in with the other meetup apps out there? Here’s a handy table:

GiddyUp events can also be planned – i.e., with a specific date and time – but the app is especially useful for organizing last-minute get-togethers. Highlight and company help you connect with people nearby in real-time, and Forecast, Wendr, and GonnaBe let you tell everyone where you’ll be later.

GiddyUp cofounder Elliot Goldwater sees a few drawbacks to apps of the “anyone can show up” variety:

“1) People generally feel awkward inviting themselves to someone else’s event and 2) people value their privacy and generally don’t like everyone knowing what they are doing.”

But that’s not a flaw in all plan-sharing apps: Wendr, for example, lets you broadcast plans to only your best friends. And these apps may appeal to people who live for random encounters and chance meetings.

Tell us your favorite meetup app in the comments.
Hungry Hungry Kobayashi - Debugging a Distributed Datastore via the Network
Awesome emailing.
Mail.app and Mail on iOS. I wanted to switch to Sparrow and Sparrow for iOS but I really don't have a reason to besides shiny new software syndrome.
That's a great idea. The landing page is definitely looking a little dry.
Sorry, I think I was being obtuse.

I don't think the problem is that you don't have enough generic words to add to either side.
I think the problem is that all your doing is adding words to either side ;)

I like your site. It's really useful to get the low-hanging-fruit.

But for instance, Cyrus is a awesome name for a Mail program, because Cyrus the great is credited with the creation of the first postal service.

That doesn't mean that CyrusCoupons is a good name ;)

Many names are good because of the metaphors they invoke, or because of the story associated with that character, place or object.

"Teapot 3d" would be a great name, because it's a Teapot is a traditional object to render.
Lena is a great name for image manipulation, because of.. http://www.ecogito.net/articles/lena.html

Again, I think your site is great for what it is, but a lot of my favorite names.. Really great names.. come from much more oblique or abstract approaches, for that particular problem. These don't generalize well, by their very nature.

Does that make sense?
I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-icon/ in order to bring back the RSS icon in Firefox.
How do you imagine HBO getting screwed in the long run? As far as I can see, there will be distributors in any brave new world. Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Hulu are going that way. As long as HBO keeps making quality content, distributors will be lining up to bid on it.
The <hype> tag, another undocumented easter egg, sadly didn't catch on in the same way.
The FBI should absolutely execute a seizure warrant against those companies, if doing so is effective, but:

- Those companies probably have too many servers and too much data to make seizing all of it productive.

- Those companies would be less likely to be effected, as they have backups and redundant servers for handling outages.

- Those companies keep records that they provide to law enforcement when presented with a warrant or subpoena.

It's 100% ok to run an anonymizing remailer, with no backup strategy in place. It's retarded to act surprised and indignant when the server gets seized because it was probably used to commit a crime.
They seem really expensive. I use buyvm.net and love them.
ORACLE WILL WIN - Software Engineer at Oracle Corp
fU, I work at Oracle!
I don't know that "that good" is the metric against which people are measuring the old Google Reader. I think a more accurate metric would be "that adequate" or "that appropriate". As others replying to this have stated, the old social functionality of Google Reader dovetailed nicely into the RSS aggregator functionality, where you could build a small close-knit group of people who--while having their own areas of expertise--took care in paring down their own individual firehoses to well curated streams of interesting content. That's it: no more, no less. When Google trashed that feature set to shoehorn the 10 pound G+ monster into that 5 pound bag, it was over.
Awesome stuff. Also drop me an email some time - ben at playtomic.
This is a testament to why you would want to use AWS virtual instances and never have "a server" - point your domain at a new instance should one machine get ordered off by the FBI.
After teaching myself Brazilian-Portuguese at home in California over a good 5 year period, I moved to Brazil to perfect the last stage, speaking. After half a year, I moved back to the States. A few years later, I moved again (to Brazil) for a few months and last year I moved here once more. Now I've been here for almost a year this time around.

So I've climbed this mountain and found myself wondering what is next. Seems I'm going to take another stab at Italian since it's been several years since I first got into it. That's what's great about language learning, if you consider yourself a lifelong learner, you can 'bookmark' your learning process for later.
The fact that the red tape is not insurmountable doesn't mean that it's trivial.
Makes a lot of sense.

There's a lot of smart folks on here... can anyone think of a way to algorithmically come up with domains like Colin is describing?
and all my papers. :) I use git for managing word docs at school.
I am actually looking for a decent UML editor. So I create a class, click it, expecting to get at the very least a couple of text areas labeled "Methods" and "Fields." Instead, I get a WYSIWYG editor that looks like it came out of the early 2000's. My immediate reaction was to jump back and shout "DAAAAAA!" (I am not joking about that.)

Now, obviously I don't know exactly what your target audience for this is. But in general, my experience is that if you provide a WYSIWYG editor, the users will do horrible, horrible things to your content. They are usually prone to glitching out in addition. And more specifically, for editing UML, a WYSIWYG editor is just about worthless - it provides no structure to the data, and it makes it incredibly easy to bork up the structure of the class. (Also, the editor doesn't really mesh with your site's design very well.)

So, my advice would be to provide a bit more structure to the content of individual diagram elements (at the very least, separate text boxes for Name, Methods, and Fields in a UML class), and find a less obtrusive WYSIWYG editor if you decide to continue going down that route.
We obviously have different ideas what C1 and C2 are. I'm sorry, I know only what exams look like here in this German speaking country for the purpose of obtaining B2 in order to get the right to study and I know how much harder C1 is (as much that a lot of native speakers not trained to write organized texts wouldn't pass it without targeted preparations), and it matches the specification I've linked, see the top post.

Can you please specify your reference for that what you consider a "C1" level? Also please note that once we relax the starting conditions, allowing two years of preparations and avoiding a formal C1 exam, we can't really call it "C1 in five months."

I believe you that you sounded awesome, I believe you you've received a lot of praise for your ability, we just don't agree if that was a C1 as defined.
Ask HN: Is there a web service that can read text or web pages?
I would love to be able to give a web page, text, and/or HTML to a web service and get back an audio file of that page being read. Basically, automating the OS X service where you can right-click text and, via Services, “Add to iTunes as a spoken track.”

But I am not aware of any such service.

Does one exist?
Nice job! I was wondering the other day if anyone ever ported Stella to Java, but this looks simpler and ripe for hacks!
I'd still like to be known if there was a bomb thread in a building I was in...
Another question pertinent to the hypothetical situation you pose: Should the FBI be able to keep the store's records of purchases made by other citizens not under investigation if they are "accidently" discovered during the process of search?

Under previous federal administrations, such information was required to be destroyed if collected. However the current administration and counter-terrorism guidelines assert that such private information may be held for 5 years, and shared between government agencies.
Bill Viola did this using strobe lights in an installation format. You can recreate this yourself easily with a programmable strobe. Thanks to Edgerton for the inventions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Eugene_Edgerton
Tumblr Holds Its Nose, Opens Back End to Ads
I rather wish they had worded it as 'We assume you are not stupid'. Or they are assuming wrong in my case?
Sanebox.com offer visualizations of your email, broken out by useful vs time wasting. It's a side effect of them managing your inbox. They'd probably be open to additional data viz ideas
You would have a point if the post author didn't also claim to be having the same success with Russian (also rated notoriously hard to master for english speakers). The tone of the article also implies that the same technique can be applied to any language.

That said, I still doubt actual fluency is obtainable for non-mavens even in the romance languages. In my experience, all early learners have a naive view of their own ability, no matter what the target language is.
1993 World trade center

And today is the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma city bombing.

However I am uncertain if a "threat" was ever called in for either.

This is evidence that a called in thread will likely never be real - real attacks aren't called in with warnings.
The warrant was (according to riseup) related to the recent rash of bomb threats against the University of Pittsburgh.

https://www.google.com/search?q=university+pittsburgh+bomb+t...
When did these bomb threats happen? At the end of term or beginning? During exam week? When a famous politican is visiting?

126 is alot. I bet if you were to investigate the timing of these threats you might find some interesting correlations...
You would have to show that anything non-work related which you produce existed in at least idea form before you signed this (by attaching it as 'Exhibit A'). Anything you don't declare up front belongs to the company for the duration, including your inspiration as soon as you commit it to tangible form. You could ask for a clause providing you with an opt-out mechanism for side projects you may come up with later, eg open source things you want to do for the public good or whatever. It's boilerplate, but it's very one-sided boilerplate. I wouldn't sign this unless I had equity.
Or how about: anything I do in iTunes makes it freeze for five seconds.

It's been explained to me that this is because my music collection is around 200GB, so my iTunes Library.xml file is around 60MB, and any action (playing a song, renaming, etc.) rewrites the entire XML file on disk (incrementing play count, renaming, etc.).

And this is on a MacBook Air with SSD under Lion!
eazyBI looks very interesting, but your site and sales pitch seem pretty unpolished. How big is your team and where are you situated?
I don't see any Xen options on this site.
The title is a bit misleading. It is actually a free summary. You still need to purchase the book.
seriously - it's a 'subscribe' function. i don't give a fig if it lands in my inbox or a reader or my email's RSS inbox. so long as the function continues (and email is a fine proxy) I'm fine with it.
Ah you're right, I just pulled the linkedin revenue from Wikipedia which is actually the 2010 figure.
it's worth noting that it can't work on mobile - mobile safari does not support any kind of file uploads. But not working in IE is definitely a fatality
It only lasts until the session ends.
Netherland - I installed this and gave it a try. I'm running into one major issue. I can't see my prompt (or the last line in whatever I'm doing). I don't mess around and invoke grc by doing 'grc bash'. This now listens for every command that's in the config file. Well the command I want to work most of all is ssh. When I ssh into another system I don't see my prompt. Any ideas what I can do to fix this?
You are 100% right: I'm just saying their their business and distribution model is based on cable subscription. And that we don't know whether their math (and content they produce) will work if they switch to different distribution model.

My assumption is that with changing distribution model they also need to change what kind of content they are producing.

Anyway, I'm concern that death of cable will also mean death of HBO and their great content: as revenue from cable subscription start drying down, the revenue from other distribution channels will be too weak to replace it and then the death spiral starts....
I don't know about pavel_lishin, but I care what other people think because I don't want to be an asshole. I don't want to be the guy talking loudly on his phone on a crowded bus, because that's guy's obnoxious.

The guy who's whispering to himself is fine. Weird, but at least not an asshole.
I got high standards. Gimme some THICK life-changing value! Not thin, retina, prettified, fluff value! That ain't a billion dollar valuation.
I can imagine an awful fallout if a bomb went off, people died, and then later it was revealed that there was prior warning. Better safe than sorry works here, I think.
In other words, useless?
To this comment - yes, that was what I said originally. agreed.

To the above response, if it was good enough I'd pay for custom branding for sure. Is the aviary module supposed to be part of the service? For me, that's not really a good addition. Perhaps as an option that can be enabled. If you could just give me a really nice looking modal that allowed a file upload through the ways you provided, hosted the files for me and gave me back a url, that would be enough to merit a small payment at least. I'd only include a very small branding badge at the bottom but have the option to remove that for an additional price.
> I fail to see how mining asteroids to use their resources on Earth could make economic sense in any reasonable time-frame.

It may not matter. Assuming Cameron has enough wealth to support himself and his family for the rest of his life, what else is he going to spend his money on?

He's already made it pretty clear that he's keen on exploration, and that space is an interest. If his net worth is $650m (wikipedia), I would imagine that he'd be quite comfortable spending $500m of that on something that he's passionate about - even if it's not profitable by the time he's dead.

Mining the asteroids is inevitable. Maybe it wont be profitable in 10 years, or 20, or 50, or 100. But he wants to spend some of our Avatar dollars bootstrapping a new industry, I don't have a problem with it.

I honestly don't think that he would expect to be profitable in the near term, but I don't think that's a factor for him.
Wow, you place an awful lot of faith in amazon.
Those are for a set of features we have coming down the pipeline. Publish stream would allow us to save the photos back and offline access is for auth'ing just one account for access to all your files.

I completely agree with your sentiment of asking for only what you need.
Go straight to scale with http://www.sensage.com. Used by governments, health records and insurance companies, telcos, etc. When commodity solutions like Splunk no longer work for you take it to the only other level you need.
Good way to get new members Grouper. :)
Further, Public Enemy Number 1 (Bin Laden) purportedly used basically no direct network technology to disseminate his bidding he used a sneakernet to get info to various folks.

EDIT:

Obviously the person down voting me is not aware of how Bin Laden used USB sticks...

http://news.techworld.com/security/3279773/bin-laden-used-us...
I thought the server tracked the number of infractions, and fell back to a reduced feature set when you went over the limit a certain # of times.
Significant whitespace in a live coding language? I like and use Python, but that seems like a show-stopper of a bad idea for a language designed for throwing code around in real time.
When I saw the wall appear and get moved I instantly thought about some variation of a programmers pong of sorts. Or other games!
SEOmoz don't appear to feature "domain age" as a specific point in their ranking factors survey - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#predict....

I think the general opinion there is that excepting an initial possibility of sandboxing for new domains the domain-age boost is merely a misreading of incoming linkjuice.

Logically this seems right as a domain with equal content (by algorithmic analysis) that acquires links from high authority domains, and more incoming links generally, in a shorter time and beats down an older domain in doing that, such a site must surely be better in some way for users? [run on sentences are a speciality of mine].
Yes, that is a pretty hard problem, i.e. how do you distinguish between JavaScript highlighting a source snippet and doing something that messes up your presentation? In the end, I don't think this would be worth the effort. Keep the feed reader simple enough, the real post is usually just a keypress away. My usage pattern in Google Reader is just pressing "v" to open a tab with that post for later referral (it's easy enough to modify firefox or chrome to do that in the background).

Of course, if you have total control over your RSS generation and feel particularly perfectionist, you could always have some minimalistic features present in your feed, probably similar to your print CSS version. Bold and italic for syntax highlighting, for example.
Even at high frequencies? Because a strobe light gives you a lot more flexibility.
Ruby could be obfuscated by compiling to a jar using JRuby. Presumably something similar could be done with Python and Jython, and PHP can be compiled into C++ using Facebook's Hiphop compiler they open-sourced.
I'm heading over to a friends house tonight for a group view of ep 3/4 of Game of Thrones. He pays for HBO, we pay for food. If HBO offered me delivery options that I could consume with my lack of cable/sat TV, I would gladly pay, and they'd get a cut of paycheck for their quality content. More interestingly is this "piracy" or simply lost revenue?
Not really actually, I just mean having a discrete server that can be "seized" is not a particularly robust solution.
It looks like two iPads, one playing the movie with the other one above it in video record mode, presumably streaming to the TV.
"We assume you are not stupid" means they are making an assumption of intelligence, whereas "we don't assume you are stupid" means they make no assumption one way or the other.

I wonder which is more appropriate?
1996: Pipe bomb at the olympics in Atlanta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Olympic_Park_bombing

But really, what you're complaining about is CYA (cover your ass) security. It's a lot easier for the person in charge to decide to clear out the building, and answer to a bit of grumbling with "just doing my job to keep you people safe" than it is to deal with the (extremely unlikely) fallout that would come from ignoring a real bomb.
> "In total, over 300 email accounts, between 50-80 email lists, and several other websites have been taken off the Internet by this action."

Dramatic description aside, I really hope that what they mean is - lost one copy of it, waiting for DNS change to propagate... Am I hoping for too much?
OTOH, I found adding properties and methods using the text editor to be much quicker than the clicking/tabbing around in a dialog box which is the way it's done in UML editors I've used. So I don't know what the right balance is.

What killed it for me, for UML, is that the properties and methods don't have their own connector points for attaching an arrow to.
I suspect the newer domain would look more active, more current and therefore more likely to host content useful now/of contemporary interest.

I suspect ranking 'degrades' slightly over time - don't keep adding content and lose places in the SERP.

Having said that, it's pretty much hypothetical. A ten year old domain will have more links and more content, and I think _that_ is why old domains rank well. It usually takes time to develop a great quantity of useful, ranking content and links, hence the perception that "aged domains" are more valuable.

Anyone else have thoughts / different view on this?
Interesting, what uses were you thinking of?
Same with Australia. Our consumer protection law also has fit for purpose guarantees, you can ge a full refund of you have been misled about the product. Also, there is no such thing as a 12 month warranty - if the product (for example n iPhone) is reasonably expected to last for 2 years, then you get that product for two years with warranty.
Hmm, there seem to be a number of syntax errors highlighted when viewing the source code. If I was inviting people to view the source, I would probably want it to be clean.

Here's validator output:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fprgmr.com%2Fx...
It can with a bit of CSS magic: https://gist.github.com/75603244b7e96ecb0bd2
I know right? I reserve a fixed time for each one of the languages I speak and find myself learning few more words every day. I dont know about you, but I see a lot of similarity between the human languages I speak and the computer languages I use. They both require life long commitment. Isn't that interesting?
5 months without living/breathing the language amongst native speakers, fluency, methinks NOT ;-)

I took 8 years of French growing up (10-18) and I understood nothing, literally nothing when I visited Quebec for the first time (that's a joke, do you get it?)

Anyway, the point is, fluency cannot be gained without living in the culture where the language is spoken. Book learning, reciting phrases, etc. will not give you the auditory queues that conversations with native speakers will. When you mispronounce a word or phrase, a raised eyebrow speaks volumes. Books do not raise eyebrows.

The best way to learn languages is to live abroad, in various places, watch loads of TV (really the more the better) and mingle with the locals.

Finally the absolute best way to learn a language is through your significant other; if he/she speaks the language you are trying to learn, and has no interest in speaking your native tongue, wow, spaceship language learning class of the highest order ;-)
Is there a law enforcement backdoor in Amazon TOS?
And expensive

And with lots of innocent casualties

And corrupt

And supported by morons
I think that's important to people that want to be in good company. Not when futzing around with your Macintosh, trying to put together 30+ bingo cards for tomorrow's class.

EDIT: removed an article to clarify