skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heard this story on RadioLab recently. Very interesting but it's hard to see how language itself was the mechanism behind their unusually sensitive internal compass.

More like they're acutely sensitive to external cues like their shadow (position of the sun) and other subtle details of the landscape. Their language just seems to reinforce that more subliminal attentiveness to these cues.

I found this to be one of the more interesting points made in the RadioLab story: while the majority of the limited number of modern languages in use today do not have this spatial-directional feature, it seems to have been a feature of a large number of the languages that have ever existed. (Edit: per Dr. Lera Boroditsky [great website: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/], it's a third of the world's (current?) languages, though not speakers.)

Which makes sense. Imagine our unsettled, migratory ancestors trying to keep their bearings without the aid of compasses or standardized maps. One of the first features you'd probably ask for in your language is a feature that helps you keep track of your approximate location.

Radiolab link:
http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/
Really scary.

I wanted to see if i could find someone. Went onto twitch.tv. Picked a random stream. Got email. Looked up Skype id from email. Searched for skype id which gave me the IP and the small town where they currently reside.

Its worrying how easy this makes it to find someone.
I generally use nohup so I don't have to worry about killing the program when I log out. The man page has a handy bash script for "launch" that captures stdout and stderr to separate files.

http://ss64.com/bash/nohup.html
In the same way one could argue that a person like Kevin Rose has almost a 99% chance of succeeding in a startup he founds.
I believe iTerm2 on OS X hooks into tmux somehow to alert you when something has happened in one of your windows. I assume there's a way to make that happen on other platforms too.
Nowhere in the article was "earning money" chastised as being bad. It just suggested there are better options if that is your main goal.

"If you’re smart enough, if you’re talented enough, if you have the drive, if you have the ability, and you’re motivated by making money, then you should just get a real job instead, like become a banker or an investor or a consultant or something. You’ll be much more likely to make a lot of money over the course of your career than by starting a company."
Google business practices are under investigation in South Korea and Argentina
Hi Davy. I really like the minimalist approach to this app. Install was straight forward (but a little sad a Linux version doesn't exist yet). No complicated shortcuts (I like) and basic functions. It seems hard to screw this up.

Sadly, I don't use Postgres and I didn't have any databases sitting around to test it against. If you know of a quick way I could test it against a database, I'd be happy to share more. Otherwise, it looks great!
But also you could use Cloudflare to make your site faster in these regions :)
Be concise – The Top Questions Asked At A Y Combinator Interview
Does this release support "read-only" slaves?
These are the same things I worry about in learning to code on my own -- Will I know the "right" terminology to "prove" to an interviewer I'm capable of doing X task in Y time?

A funny coincidence, i did journalism too -- you're not missing out on ANYTHING (I'm trying to escape the career myself, even contemplating school).
all I hear is "blah blah blah, never been done before, too hard, no money" - same things said about flight prior to the Wright Bros. These guys (who are smarter than us) see an opportunity. I, for one, would like to see them succeed. We need to get heavy industry off of the Earth.
Nitpick - shouldn't it be

PS1="\[\033[G\]$PS1"

instead of

$PS1="\[\033[G\]$PS1"
Really interesting talk. TED do some great talks in general imo.
Bestbuy shoping
bestbuy shoping
bestbuyshoping bestbuyshoping bestbuyshoping http://bestbuyshoping.tumblr.com http://bestbuyshoping.tumblr.com http://bestbuyshoping.tumblr.com http://bestbuyshoping.tumblr.com
Classes in Python
SoftLayer charges an insane amount for memory
I thought the same thing since I've followed Colin since starting Flash development. It turns out the title of this post is incomplete, on his lectures page it is actually "the trouble with javascript (and why it's worth it)" http://www.moock.org/lectures/
Something worth 8.5 billion got to be a little more secure.
less environmental controls, that's the biggest reason it's cheaper.
> Without scarcity where the demand?

Iron is hardly scarce, but it is in high demand. There are a thousand uses for cheap gold. It's not like if the asteroid would be made of rare postage stamps that become worthless without the scarcity.

Let's say the huge chunk of gold would drop the market price to 10% of it's current value. If they earn $ 2 trillion at once instead of $ 2 trillion slowly, is it really a problem? It should still be enough to finance the next run, and earn even more.
"you should just get a real job instead, like become a banker or an investor or a consultant or something"

yeah, consulting. the pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie. but at least you have a nice salary to pay back your MBA student loans. and you get to travel every week and get fat eating out every meal and drinking at networking events.
Great detail on the source of that stat. The use of that 90-95 percent metric is next to meaningless in defining failure rates of startups. There are tons of successful companies generating great returns who have not met the initial projections, because initial projections tend to be unrealistic.

I founded a startup that's profitable and doing $5mm in revenue but would be considered a "failure" because at the beginning we played the hockeystick revenue projection dance (partly to appease potential investors, who discount whatever number you give them anyway, and partly because we were wildly optimistic).
reduced and zero-gravity environments allow crystals to grow faster, and in more perfect configuration than gravity-bound locations. This could lead to some really interesting metal alloys.
This was an interesting story. Sounds like an astute interviewer, the kind who can really get at the core of technical knowledge. And of course, people have every right to set whatever standard they like in their hiring.

But every time I read about someone like Alice, it does cause me to reflect on the "hiring troubles" companies are experiencing, the "shortage" of top candidates.

She has contributed to open source, shown the ability to learn and write small apps in new languages. She can code, definitely, but she shows some weakness... NO HIRE. Not only no hire, she's a faker, a cargo cult-er, she "pulled the wool over your eyes." She's not just unqualified (by high standards, in my opinion), she's insincere.

Please, understand that I'm not saying that hiring standards shouldn't be high, or that weak team members don't do more damage than good. I get all these things. But the bar is high enough that it should be utterly unsurprising that there's a shortage of "qualified" people, and that a lot of people (who might have become good programmers) bail out, get forced out, or want nothing to do with it after their first taste.

I'm ok with these high standards, but I think we celebrate it a little too much.

EDIT: raganwald, jbooth, peter...

thanks for replying rather than just downmodding - unfortunately (for me), yeah, you're right, I misread this.

I'd like to take it down, but once someone has responded, I leave it up with an EDIT...
No, after disconnect it still show IP few hours
I honestly cannot replicate either of these behaviors, even using the OS X Terminal application (which definitely causes serious cursor synchronization issues with complex prompts due to incorrect terminal emulation: use iTerm2 instead), and even using an old version of bash (tested on both Linux and OS X).

A) When I hit ^C, I am always seeing a newline occur after the ^C and before my prompt is redrawn. I have tried this with cat (blocked on read) and ssh (blocked on password).

B) When I purposely attempt to cause this (using echo -n and interpreting "a very long command" to mean "long enough that it wrapped to the next line"), hitting up redraws and overwrites part of the prompt in order to guarantee that the position of the prompt will edit correctly.
I think the purpose of this post was to examine why people decide to ask these kinds of questions.
JSIL - .NET to JavaScript compiler
Mine's very similar, and includes the current date and time; it also wraps onto the next line and starts with a # (mostly because I'm an idiot, and have burned myself by copying-and-pasting an entire-line-plus-newline and ran a command instead of just copying it in order to edit it.)

[\[\033[1;32m\]\D{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S}\[\033[0m\]] \[\033[1;32m\]\u\[\033[0m\]\[\033[1;32m\]@\h\[\033[0m\]:\[\033[1;36m\]\w\[\033[0m\]\n#

It's actually dynamically generated by my .bashrc so that different servers have different colors; at a glance, I can generally tell whether I'm on one of my machines, or on a work build server, or an amazon ec2 instance.
I only use it for lack of a better one; "programming" seems too specific. What would you suggest?
Worked fine here.
mmm. You're right. I wonder how much he believes that himself.
Not really a new particle as much as a resonance mode. No big deal...
I don't personally believe that bash suffers from this (I certainly can't replicate it, as further described in my other comment), and would love to see a more step-by-step reproduction of the problem.
That's why Google didn't bought Skype, their P2P is not state of the art. Your client is also a server for someone else, they obviously need your IP address and a proxy would not reduce traffic for Skype.

Why the heck did MS pay so much for it?
I don't believe it either: I think the crunch will be the spur that finally gets us out of this single-point-of-failure that we call the Earth.
I don't think it's useful as a text message shortener because for me, my Android phone automatically sends 2 text messages. It will break the workflow if I have to click on a link to read the entire message that someone had sent.

As a tweet shortener, I know there's code to breaks a long message into chunks and tweets them so a link to read the entire message is again not ideal.

Best of luck :)
Tools - Live Weight Calculation
The obvious thing for the MPAA to do is to start doing it themselves -- voluntarily send free discs to overseas units.
Curing boredom and bringing joy to the user are solutions to real problems!
Yes, you are correct. I think it's better than nitpicking when it makes the code run correctly.
Any insights into the exploit? Obviously the bug here is that they got the IP without any confirmation from me; ideally Skype should be popping up the "new buddy request" dialog, but it's not.

So is this a fixable leak, or something core to the protocol (i.e. do you request a buddy P2P too?)
Yeah, you had the fortunate ability to view the non-minified version. ;)

My first approach was the mouseclick (using $('.zr_zergling_container').click()) but for whatever reason that wouldn't work. I got fed up and just decided to try moving the zerglings to a clickable location. Ha!
Thanks for your feedback. However, the Google Guidelines appear to be contradicting and ever changing.

It's not a complaint, it's a valid argument to shed some light upon their eyes. Sorry you don't share the same passion but claiming to 'bother people' is a bit much.
The best part.. he sends to the _chaplain_ to then distribute to the troops! He starts with purchasing boot leg from vendors on the street. That made me say "NO!...". Is it wrong of me to want to step in and show him how to do it right?

This was great story.
"It just suggested there are better options if that is your main goal"

Totally depends on the person. I visited my dentist the other day who clearly didn't have a business head on him (we've spoken many times). He is better off and will make a better living as a dentist giving his intelligence and abilities. I'm married to a Physician and wanted to set her up in her own office. She isn't interested, she would rather just work for the Hospital and get a salary. Everyone is different. The best option for a particular person to make money depends on the persona and their abilities.

As an aside, as far as being a "consultant". In general (as always) a consultant doesn't really build any equity unless they have others working for them. They don't have anything to sell (to someone else as an entity) and over time need to constantly pick up clients and interact with clients. I built a business and after 10 years I had something to sell. It was something that didn't depend on me it had customers, employees etc.
Yes, it worked perfectly.
The core of this argument is to try to demonstrate that the government is somehow necessary. It once was, assuming for the sake of argument that Apollo was desirable and necessary. But the fact is that regardless of the past, what SpaceX is doing now, NASA can not do now for anything like the same price. If NASA is doing the propping and still can't do it at the same price, that's still not a win in their column.

Look, just face up to it. The free market we have right now is doing something the government we have right now can't. It's not like this proves very much on its own.
"projected" return, "declaring" a projection then "falling short"...

These terms invalidate the given statistics, rendering them essentially meaningless. These figures are geared toward being consumed by finance professionals, not by people actually running small businesses or who found startups.
The average expected income from working at a large corporate may well be higher than founding a startup. But there's at least the chance of making a lot of money in a startup. It's very unlikely that you'll stumble into a windfall working for a large corporation.
According to the professor on whose research this information is based, a third of the world's languages have this linguistic peculiarity.

You can hear her account around 30 minute mark of this RadioLab episode:
http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/
A good way to start a career, not a very good way to live though.
It seems unlikely to me that the business types will do much serious programming; after all that's not what job is. I suspect the real value of this will be improved communication on technical subjects. It's much easier to work with someone (like an engineer) when you have a common baseline and can appreciate the work they're doing. It's also a fantastic learning opportunity for the engineers, since teaching/mentoring people on a topic is one of the best ways to improve your knowledge of it.
Fair point, but equally Skype was an independent company when it developed its protocol, and although Microsoft hasn't fixed it, its not really their fault.
Oracle withdraws its characterization of Java registration as collective work
Chomp loses Android compatibility following Apple acquisition
Maybe I'm misinterpreting both the original post and this response, but it seems that you think Alice is the "cargo cult-er". I interpreted raganwald's post as critical of _Ted_, criticizing _him_ as a "cargo cult-er".
Skype is at its core a p2p idea, so this is expectable. That's sort of the same thing that was done for bittorent users, except with a single centralized authority.

The interesting thing is that they do this without making a call. They only request contact information. This could be avoided.

Skype can mitigate this, but in the end, there is little more to be done. If you want a p2p network where anyone can be reached, at some point, you will need ips.
I may have done a poor job of conveying why the story is related to Cargo Cult religions.

The term cargo cult programmer may also apply when an unskilled or novice computer programmer (or one not experienced with the problem at hand) copies some program code from one place and pastes it into another place, with little or no understanding of how the code works, or whether it is required in its new position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

I don’t know if this term can be applied to Alice, but I am pretty certain that the story describes Ted blindly copying the surface form of something Bob did in an interview with Carol into Ted’s interview with Alice with little or no understanding of how Bob's conversation worked, or whether it was required in Ted’s conversation with Alice.
Honestly, when are you going to quit believing companies like Google are out there to protect your interests? You're completely right, they were against SOPA because it would have been a huge threat to their business, while CISPA could protect their interests so they were all for it.

Why is any of that surprising? They're a company, not a charity. The entity that's supposed to protect its people is the government. If they aren't doing their job then complain about them. Google is doing exactly what is expected of a company: Making money, growing, and moving their own business forward.
Ooh, me, me, pick me. Let me guess! Do it because you want to change the world?

It's a laughable, tired cliche now, especially coming from a guy who made the equivalent of a digital hipster moleskine who isn't changing a god damn thing about this world. People are still broke, sick, and starving. But I can take awesome notes on my MacBook Air!

The better answer is "because it's interesting and fun and challenging and sometimes disappointing and a fantastic learning experience and you might get rich or go broke while experiencing the full, unfiltered range of human emotions and potential".

It also happens to be more truthful and conforms more to the modal outcome.
if you take a look at the site where this is coming from, you'll see that i actually talk to the "next generation of entrepreneurs" on a daily basis. the whole point of this post is to caution young entrepreneurs to build meaningful companies that solve real problems instead of trying to make a quick and successful exit
There's nothing in CISPA that would violate those criteria. It doesn't close or censor anything.
Ah, alright. Well I a big challenge will be your interface since that's the primary change between desktop/mobile development. And most people seem to be innovating on that. I did see a few interesting demos that focused on new UI paradigms. LightTable was particularly interesting. Even though it was never demoed on a mobile device, I don't think it's hard to imagine how LightTable might work on an iPad.

The hardest problem, I think, is the environment. The UI stuff (like getting the same density of information around and under your hands while you're working on a piece of code) will get solved pretty easily. I'm more concerned that closed systems (like Apple's) will be threatening to any type of local development environment. Even basic web development, I'd expect to get full access to the developer tools within mobile Safari if I wanted.

Remote development (via ssh, perhaps) is a compromising solution here, but I'd really like to do my development offline if I need to. Being tether to an internet connection can be distracting and something you want the option of especially if you're mobile.

I have seen some interesting attempts to create an all-in-one solution within Android (and can't find the project right now) that has shell access with vi and ruby/python/scala interpreters/compilers built in.

I think progress in this area is happening much quicker than you think.
function DoStuff(foo) //<<<<No information what type foo is
{
foo.DoA(); //No way to know what methods foo support
foo.DoB();
}

For most situations where it is possible to infer the type, Visual studio actually does a pretty good job on code completion, but no jump to definition.
I think the article was agreeing with you. The cargo culter was the one who saw someone ask an improvised question about implicit and turns it into a litmus test.
The question no one asked: did you ever pitch the book(s) to professional publishers, so that for a cut they'd handle the marketing? Your issue isn't one of quality, but of being hard to discover. Your main problem may be that people are afraid of wasting their time with self published books, because it has never been easier for a crank to publish something. People value the curating done by publishers, they at least weed out the most atrocious.

Other than being published, you could gain a lot of visibility by having your book reviewed by influential people for your target demographic.

Also, as other pointed out, having more of an online presence (given the demographic you can skip Facebook, but Tweeter and G+ sounds like good addition to Reddit) if you don't want to have a blog.

Usenet is now a barely animated corpse, but in addition for comp.compilers, comp.lang.c(.moderated) would likely make a good target given the subject.
What they could do is have contact requests go through Skype master servers, not p2p, that way you could only look up the IPs of people you are connected to. But is it a big enough issue that they will make such a big change? I doubt it - and I'm not sure they ought to have to do it, either.
Dropbox Boosts Free Storage Limit to 5GB to Match Google Drive | PCWorld
I wasn't alive then, so this probably me romanticizing, but the Hollywood of the WWII era I grew up learning about would have been sending these films over to the troops on their own.
I like that site as far as the cheaters and things go.

But I can't stop being bothered every time I see a ban for hacking the avatar to make it a weird color. Why is this so offensive to them?
Even better, if you want to edit a long command, use C-x C-e (remember to have EDITOR set to your editor of choice).
More like they're acutely sensitive to external cues like their shadow (position of the sun) and other subtle details of the landscape.

That's confusing how they achieve it (the cues) with why they developed the ability (need to know for proper communication, maybe for the reason you mention).
This just in: Javascript does not follow the One Way to do things. Developer outraged!
Yeah, you'd think they get positive PR if they sent free DVDs with pre-recorded messages from the stars before the movie.

"Hi i'm Tom Cruise and I, and everyone else at Sony Pictures, want to thank you for your service. Enjoy the show!"
When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End? - HBR
2-5 years with 3ds should definitely put you in the "decent" category.

There is a big difference between being "decent" at something and truly knowing it as "an extension of self". Expertise is a real thing.
Google Drive The Unboxing: Are You Prepared?
Poor interviewers only test knowledge, not ability.

Right. There are lots of very capable people who have optimized by offloading a lot of information from their heads because they can get it from their tools. These are very different from cargo-cult programmers who are only guessing about which completion in their IDE they should use. However, the two types will be unable to answer many of the same questions when away from their IDE.
Why I Decided to Learn Ruby on Rails
Even if the answer is "none", zsh will need to additionally defend "what is the advantage of zsh for someone who already knows how to use bash", as any form of switch is going to come with a cost. I would therefore be really interested in your reasons (I use bash, as currently do all of the people I know and work with; [edit: apparently except one]).

It seems like most of the features listed as better than bash are either a) covered by bash 4.0, b) bad ideas (shared history among sessions), or c) only controversially better (searching around, people seem to argue back/forth about which programmable completion implementation is faster/better).