skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CPops is right. What is the end goal? I found Swedish easier to learn than French; (more) simple grammar, very similar to English in many ways. Tolkien/saga-style English, at least. Ties to northern British traditional slang and place names of interest also. But I earn the majority of my living from French.

stevenbrianhall - I'm no fan of Duolingo. I wanted it to work well, but it let me down. The voice rec is a gimmick, the material doesn't seem to be able to take you very far. Also, as a translator I find the idea of relying on crowdsourced translation too great a risk.

For anyone interested in language learning techniques and startups, would you happen to know how to legally protect an audio-only teaching method? I presume it would fall under the legal area of copyright, but the technique I'm developing would be easily copied. Do I need to just bite the bullet and trust in copyright law?

I'm not normally jumpy about IP but I would like a few years to try to market this one as my own.
That's not too annoying. I could probably continue to use it for free without going crazy with a small nag like that.

And that's why I'll be paying for it, because you're not making it annoying in the first place. :)
lol, but Racket being so DSL friendly I would have doubted myself.

My 5 bugged languages were : scala, groovy, Dart, they're all not too unrelated.
Nevermind. :-)
It makes a lot of sense for there to be a standardized, open framework for document management in general outside of source code. So many industries could improve their processes and transparency through tools like Git and services like GitHub, but they would need to be made a lot simpler than GitHub's UI. Their site has some great stuff going for developers, but scares away a few designers I know. I'd love to see a site/app like that get made.
This is actually on my to-do list for "Things I need to do if I ever get on a state bar.".
Instinctively, I'd agree with this kind of stuff but after reading through I want to say, "Where's the evidence?" If you're claiming this stuff, tell me how it's worked for you and others in terms of reaching success, and don't cop out and say it's "perfectly logical" - there's nothing logical about being human.
You do realize that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Germany citizens were not alive during World War II, right?
10 Social Media Monitoring and Analysis tools
Sounds exactly like Opera Mini.
> It is becoming more and more necessary over time. Addressing it as a common need and making sure that everyone can accesses it is not inherently unreasonable.

It's entirely worthwhile to pursue goals like maximizing the availability of internet access for as many people is feasible and practicable. But putting this pursuit on the same level as fundamental rights - which inhere in every individual irrespective of any external infrastructure or institutions - does indeed dilute the concept of rights.
We're just getting set up - let us know you're in there so that we know we're not broadcasting to thin air!
Use the butterflies to identify privacy-invading butterflies.
> Therefore you cannot legally, commercially treat aging in the US, as aging is not recognized by the FDA as a disease, and there is no path towards reversing that situation.

If the FDA doesn't regard aging as a disease, then any treatments devised to prevent or reverse aging are not treatments for any disease; so wouldn't the FDA, under this policy, have no role whatsoever in regulating aging treatments?

Not considering aging a disease would seem to put anti-aging products entirely outside the FDA's reach.
Discipline is something I lack and need to force upon myself.

I tell myself I do programming in my free time. I tell myself that.

But then I look at my free time, and I realise I spend it all browsing HN/Reddit (occasionally)/BBC News/Forums. I don't do much programming at all. Because I get distracted far, far too easily. Sometimes I'll look back on the past week and realise I've done absolutely nothing of any value.

I've set myself 30 minutes tomorrow to work on something. Perhaps I'll finally learn Lisp and venture into functional programming, after all. Maybe I'll improve my programming skill again.
If my new kernel blew up my system, I don't go scrounging around for boot disks, I pick the previous image on next boot.

Debian and Fedora's package managers both keep the last three kernels operating and in grub.

(This is a hassle for me since Fedora has had a long string of updates since 2.6.36 which was the last one that gave me working r/w HFS+ support, and i have to keep removing the second-to-last kernel manually with the package manager.)
I didn't see anything in the slides about compressing (gzip) any of the non-binary formats (json, xml, etc). It would be interesting to see those in a comparison like this too.

Also would have been neat to see tnetstrings <or insert favorite format here>. ;)
Great site! Can you tell us about the technology you use to run it, such as db, npm modules, server configs, etc?

Sometimes I wish sites had something like a colophon that described how the site was made.
How I wish I could say I speak 70+ programming languages, but alas, they're all from Rosetta Code.[1] I would like to show a variety of "tasks", as the site calls them, but scraping seems like it would be a pain, so I went with the most interesting problem with a solid number of samples. As for the architecture, it's pretty much just a Ruby hash from language to code, and then a bit of CoffeeScript to glue everything together.

[1] http://rosettacode.org/wiki/99_Bottles_of_Beer
Why should he be treated differently than any other talented programmer? The goal of the orientation process is to familiarize one with the company, not to teach programming skills.
I'm not alone?

https://ajf.me/stuff/ihavewaytoomanyprojects.gif

Guess how many of those are finished.

Edit: And that isn't even including the ones from this year!
Yahoo! chief executive Scott Thompson has stepped down
Democracy Is for Amateurs: Why We Need More Citizen Citizens -
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/democrac...
I agreed with this post up to the point where you recommend a Masters in either statistics or economics. As a former econ student/researcher, I can say that you should not get a MS in economics or statistics if you want to do scientific computing!

1. Both are too domain-specific, and they usually lack the technical (coding) rigor you want if you're dropping lots of $$ on a grad degree. There are exceptions -- the statsmodels.py team, for example, includes an econ guy from American University -- but they're exceptions, not rules.

2. At best, either degree will get you experience in MATLAB/SAS/Stata, which are used for data analysis. This is not scientific computing, where you'll have to convert slow models to C/C++/Java etc.

Instead, if you're set on coding I would suggest a Masters in applied math or a Masters in CS with a focus on topics related to stats/ML and large-scale analysis (Bayesian inference and graphical models, sure, but don't ignore classes in numerical methods or distributed computing).
When a customer writes down his/her name and address in the log book of Customers Who Bought Meth Ingredients, I think the reasonable assumption is that this log book will be shared with law enforcement. This active - and very visible - step of recording the information makes that sharing quite likely in the customer's mind.

If this sharing were occurring based on scans of customer loyalty cards or the like, I would be more troubled.
i wonder if the dust created by the bandsaw wouldn't make it difficult to replace it with a more modern system. we used to use standard office pcs to run a pos system for video shops around ireland. as the systems moved from been shipped with win 3.1 to win xp the processors got faster and the dust in the shops used to clog up the fans. machines pre pentium iii with passive cooling worked fine but anything with a cpu fan could be easily clogged with average dust levels in a pos location.

we also had a few pcs in engineering locations and even the power supply fans on 386s had problems with the dust in those locations. you have to wonder what the dust was doing to staffs lungs. after one particular location killed 1 pc a week for a month we ended up putting the pc in a pair of tights as this filtered out the dust. looked weird but far cheaper than a industrial pc.

but opera 3.62 seems to have support for css and works on win 3.1

haven't touched a win 3.1 system since around 2004 or so.
Just tried this out, and it's not as flexible as I would like. For example, !python <search> doesn't work. You'd need to use !python:<search>. It also seems to require that you have no space between the keyword, colon, and search phrase.

Still, a minor annoyance.
Whatever you call it, it's terrible and it's fixable (like other diseases), so we should work on it.
The news was just made official.
Press release: http://pressroom.yahoo.net/pr/ycorp/233946.aspx
I was a bit surprised by Stallman's statement

"One of our main goals for GCC is to prevent any parts of it from being used together with non-free software. Thus, we have deliberately avoided many things that might possibly have the effect of facilitating such usage"
> Would anyone here know the validity or the restrictions with which the news people are constrained to tell the whole story?

Only the rules of validity that restrict all statements, such as the law of non-contradiction. Individuals such as yourself are the only agent of restriction for all sources of news.

You might enjoy the interviews of Jan Helfeld, who attempts to hold journalists and foreign policy officials to the law of noncontradiction: http://www.youtube.com/user/janhelfeld
They are OK if they are not reporting about Russia and/or former Soviet Union republics.

And the US, sometimes. It seems that "sticking it to America" is the main reason RT was created in the first place, so it shows in some of their US coverage.

Nevertheless, we don't live in an ideal world and I think it's good to have both RT and Western media, and all those news sources in between.
An Amazing Vintage Video About the World's First Accurate Atomic Clock
VNC client and VNC server on another PC.
Still disappointed that same old SPD+CDU take largely the lion's share of the vote.

I mean... in a normal situation I'd consider these results very good progress, but given the absolute havoc the EU is in, I'd expect a stronger reaction to the status quo. But nope, the bipartisanship is rather solid still in Germany.

It takes Greece-style catastrophe to really shake things up, it seems.
This is what my parents have taught me to do as well.

It's also a possibility though that the beggar wanted to be efficient and accumulate more money for other fares throughout the day, just trying to be efficient.
I like these suggestions for single-use websites. I'd much rather make a web-site instead of sending a paper card that will become either trash or a burden to store and preserve. The recipient doesn't have to make any effort at all to save the "card" and look at it again later. It is just there for them if they want to look at it. Good Stuff!
In essence the FDA only approves medicines for specific, recognized, named diseases

This reminds me of Melanotan[1], a drug developed by the University of Arizona to boost skin pigmentation in order to reduce the chances of skin cancer. The only way that testing and approval can proceed is for it to be applicable to the treatment of a specific disease, and prevention doesn't count.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afamelanotide
Imagine gaming the stock market with one of these. Just fly it into your nearest Fortune 500 boardroom.
HOWTO: Migrate Bazaar repository to GitHub
similarly the guy says, he creates variations of the code in order to avoid detection. a world where hunter and the hunt all diversify.
I hadn't seen the John Cleese lecture before. It's definitely worth watching and having a think about. Thanks.
The APL font there is rendering strangely for me, it was the first one posed to me and I recognized it, but a lot of the symbols were rendering as unicode letters with umlauts and other errors.

edit: I just finished, 63/75
Neat idea, but is it currently really a problem to tell who has written what part of a law? Isn't this public information already? If not, then this isn't a technology problem, and it will not be easy to convince our congresscritters to keep track of who writes precisely what. And what about sections of law with shared credit, or law that comes from a committee that didn't unanimously agree, etc.

I know very little about how law is written, but my impression is that most people who pay attention to it are more concerned about the large ideas than the exact wordings - that's how you have politicians voting on bills when they haven't read every word. How can they when it's thousands of pages long?

So this might be more useful to a small number of politicians and lawyers who are examining law closely, looking for loopholes, or concerned about the exact details of a particular statement's pedigree, but I don't really see the general appeal.

I would rather have a tool which provides similar information, but on a higher level. An independent overview in layman language, general information about how it came about, how it's significant historically or with respect to existing law, and with the option to drill down to the actual language and gritty details. Of course, this would take much more work to build and maintain. I've been a fan of opencongress.org but I've found that switching between opencongress and wikipedia is the most effective way to understand the context and significance of a bill.

Reading the actual text of a law is usually about as useful to me for determining its implications as reading the source code of a printer driver would be to my dad for figuring out how to install a printer.
Tiny Habits w/ Dr. BJ Fogg
Do other drawings load slowly for you? Most images you see are drawn via canvas using the same code that runs when you draw with your mouse.

For example:

http://doodleordie.com/profile/underwearhero

Let me know if those drawings load very slowly or not at all.

Anybody else using Chrome on Linux having this issue?
Thanks, definitely missed that docset feature! Maybe a brief mention of the docset: prefix in the Docset help page would be possible?
Yup you are correct Jimmie. Unfortunate that I cannot go back and edit it.
You could also use the money to buy your basic necessity expenses and deposit the money coming from your other sources to another account. I am sure you have some bills to pay (rent, food, groceries, laundry etc). Pay all these with that card and deposit the money that you are supposed to spend.
The banks are getting notorious for charging a "monthly fee" and it is going up. So try to look for a credit union near your place for opening an account and as soon as the money on this account vanishes just go ahead and close it. Unless you want to put more than 8k in the account to waive the monthly fees, I do not see a point to keep this account.
My 2 cents.
YUI 2 was an awful mess but YUI 3 is pretty good. YUI 3 actually came out a while ago (it's at version 3.4 I think). But it's gotten a lot more simpler thanks in part to mimicking jQuery selectors.
If it ever gets popular, it will happen _despite_ its name. Googgling it would be a flicking nightmare. Or change the name now, before it spreads.
RequestPolicy
Ford vs Facebook
I think you may be blowing things out of proportion just a bit.

The vast majority of people in the US will never be terrorized by a police officer. In fact, the only time most people even interact with a police officer will be for a traffic citation.
That's true, the process doesn't need to be 100% "conscious".

PS: Great insight on the article about soviet "gamification", I never thought abut that in that way, thanks.
That last language is REALLY concise.
I love this skeptical and evidence-demanding attitude.

You may find evidence to support this (and other information about habits) in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-Business/dp/14000...

From personal experience, I've found the Seinfeld Calendar to be powerful, which is similar to the idea the author wrote about. http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...
We have a reporting system to get rid of those few bad apples from 4Chan (amazingly most 4Chan players love the site and play legitimately).
>German Police Used Only 85 Bullets Against People in 2011

Only? That's far too many for Europe. 20-30 would be a much better number.
My third attempt at Vim
It's just sad to be required to run Windows 3.1 in 2012.
good read. reminds me of this article on staying focused: http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/how-to-focus
Related is a great site I found through HN recently: http://chains.cc. It helps you track doing things daily and allows you to see your progress
Would the technology demonstrated to target and destroy mosquitoes with lasers be useful in some application against these?
Why oh why is this posted with the reddit toolbar?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002678173

That having been said, the very fact that they're stifling transparency at every turn and trying to keep these things a secret surprise is pretty good foreshadowing.
the documents themselves arent the problem, the real deception lies in the use of language and words of art
This is the best description I've read here so far. Scientific programming is ultimately a "niche" task, and there's a limited number of areas where this work happens (startup hubs, sure, but otherwise its research institutions, financial companies, or bust).

The best analogy I can think of is a tenure-track professorship. As a scientific programmer you are a complimentary good to advanced research; please remember that advanced research only happens in a few places across the world.
I agree about a colophon!

We have a lot of this information on our About Page but maybe that's not the best place for it.

http://doodleordie.com/about

I'll reply to each technology separately to make it easier to reply to questions about a specific tech.
... and then destroy them with robotic spur-winged plovers.
I seriously wonder how it's possible that in his tests JSON got smaller than MsgPack.

MsgPack is so close to JSON in structure, but very compact (1 byte type header, small numbers type and payload combined) it doesn't make any sense.
The majority of artists seems to be very happy with the emerging distribution methods. You know, the 99% that didn't get a major deal in the past or that have been strangled by buy-out contracts and "less than fair" revenue shares.

If you have other data then I'd be curious to see it. My impression is that complaints only ever originate from mainstream artists, major labels or lobby-groups.

I have yet to see a small band or indy speak up against the demise of the major labels.
I am not sure whether Ronacher realizes it, but this is exactly the motivation behind Pump [1], an HTTP abstraction that takes a different approach than WSGI. It was criticized a lot by HN [2] and by Ronacher himself [3] but I’m glad that he understands my point of view now.

[1] http://adeel.github.com/pump/manual.html
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810373
[3] http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/7/27/the-pluggable-pipedream/
Somewhat related: a friend and I built a game a lot like this as a Facebook app back in 2009 called Pictionnected. It had a few really passionate users. Didn't really iterate on it, got busy with work, and didn't maintain it when Facebook made some platform changes--eventually killing the app.

I deeply regret not sticking with it. I didn't know at the time just how unique it was to have that core set of extremely passionate users. The thing I've been realizing more and more these days is that persistence really is the name of the game.

In any case, it's great to see that the idea is still alive and kicking!

(Screenshot, for posterity: http://i.imgur.com/pSLNA.jpg)
Database: Mongo

We're using a 5 GB instance at MongoHQ with backups to S3.

Mongo is insane fast compared to what I'm used to with MySQL, and I love the JSON-based query syntax over SQL.

Not being able to do relational-type queries has made some things more difficult, like building "Top 10 List" of arbitrary data is a bit more tedious.
Can you describe this further? Reading this guy's post it sounds like he's complaining about the exact opposite problem: that the web framework is designed for streaming and, despite that I agree with you that specializing request/response out of that should be easy, he claims that this seems to make it awkward or impossible for him to have his request/response model.
This is a laudable idea.

Unfortunately, the key challenge with the problem isn't architecting a DVCS-like service for legal documents (for an MVP, you could easily get by simply designing a novel frontend to git), it's an adoption problem. The current system is flawed, yes, but merely offering a superior product for less money isn't enough to make a dent in the bureaucratic nightmare of modern-day Washington.

I'm reminded of an article I saw here on HN a few months back: http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-n...
Adjusting to a mobile digital life: the acceleration of convenience
Worth wondering whether films that they protect using anti-pirating measures might take a hit on sales. Difficult to test, because if a film's likely to be successful, people are likely to find ways to pirate it successfully.
Play is a frame of mind, not a contractual relationship. If it weren't, nobody would take mmorpgs seriously, and they do; the consequences may not involve your paycheck but it's harsh when you let your team down.

Playfulness shows up at work all the time, although not necessarily in ways that promote the bottom line.

Play mindsets can be encouraged in the workplace when they don't emerge spontaneously. Whether those efforts are successful for a given person on any given day...? It's still pushing a rock uphill.

Game design and reward systems are trying to find a path that doesn't suck. It may take another decade of experimentation before ten thousand failed attempts show the obvious and elegant ways to make more workplace leaders look like your favorite camp counsellor, recess organizer, or dungeon master.
But is that correlation vs causation? As someone who dedicates some time each day to what I want to succeed in, am I just aping some of the habits of the successful without really doing what matters?
Well, if you

#define write(x) {};

it's even valid C :)
Microsoft-Funded Startup Aims To Kill BitTorrent Traffic
Won't change anything. It's proposing a technical solution to a people problem.

Right now laws are openly available, but people don't care enough to get look into them. Also, just because you have "git blame" doesn't mean you'll now magically be able to see what corporate lobbyist wrote the law, because they'd just ask the legislator to commit it instead. Wouldn't change anything.
Bills used to not be 1000 page tomes. Special interests usually cause that bloat by lobbying for exemptions or credits in special circumstances. There's no real reason it has to be 2000 pages, it's not going to be three pages either though.
They need someone who actually knows and cares about product development. Job one to me is to fix yahoo mail, which is just horrendous. They have good market share but it is so much worse than Gmail it is an embarrassment.

Of course, we all know that isn't going to happen. They will hire another suit who will continue the destruction of a once-great internet company.
he was respectful in the first reply. now if you drag him into opinion pieces you are asking him to pull out his full guns, and deserve no more respect than he wants to give. you earn the respect, and you are not entitled to it right off the bat.