skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.)

Well, not only that. English usage will also drop because of long term economic and cultural effects. English had commerce, hollywood and popular music going for it.

But billions of people in emerging middle classes now, e.g in China and India, get their own "hollywoods" and music on, and they also get at least equal footing in the world trade-ways (commerce).

With a large cultural industry and commercial opportunities, they'll be just like Americans that could not care less about non-english speaking content (movies, books, series, webpages, songs, etc).
I would add the book 'Elements of Computing Systems' [1] by Nisan and Schocken (in addition to CS:APP) as a replacement for COD. COD is more of a reference book rather than a teaching one.

[1] http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/
The article made it clear that the people waiting in line had motivations other than a phone. They were leveraging the marketing opportunities associated with such a high profile event.
What "actual web server" HTTP/1.1 compliant would you recommend, since this article tends to show that no "actual web server" handle it correctly ?
No one besides you is saying this.

In the context of the article, these two quotes are right next to each other. The author is saying this. He's trying to paint cultural homogeneity with the parent country, which is reasonable with first and second generation immigrants, but it's a sloppy way to exclude blacks from the American scores.

Let's be very clear here with another quote:

So similar to my comparison of GDP levels, let us compare Americans with European ancestry (about 65% of the U.S population, and not some sort of elite) ... We remove Asians, Mexicans, African-Americans and other countries that are best compared to their home nations.

The author is removing all blacks as they are 'best compared to their home nation' as he has defined them as 'immigrants'. (he's also exluding hispanics, apparently, despite a lot of them already living on land that was acquired by the US in the 19th century - how these are 'immigrants' is beyond me)

The thing is, blacks in the US don't live like their West African forebears, nor raise their kids like West Africans. They live like Americans and raise their kids like Americans. They are Americans and have been for multiple generations. To exclude them on 'American' scores is pretty racist.

--

Also, how can you really make a representative argument when you cut out one third of your subject pool? If the system only 'works' if you exclude them, then that means that the system is not working so well for that particular country.
The best idea from the article is the recommendation of an official unit test suite. I'd love it if every group that builds an API or protocol spec were required to include a unit test suite for the defined behavior prior to finalization of the spec. It would not only make implementations easier but more importantly result in the spec writers running into some of the design problems they tend to miss.
Here is the blog post that goes along with this - http://jchenry.me/2011/05/26/Reading-List-%3AA-Crash-Course-...
> Their "years" claim assumes they are only used for brief periods each day,

Even if you read the fine print saying "if used 3 hours a day", and divide the stated lifetime by 8 (even though they don't stay on 24 hours a day), they still don't last that long.

> LED bulbs are different. Heat is a killer. You might be burning them up in an enclosed or even partially enclosed fixture.

If they can't function in the same environment as a standard bulb, that seems like a major design defect. And on top of that, even the ones used in mostly-open lamps don't last noticeably longer.
It's not the '60s - 90's anymore, when US had the stronghold on global cultural creation/consumption. There are many signs that this is starting to fade, and for huge masses of people it was never true in the first place. E.g Chinese people could not care less about english media and knowledge. But people wanting work in China/Asia might very well care about learning english.
Check out http://tryruby.org/ while you wait. I just ran through it again last night and it's so beautifully crafted I want to weep.

I learnt Ruby kind-of-alongside Rails and wish I'd spent more time focusing on the language itself; I'm going back and deepening my knowledge of it now. But it depends on how your mind works, whether you want to get a Rails project going yesterday, what knowledge you have locked away somewhere, and so on.
Ask HN: Popup mobile/web dev shop only on the weekends
We all know that devs are in high demand and usually the best have FT jobs at the top companies or they're trying to start something on their own. Companies don't have the talent/time, devs don't have time or don't want to commit significant time.

I've been doing some market research, and found that devs always have an interesting side project or try to attend hackathons to solve problems during the weekend.

Why not get paid handsomely for it? Like $7k-$10k in a weekend. Just to give a rough format of the weekend:

Qualified devs give availability for weekends they want to hack and more importantly, screen out undesirables, (PHB, egotistical devs, etc.) you're here to have fun and get paid.

Popup dev shop finds clients that want to test an idea or rapidly prototype something along with a significant deposit to show that they're serious + fee to cover weekend running costs. Projects get selected based on interest from the pool of hackers + availability.

Friday - Sunday: hack with all amenities provided, food, beds, shower, etc.

Monday: Present to the client the product. If they like it, we get paid, if not, something to put in your portfolio and meet fellow qualified hackers.

Mutual understanding from the client and hackers that there is no obligation to continue working on the hack after the weekend is over, but at least they have a working prototype which they can buy.

Rinse and repeat. The popup dev shop.

Thoughts?
Absolutely. I'm a non-programmer that had been working on picking up Rails a number of times without a good background in Ruby. Each time I'd run into one issue or another and not have enough knowledge to push past it.

I've put in a bit of time in Ruby and it's opened up Rails (and programming in general) for me more than I thought it would. The biggest advantage, besides just general programming, is reading other people's code and documentation. Recently, I've been exploring i18n (internationalization) in Rails. By going into time_ago_in_words helper, I was led to the distance_of_time_in_words helper and it's source code (https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/bd8a9701c27b4261e9d8dd84...). By understanding enough ruby, the Rails code became a wonderful source of documentation.
Except Hitachi couldn't have still put out PCs with Microsoft on them. Acer would still be able to put out Android devices.
I have this problem and will mindlessly eat anything in arm's reach while working. I used to buy mints for anyone passing by to have, but would eat them myself... and they would go fast. I put on about 10kg before I realised that it was because I was essentially eating a bag of sugar every day...
yikes, did someone not read the article?
Where did he say it didnt work? It seems like a great idea.
It's been many years (if ever) since Apple tried to create scarcity to sell their phone. Every day that they are unable to sell a customer an iPhone because they don't have inventory, is a potential lost sale, as someone just buys a Galaxy S3, or decides to wait for the Lumia 920 - both of which are acceptable substitutes for the iPhone 5. Once that customer buys a competitors phone, they don't only lose out on the short term sale, they lose out on the content follow-ons, and, perhaps even worse, they lose out on the upgrade sale 2 years from now when (in North America) that person's contract comes up and they have to get a new phone.

Apple's inability to build enough iPhones is going to cost them Billions of dollars of lost revenue. You can buy a lot of marketing for that kind of money, particularly at Apple's margins.

So, no, there is no artificial scarcity at work here - just the sheer challenges of trying to manufacture 10s of millions of phones over a short period of time. This is not an easy thing to do.
People lining up days earlier to get their iphones used to make me mad, knowing that you can just pre-order it online, no hustle. Now I just see it from a good perspective, these guys have their culture and want to be feel part of it, that's the reason right? I don't think their life is that boring that they have to do these things. It must be passion and excitement. Might sound obvious to some of you, not to me, I have a hard time assimilating this process.
I love shacks, too. Here are more good ones.

Willard Van Orman Quine - "Dad built himself a small "shack" as he called it to be as far away from the family noise as possible. That way he could work to his heart's content and not interfere with the noisy comings and goings of the likes of my brother and me and our friends. It was not wired for electricity, so when it was late or dark or stormy, he would light his kerosene lanterns and keep pounding away on his typewriter."

Wilhelm Peterson-Berger - Wrote warm, lyrical piano songs called Frösöblomster in a rustic house called "Sommarhagen" that he built on the island of Frösö.

Birgit Friggebo - In 1979 this Swedish Housing Minister changed the building codes to exempt structures under 15 square meters. Minimalist cabins ensued and are called "friggebods."

Gustav Mahler - Built a tiny composition house or "Komponierhäuschen" at the edge of a lake.

Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia - VERY rudimentary, created by orthodox monks seeking Hesychasm.

Skellig Michael clocháns - beehive dwellings made of piled stones used by monks on cliffs on an island off of Ireland.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - built a cabin in Skjolden Norway in which to do his uncompromising philosophy. There are pictures and details of this cabin in the book "Ludwig Wittenstein: There where you are not."

Toru Takemitsu - Wrote haiku-like music blending Eastern sensibilities with Western instruments. He lived in a barn for a time to better focus on composition.

пустынь - In English, poustinia. A small, sparsely furnished cabin for solitary (generally religious) retreats.

Dick Proenneke - Filmed himself building a cabin in Alaska in the movie "Alone in the Wilderness." He's pretty amazing.

Ryōkan Taigu - A buddhist monk who left the monastery to live in a hut outside of town. He wrote poems about his daily life and his shack.

Ted Kaczynski - Aka The Unabomber. Before he snapped he was a mathematician studying complex analysis. Built a tiny cabin in Montana which he filled with books and supplies.
Actually, being Canadian, I do watch them on TV :)

I've also watched all of the UK Dragon's Den one summer.
Where does it say that on that page? It says "Thank your (sic) for accepting the license agreement.", but it doesn't say anything about 'the referrer', and in fact links to the license agreement that it claims we've accepted.
Wait, these headlines on Hacker News link to stories?

>click<

Well, I'll be darned.
HTTP has its problems, but implementing it is a walk in the park compared to many other telecom protocols. Try SIP and its dozens of add-on RFCs, or tracing a H.323 call flow, or even making sense of something like Megaco from the ITU/IETF spec.
I made the switch by having two computers: a sit down desk where I disabled most websites, and a stand up desk where I could freely browse the web. After a week or two, I was fine standing up and made the full transition.

You will definitely want to relax from time to time though.
>Except they are "only" trying to replace perhaps the single most ingrained language of all time, that is, Javascript in browsers. And I'll warrant that the more ingrained a language is, the more it's contender needs to be exciting, and yes, even hyped, and catter to developer motivation and happiness.

True, they need "hype", but exciting in the way asked above just throws most developers off of it. No exciting language ever gained a stronghold in the market. Even Lisp in the AI/Lisp Machines era and Smalltalk in its heyday were marginal.

<b>Having said that, I think they could find some success in, say, making Chrome run Dart natively (as well as Javascript for the time being) and then getting other more hyped languages to compile to Dart.</b>

They do have Dart run natively in Dartium, a special Chrome version IIRC. But obviously I can't see Apple/Mozilla/MS playing along and adding Dart to their browsers.

One way they could gain ground would be to use the server side advantage (since they want Dart to work on the server too):

Make a better Node.js like environment with Dart, with no callback-spaghetti and single-thread issues, and add a top-notch web framework for it, suitable for both Rails and client-rendering style web development. Add MySQL/PostgreSQL and Mongo drivers.

I think something like that will catch on like wildfire.
PSA: Do not release ARMv7s code until you have tested it « Wandering Coder
Perfect translation is going to be hard. For an everyday most common 5,000 words that may be ok but anything outside of that would require the invention of many new words when English likely already has them. They don't really mean anything in English either - for example "quantum mechanics" are just two words, and have to be learned even for English speakers. When coming from another language you may as well use whatever words others are already using. You can see that happening when other language speakers adopt English words.

There are other factors - English speakers readily adopt words from other languages as needed. This makes it a lot easier to expand. Compare with the Académie française: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise

Look at what people all over the world are constantly bombarded with - Hollywood's output is shown (and popular) everywhere. As are words like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Nike and Apple. Even Bollywood is including increasing amounts of English in its output. Popular entertainers in various countries have also taken to singing some or all of their songs in English.

Look at generating input. There is a bias to a reasonably small number of symbols. A 500 key keyboard isn't practical (although variations exist). Having many modes and switching amongst them isn't that pleasant either. We already see people dropping case from English where is it mostly cosmetic. (Of course voice recognition is always around the corner but isn't practical in many environments and has always been around the corner.)

It is acceptable to speak English "badly" - did I tell you about the time that: the mat cat sat upon? I've heard from speakers of other languages that just getting the gender wrong in a sentence is enough to make it extremely hard to understand.

My prediction is that the number of speakers of English as a second language will continue to climb since it is the most friction free way of communicating in many circumstances, and that will rapidly lead to their kids adopting it as a first language. Heck all the people I know who have a non-English language as their first language have their kids speaking English as their first language.

TLDR: English makes a very good lowest common denominator
Api Engine - Collaborative work flow for API services
Easy Target:  How to Spot a Child Molester
The exhilarating dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream
High-performance data structures for Python
It doesn't say anything like that on the page, but it does in the URL: publishing_this_url_is_probited_by_the_license_you_accepted_getting_here_from_the_previous_page.
I agree. Comparing features is old now. How about we try UX? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529225
Quite true. But then in a world of Asus Cloud and S-cloud you're still in the same boat. Backup, sync, and asst. services are fragmenting.
Java, JavaScript still highly ranked languages
Bootstrapping a (profitable) Internet company
+1 to espresso. Too bad there aren't any "native" bindings in many languages, but in many cases piping it through stdin/stdout works well enough.
Church or Beer? Americans on Twitter
> the big problem with iCloud is that it's restricted to Apple devices only

I am using iCloud contacts, calendar and mail on my Nexus 7. They are plain standard CardDAV, CalDAV and IMAP.

To use Google contacts and calendar on any non-Android device you have to go through an old version of Exchange ActiveSync, which is quite limited and loses some information.

This is basically the only reason that made me move from Gmail to iCloud: it’s easier to share the data across platforms. This is of course not true for documents sharing in apps, for which I still mainly use Dropbox.
Sure but the point is that any truly competitive cloud service has to be cross platform.
Thanks. Good luck to you. Have you considered going independent/freelance? You may find there's a market for someone with your skills, but there's no full-time employment options for someone with your skills, drive and experience.
You can do this without an explicit statement terminator. In Scala, you can write something like this and just have it work.

foo.bar(arg, objectToComputeArg2.computeArg(innerArg1, innerArg2,
innerArg3), arg3)

You can do the same in Python or in Lua. Lua will yell at you when it's actually ambiguous, as in

function_returning_a_function(arg)(arg_to_returned_function)
(it_is_not_clear_whether_this_is_a_call_to_the_value_returned_by_the_previous_line())

You can disambiguate this with parentheses or using a semicolon, though. There's never actually a need to use a semicolon.
I completely agree with everything you said. This is a Samsun and Apple game, with Samsung occupying every niche and market Apple won't take. There's no third platform evolving.

And yeah, if Apple goes sub-$200, it's going to have to be with a wizzy new design. The flagship model is maturing.
OberonScript
World’s first NFC supermarket to open in Paris
One thing I would love to see in languages that can work with single or double quotes is a practice like double quoted strings are text that will be displayed to users and single quoted won't. That way editors and tools can automatically help with localization, and can spot when you mix and match.
Movies and TV shows will be the least of English hegemony. Science, Tech, and Business is where it rules and it will never be displaced by any language currently on earth. A future constructed language may have a chance though.
But that stuff isn't what makes it interesting. It's the support for arbitrary backend structured storage, but few apps can afford to tie themselves to an Apple-only solution.
Having an explicit terminator makes it maximally flexible, but certainly not "possible". Python does it just fine, but the rules, while mostly sensible, do have a couple of corner cases that can catch you. Javascript does it somewhat less fine, with quite a few more corner cases, including a couple that definitely routinely hit people. But in both cases, it can be done. Nor are those the only two examples.
Not 100% if this is what you're asking, but if you go to settings (hover over the triangle near the top right corner) there's a "email preferences" tab near the bottom left. You can change the frequency and kinds of emails you receive there.
Ah, I see what you're arguing. Perhaps so. Ideally so, for sure.
What the fuck is meant by "man up" in these kind of circumstances?

Is your average man supposed to take 30 years+ on the chin for trying to release academic papers?

If he didn't have a penis would you feel more compassion? As I have never heard it be suggested that a woman in desperate circumstances has a need to man up.

As for what could he do to give more breaks to other programmers, he was trying to give out academic papers for fuck's sake. On the scale of things, that is giving more breaks to others, than most people accomplish in a lifetime.

What is your idea of changing the world?
wow, you guys sure are mad. my apologies.
I don't like Microsoft as a company but I would like to see WP8 become a real alternative. They're taking some bold chances with their UI and a three horse race would be more interesting.
The "cultural" enterprises will segment and diversify, but business, tech, and science will all converge on English. Anyone from those other "hollywoods" will have to use English to reach a global audience.
The pdftotext tool from xpdf does something like that. One option pads the output text with spaces to roughly match the layout of the pdf (the -layout option) and another option just strips the pdf formatting out (the -raw option).

Depending on the structure of the pdf, one or the either may give better output (the -layout output would need some more processing).
I think it was a really good question. It showed that he had the intuitive instinct that there had to be a better way. He just didn't know how to ask for a "cow engine" by name.
FWIW we are a Java-based startup that just hired our first London engineer, so there is stuff out there.

He was someone that had actually contracted with us awhile back.
For any other American viewers: Dragons' Den is the original and Shark Tank is the adaptation.

Impressive to see how many countries the show has been brought to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_Den (Afghanistan!)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4516619
the haunting music did it for me
And that was because it wasn't originally Carrier-Subsidized, if I remember correctly.
Also similar contents to this book I think:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...
I had a long explanation typed up, but a pretty direct analogy will probably work better. If a baby formula manufacturer includes melamine in baby formula (happened with Chinese baby formula a couple years back), but is able to get the FDA to rate it safe, it's not just the FDA's failure - the manufacturer has the best information about what's going into the formula, the regulator has much less, and the buyer has next to nothing to go on, except for a little blurb about how it was made.

Many of the banks have claimed that since the regulators rated these things well, why should they be held accountable? The buyer is supposed to be educated if they're playing in this league, caveat emptor (this is a pervasive attitude in banks). I think that's bullshit, because when the banks securitize this stuff, they're abstracting away the underlying layers, and it's effectively closed source. But people seem to have bought into it.

To answer your questions, pension funds and others poured hundreds of billions into CDOs as a result (many legally wouldn't have been able to unless the banks got them to AAA). A huge percentage of these assets lost a huge amount of value. One of the net results was an extremely large wealth transfer from pension funds and governments to bank employees.
I still prefer a mouse, but these days MacBook touchpads are good enough that I no longer bother bringing a mouse with me for serious work away from my desk.
Keep going. You won't attract 100% of the same users even if your MVP are similar and the long term evolution of the product will change drastically
The Limits of Quantum Computers (Scientific American)
> CoffeeScript does compile into JS, but so does Dart. Both are in that sense just syntactic sugar.

With regards to Dart, that's like saying C++ is just syntactic sugar for assembly. When there's semantic differences between the mapping from one programming domain to another, I would argue that constitutes "compilation". I would agree with the statement for CoffeeScript though.
Let's see what Google Translate makes of this:

"Thank you for the article. It is sad that the Russian language is not included in the top ten most used language on the Internet."
Google Translate again: "Just start a cold war again: D"

(Google Translate doesn't quite 'get' smilies, apparently.)