skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gaelic is compulsory for both primary and secondary school which means that almost everyone will study it between the ages of 5 and 16 (minimum school leaving age). It says something about our approach that all but a very small minority of school leavers are effectively unable to hold a conversation in the language.

It's been compulsory since the formation of the Irish state during that time the percentage of actual spoken Irish (as well as general Irish comprehension) has continually dropped. Given that the actual aim of this was to promote the language I think it's safe to say it's been an unmitigated disaster.

My personal take on this (I went to an all Irish primary school so I was fluent) is that there's two factors here:

1 - The way it's taught is absolutely terrible. There's a focus on the grammar and structure of the language rather than actually speaking it. This means that students associate it with memorizing genitive and dative cases which is pretty boring. This means the student don't like it. Some of those students grow up to be the teachers, and they've got a negative attitude to the language. Wash, rinse repeat for 90 years and you get to where we are now.

2 - There's no economic incentive to learn the language. Unless you're living in a gaeltacht (nearly all in very rural areas) you're almost never actually going to be able to use it. It's not present in any other country and apart from having conversations which foreigners can't understand, isn't useful. There are reasons to learn it but they're cultural or academic rather than practical.

There are signs of regrowth with more and more all Irish schools popping up but my impression is that it's become a middle class status symbol to be able to speak the language so we'll see what happens there. There's also been discussion about reforming the syllabus to split it into conversational Irish (compulsory) and 'academic' Irish (optional)

As for dealing with the government, you're permitted (not obligated) to conduct all of your business with officials through Irish and demand that they do the same with you. We have two versions of our constitution, one in Irish and one in English. In the case of any discrepancies, the Irish one takes precedence.
Irish person here, I can't speak much Irish and I cannot think of a situation that would ever require me to, since leaving school (though since I live in San Francisco now, its even more unlikely).

We're required to learn Irish throughout school (all the way til we finish secondary school), and even need to pass Irish exams to get into university.

Government business can be done in Irish, but its very rare. When you see it at the top-level, like in parliament, its almost always done for effect.
Don't they also earn money from landscape etc?
There's nothing illegal about minimizing your tax burden using lawful techniques.
I had exactly the same vibe. But the posting history shows no indication that that's the case. Except of course for the OP, nathangs
The public loves the tax rates, because of announcements like this. Creating jobs is what stimulates the economy, and the tax lost from corporate tax shenanigans are more than made up for by the creation of thousands of jobs from US multi-nationals setting up shop in Dublin.
A fairly detailed paper on Lua was published in HOPL-III in 2007: http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf
Sure they aren't, the difference lies on what they do with the data.

While Google will use that data to show you harmless text advertisement, the FBI might use it to backup a phony case against you, that can ultimately put an end to your freedom.

I'd say that's an incredible difference. Wouldn't you too?
> I don't promote or demote filesharing per se: it's just the cutting edge where the future trends will show years before they land elsewhere and that's what it makes it so interesting.

One interesting thing I've noticed that the people behind the best filesharing networks tend to have tremendous success with their later projects.

Napster is the obvious one. After Napster went down, Shawn Fanning co-founded Rupture and Path, and Sean Parker went on to become the first president of Facebook, key investor in Spotify, and managing partner at the Founders Fund.

Kazaa is another great example. After their legal walloping, the founders and development team behind Kazaa regrouped to form Skype.

And then there's The Pirate Bay, which is still rolling merrily along, court rulings notwithstanding. Its team hasn't created any billion-dollar companies yet (we'll see what happens with Flattr), but they created a political party that's won elections in multiple countries, as well as the webhosting company PRQ, which was Wikileaks' home in its early days.

I don't think all of these later successes are a coincidence. Filesharing involves hard technical problems, hard logistical problems, and intense competition. If you were an investor, a blind strategy of giving money to the best pirates you can find seems like it might be surprisingly sound.
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My iPhone 5 is considerably smoother and faster than my iPad 3. That's surely also related to the iPad's insane pixel count, but the iPhone also loads and switches apps faster, before CPU-based rendering is a factor.
Come to Xubuntu, 12.10 works perfectly.
One of the classic FAQs about Lua is:

"Why doesn't Lua have unicode support?"

I mean, it does, but in the same fashion as ANSI C: you need to either pick a convention for multibyte characters or use a third-party library.

And that's not an accident. One part of Lua's embeddability design is that the standard implementation is written in pure ANSI C, and pure ANSI C ... doesn't support unicode.
These changes are mainly localised to startup communities in Tokyo. However, the movement has to start somewhere. As harisenbon says, if this generational shift to entrepreneurship and changing attitudes on new businesses does not occur, Japan's future does not look bright at all.
As opposed to the other magnetic fields and "wireless signals" we're already exposed to?

Like the Earths magnetic field, our microwaves, the sun, all those "scary" things cause cancer too. How about we hold off on the crazy talk until we have something to empirically test.
Doesn't having a large field like this require a lot more power? I thought a lot of this long distance charging stuff was very wasteful?
GNAA hacked Tumblr (contains NSFW ascii)
Whatsapp works faster for me than gmail on my android. I can insert images, audio, group chat, mute notifications per group, smilies, share my location, snap and send a photo.
also, not everyone wants to mix their SMS and email.
Yeah, that is what I heard. Which makes me wonder what went wrong in the main distribution.
>>There's still this pervasive idea that if you're not a member of some multi-corporation conglomeration like Toyota or Sony, that you're not doing "real" business.

I agree, and it drives me kind of nuts.

This is something I think you need to work with, rather than against, since this is a reality that won't change in the short term.

Our solution will be to try to get some of these large Japanese companies as customers, to give us the credibility we need to approach more and more businesses around Japan, and I'd advise anyone else trying to break into the B2B market to do the same.
While I appreciate Apple for this, this article looks more like an Apple advertorial by Wired.
After Series J, the grants are worst.

This is a pretty naive post. Of course the grants drop when the company is massively de-risked after closing its first round. I think you'd find "on average" most startups don't get funding at all, so "on average" the drop is not "greater" than the decrease in risk- in fact to the contrary.

No such thing as a free lunch buddy.
Capital Gains Tax: I'm not a tax lawyer but there's good advice here: http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/money_and_tax/tax/capit...

Morale wise, again I don't know. I'm currently out in India but when I left 6 months ago there was (I think) a sense of just shrugging the shoulders and getting on with life. At this point, more scandals, bailouts & controversies would just be adding to the pile. People will complain but there won't be any kind of mass movement in protest. We voted out the political party who were in power during the boom years and I see now that they're back to the second most popular party in the country.

I know a lot of young, very talented people don't see a future for themselves in the country, don't see the point in trying to fix a very conservative system and just leaving (this would be why we have a relatively low unemployment rate compared to say, Spain).

The only way we'll roll those rates back is if the EU forces the changes. The public aren't angry with companies or multinationals. They're angry with private banks, a government which made private debt public on the insistence of the EU and with the EU which is forcing extreme hardship to repay other EU banks. Please note, I'm not saying the people or the Irish government is not culpable for the current crisis - particularly the banking regulator - but rather just trying to outline what the public see as being the problem.
Do you thing that there would be enough of a revenue stream from cross-platform BBM that it could sustain RIM?
Yay, popups coming to Android!
Video games and sleep loss
Standard C has wchar_t, which is used for Unicode on platforms supporting Unicode.
Also ignored is the linear warming trend that started before the large industrial production of CO2 and that accounts for significant amounts of warming. And the multi-decadal pacific oscillation. But you know, alarmism sells.

citation: http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/pdf/two_natural_compone...
Well they pissed off half the users with amazon so I'm not that sure it's true.

Is that really true? Sure - it annoyed a heck of a lot of folk in the Hn community - and similar tech-focused arenas.

Non techie folk I've seen using 12.10 either a) Don't notice, b) don't care or c) like it.
Interesting for an untrained programmer to tweak and see what happens each time - changing colours, speeds, sizes, reversing the flow, changing textures, etc. Accomplishes so much with such concise code.
WiFi, visible light, and X-rays are all just electromagnetic radiation. The higher the frequency (or shorter the wavelength) the higher the energy per packet. In order for EMR to give you cancer, according to theory at least, the energy per packet has to be high enough to ionize atoms in your body. Specifically, in your DNA. This causes an error that, most of the time, does little or nothing. If you're very unlucky, the error will happen in a particularly bad spot and cancer can result.

It's important to note that the energy per packet rather than the number of packets that matters. It's similar to how I could fire a thousand ping-pong balls at you and you'd be fine, but one bullet would be a completely different story.

X-Rays are very short wavelength and have a relatively high probability of ionizing atoms in your body. UV light is longer in wavelength, but is still just barely ionizing. The lights in your home are probably pretty safe. WiFi is substantially longer wavelength (and lower energy per packet) than visible light, so it's even less likely to give you cancer.

Put simply, if you're worried about getting cancer from ionizing radiation you should go live in the dark in a cave as far underground as you can get before worrying about what's coming out of your cell-phone or router.
Is that really a different tech or just creating a field with more power? I suspect wireless charging consumes power even if nothing gets charged, so selling it as environment friendly is stretching it a bit.
all I get is a 404 page.
Probably the reason ALL my Spanish friends have Whatsapp... it really is huge over there.
Democrats and Republicans dare policy before the financial crisis this week
Democrats and Republicans dare policy before the financial crisis this week -
http://www.psdmate.com/2012/12/03/democrats-and-republicans-dare-policy-before-the-financial-crisis-this-week/
Democrats and Republicans dare policy before the financial crisis this week -
http://www.psdmate.com/2012/12/03/democrats-and-republicans-dare-policy-before-the-financial-crisis-this-week/
If possible the map array should be uint8_t, while texmap uint32_t
Tax avoidance. Huge difference.
In most cities?
No, he can't, as long as he's not willing to charge their prices.
He has no leverage past making bad PR for the cities.
Being friendly isn't going to get him anywhere with most of these types of regulatory snags.

It's very hard to negotiate with folks when what they want is your death. The compromise is what, exactly? That they only half-kill you for now until the rest of your support base erodes?

He's playing a giant game of chicken, because sometimes that's the only way to hope to win.

But, in the end, as the saying goes "You can always tell who the pioneers are because they have arrows in their back and are lying face down in the dirt."

The most likely outcome is status quo stays status quo, unless Uber can make enough noise/etc to matter.
Wow, I'm amazed! Android performance tools have really advanced since my early attempts at android development (2.2-.3). I'll need to try some of these tools out.

Have they advanced on the NDK/C++ front as well? I've never been interested in the Java aspect of Android and working with the NDK was brutal compared to iOS.
I wonder why no they don't talk about it in EU Parliament? It's not like it's a big secret anymore, all the big companies are using it, same time EU bureaucrats are discussing about all kind of new taxes, raising taxes etc. Why not start by closing the loopholes?
The role of an internal secret police goes back at least as far as the Roman Frumentarii[0] and I think you can trace a direct lineage from Walsingham's[1] operations to the CIA/NSA.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frumentarii
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Walsingham#Entrapment_o...
The homepage is unusably slow on Firefox.
Or if it works at all like Scrubby (http://nornagon.github.com/scrubby/) which was on HN a couple days ago, it might rewrite all constants into global lookup table indexes, which surely wreaks havoc on performance.
Patents don't free us from anything.
Why parameter expansion in bash?
Dominance does not guarantee users' loyalty. Whatsapp is huge in Euope, but LINE[1], the Japanese alternative is now having an impressive growth in Spanish speaking countries. Las time I heard, they had 75 million users.

This demonstrates that this market is not still settled down and can still be disrupted.

The main reasons people is switching to LINE are stickers (huge emoticons that you get for free and with extra paid packages) and they have a desktop client, along with the possibility to run on iPods and iPads, probably Whatsapp's most requested feature.

[1] http://line.naver.jp/
Régiség felvásárlás
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This is a nice overview. I'm up and down on the Coursera courses as they seem to be hit or miss, at times incomplete, at times easy A material and at times intractable. There really is no good progression from A to B and that is fine if you are a true autodidact as I am, but for those who are considering this, or any collection of OCW as a replacement from standard education, I would strongly suggest not doing this.

The problem with Coursera, IMO, is that despite the promise of free education for all, the very large amount of courses with a broad spectrum of usefulness and difficulty makes it too difficult to navigate and can cost a student hours of wasted time watching videos that may be far beneath or above the student's abilities. I would suggest Coursera creates a pre-exam section for all the courses so the student can have a slightly better understanding of what they are signing up for. Hell, they are promoting themselves as a Machine Learning repository, can't they do a basic suggest-a-course section based on pre-exams?

With that said, I love the idea of Coursera, Udacity, EdX, etc. and what they promote. I am one of those people who, despite being American, had zero chance of ever getting into college due to the quality of my inner-city high school and financial circumstances. Of course, the issue is that if you do grow up in this circumstance, you probably won't be able to take advantage of the free education because you may not have a computer. Regardless, anyone who wishes to partake can join with little more investment than a $200 computer from Walmart, so the financial excuse isn't quite the barrier that it once was.

How much opportunity do any of these courses open up? How much do employers give a hoot about a silly certificate from a pseudo-school that rides on the backs of watered-down Ivy League classes? Employers still take a degree from DeVry more seriously than the scattered layout of MOOC, and until this is changed, there will never be tangible proof or progress in the sphere.

I could tell employers all day that I read, and worked through, SICP and Cormen, but why should they care? They shouldn't because there was no one around to tell me my code is wrong. I can show employers websites I built using exotic languages such as Clojure, but why should they care when I can't pass a basic whiteboard test? I could tell them that I can proficiently write in x y z language, but they don't care and they shouldn't. To all of those people who suggest that employers don't care about your background education and only care about the projects you worked on, I challenge you to point out how many of your coworkers don't have at least something that resembles a Formal Education (TM). Coursera is not a Formal Education (TM). The proof will come if, and only if, one day a student self-learned from Coursera with a large portfolio with self-projects nails a job over a kid from MIT with no portfolio. No one, at this point, can seriously say this is happening and a convincing scale.
"Refinements should not be included in Ruby 2.0"
1000+ business model canvases
Or a significant portion of the annoyed techie folk did a sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping and moved on with their lives...
HFT is gambling. There are probably more profitable positions in gambling e.g. in Russia :)
Keep an eye on Nexus devices availibility.
Not related to the article. Seems Bret doesn't care much about us Windows users. It's more or less impossible to scroll with your scroll-wheel with that custom scroller. Personally I think he's trying too hard with worrydream.com. I feel it's hard to navigate, with bad responsiveness and clunky, even on Chrome. I believe the bad UX comes from the skeuomorphic design. I've never seen such design work good for a software UI.

That aside, Bret Victor is a genius and I love most of is work. He's a great inspiration to me, and should be to anyone involved in any form of software development.
Who is We?

I never signed a contract.
Avoidance, but it's still shitty and wrong.
I don't understand how writing it in "pure ANSI C" prohibits Unicode support. Python, for example, is written in "pure ANSI C" and does support Unicode. Though doing so correctly and completely is hard, and requires code and data which bulks up what is otherwise a compact embeddable implementation.
Regarding the claim that you can train yourself to sleep less, you might find this study interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.htm... They had three different groups that could sleep either 4, 6 or 8 hours. Here's the punchline:

"after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are."

So, although you can get used to being sleepy, it's unlikely you're performance isn't being impacted. You could argue that the 2 week study wasn't long enough, but it still seems to show that you can't really judge your own cognitive performance, so any anecdotal evidence to the contrary wouldn't hold much water.
He only talked about revenue. Nothing if they're making money (profits).
EU Nations Aim to Boost Web Firms' Tax Payouts
Are We Heading Toward Peak Fertilizer?
As an AirBnB host, I do not ask for ANY protection from hotels. Let them do their thing, and I will do mine.
That was not the analogy. You can consider "servicing it yourself" and "taking it to a repair shop of your choosing" to be basically equivalent.

If the car has been designed in such a way that a relatively common maintenance task (changing spark plugs, upgrading RAM or whatever) is now much more difficult (thus expensive because the mechanic will charge you for more hours of labour) than it otherwise would have been (or impossible) and reduces your choices of service providers then this is definitely not a good thing to the customer.

Of course sometimes such design changes are inevitable trade-offs against something else. For example a laptop is less maintainable than a desktop but you gain vastly increased portability. In this case (the iMac) it's not obvious what the gain to the customer is.
This is only part of the picture but they sure are growing:

http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05055134
I was an Ubuntu fan for a long time, but now I've gone back to Debian. Ubuntu has become far too dumbed down for me.

I've ranted about the dumbing down of UIs previously on HN (re: Windows 8 Metro/WinRT, OS X Launchpad), but none are as terrible as Unity. It's impossible to find what you're looking for with it, it's terribly unintuitive, it hinders productivity more than any of the other offerings, makes it impossible to find out what applications you have (since software store apps and normal apps are held separate), and once Gnome fallback is disabled/no longer ships, will be shoved down users' throats more than WinRT or Launchpad are.

This and a number of other missteps on Canonical's side (cough Amazon cough) have made me a disbeliever.

I've actually spoken at length with some Canonical business representatives out of London on this issue, and when I laid out some of the limitations of Unity to them over the phone, I was surprised to hear them readily agree that it's nowhere near perfect, and in many ways a step back from the tried and tested UX. I can't remember the specific complaints that I voiced at the time (this was a while ago), but they promised to be in touch when the issues have been addressed, but I'm not holding my breath on that happening.
You are probably getting such a low CTR because you are mixing Search and Display. First step is always to separate Search and Display.
You can push description line 2 to the display url.
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Always A/B test, continuously. Never stop testing new ads until it is blatantly obvious that one ad-copy is superior.
*Make sure that your keywords can be found in your ad-copy. If your keyword does not appear in the ad-copy, you WILL have lower CTR. I guarantee it!
Great analysis of whats going on. Thanks.