skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been running into this issue since the 1970s as a second-language speaker of Chinese. My wife, a native speaker of Taiwanese (whose parents, like most Taiwanese persons in their generation, were educated in Japanese under the prewar occupation of Taiwan by the Japanese Empire), tends to this day to confuse "green" and "blue" when speaking English. Those colors are both 青 in her mind. [AFTER EDIT, reply to first kind reply below: I mention Japanese that my wife's parents spoke because it was the language focused on in the submitted article, and to note that in their generation no other second language that might have introduced a distinction between green and blue was spoken in the family home. You are correct that historically Chinese also used 青 as a color term with a semantic range including both green and blue from the point of view of an English speaker.]

But another puzzler I encountered as I learned Chinese, first in the United States and then in Taiwan, was the broad range of colors that would be identified as 黃 (traditionally translated "yellow," a term definitely used for the yolk of an egg). One day in Chinese class in Taipei, my teacher, an older (birth decade 1930s) native speaker of Mandarin who grew up in Beijing, referred to the wooden tabletop in our classroom as 黃 in color. Aha! The term 黃 covers the full range of not just yellow, as we refer to yellow in English, but also pretty much the entire range of what English speakers call brown. Of course. Now I understand why the "Yellow River" 黃河 is called that, even though when I have seen it directly the silt in the river made it look brown to my eyes, not yellow. And similarly for referring to grass browning ( 變黃 ) in autumn, as to my English ear, I would not call the color of grass in autumn "yellow" but rather brown.

The book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Color-Terms-Universality-Evoluti...

was originally published in 1969, and it set the agenda for subsequent studies of how color terms vary across languages. The conclusion (as also related in the blog post kindly submitted here) is that most languages around the world begin with a very basic set of color terms that gradually accumulates more fine distinctions, in a generally invariant order across most world cultures. English has many color terms, but not quite as many BASIC color terms as a few other European languages.

We can see this same kind of process in older terms and phrases in English. What is called "red hair" in English (my late dad had that hair color) would more likely be called "orange hair" today, except that there was no word "orange" in English (that comes from the name of a foreign fruit, after all) at that time, so the word "red" had the full semantic range of today's word "red" and today's word "orange." That's quite comparable to the situation in modern Chinese, where there now are competing, very new, words for "brown" ("[coconut] palm-colored" or "coffee-colored" often being used in actual daily conversation) but many historical phrases in which 黃 ("yellow") is used for colors in the same range.
Each shell company only owns as many patents as it needs.

Thus, a loss in court means the patent is worthless, and so it's no loss if the shell company has to give it away.
Another Financing Risk
>A bigger long-term worry is the plummeting price of digital storage.

They mention that Google offers their service cheaper. But not the fact that you can have your own personal terabyte cloud for a couple hundred bucks, one you personally own and control, and never have to pay a subscription for. That is what threatens Dropbox and friends the most. Once storage becomes cheap enough to price personal NAS clouds below $100 (and upstream bandwidth gets faster than molasses), why would anybody trust a DMCA/FISA-encumbered, subscription-based business with their data?
Best Web Design Agencies & Freelancers ever
how do you expect to implement the "as-yet-undiscovered pseudorandom number generator" without any state ("hidden variables")?
I really like iCloud, but it's not a competitor to Dropbox/Google Drive or even a feature itself. I have and iPohone, 2 iPads, and 2 Macs. (Home/Work) I really like how everything is just synced without thinking about it.

We use Dropbox at work a company of about 10. We don't have any servers or IT. Everything just goes it Dropbox shared folders. Works very well and never have to think about it.

Since Dropbox is for work, I moved all my personal files to Google Drive. On feature lists it should be the same or better, but I find it just never works reliably. A lot of times I find it just sitting there unable to connect and there seems to be no option to reconnect other than exit and restart. The UI on Dropbox seems a lot more polished.
> [...] why would anybody trust a DMCA/FISA-encumbered, subscription-based business with their data?

Not only that, but a business with questionable security credentials, that has already had one absolutely spectacular security cock-up (referring to the June 2011 incident in which any account could be accessed without a password for four hours)

Never used it, never will.
An assumption: code is designed [to get things done].

Another assumption: the [thing to get done] will likely eventually be transformed via evolution or destroyed, as all natural things like rocks and species and hydrogen atoms and gluons and the entire known universe starting[?] with the big bang transforms via evolution or gets destroyed.

A conclusion: code that can not be easily changed and evolved will be conveniently destroyed via a complete re-write. This is why "facades" and opaque APIs are so popular - it is theoretically possible to rewrite different components of the code without rewriting the whole entire dang thing.

Case in point: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/810129/how-does-whiles-t-...

>>>while (s++ = t++);

This is code that is hard to understand(hence the stackoverflow question), making it not easily changed. Not a good sign for the survivability of the code.

JoelonSoftware.com makes a sparse point with this example, in that a "good" coder must understand what this does. He leaves the reasoning up to the reader, likely because he is clever enough not to make any claims that can be disagreed with. Luckily I am not this clever and I will make a claim that follows from my assumptions and conclusion above:

Claim: a "good" coder needs to understand the above type of obfuscated code so that they can evolve it or destroy it safely when they see it.

Note that my claim does not say whether a "good" coder would write code like that. A "good" coder gets the job done, whether it's a write-once-use-once-read-never perl one-liner or a big part of a big program. I only claim that a "good" coder must be able to read it, so that they can change it or destroy it safely.
Fascinating article.

For a long time I've wondered why we humans usually describe colors as a 3 dimensional space (RGB) where it really only is a 1-dimensional one (wavelength). Took me sometime to realize this was because we have 3 types of rod cells ... and to start wondering how the world looks for the living creatures who have 4, 5 or more rod cells...
It's not powered 'solely by gravity'

It's powered by a human lifting the weight.
You don't just buy a GoPro, you buy all the accessories too. I bought a Hero 3 Black last month, my first GoPro and found myself spending almost as much on accessories (LCD, batteries, mounts,etc.) as I did on the camera. I would think thats where they make most of their money being that its cheap to manufacture a couple pieces of plastic that sells for $40.

I don't do any sports, I'm not really interested in photography but a GoPro is something I always wanted.

I used it to record the plane landing as I came home from vacation and even use it to record my kids in the backseat while driving. It's a fun camera and congrats to woodman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zb7OBLtoAo
Marginally related --

on the other hand, here's "Evil Tetris": http://qntm.org/hatetris
How do you get this feature? I don't see it advertised anywhere.
Think Recursively, Vividly.
The Little Schemer is a book teaching you to think recursively. The way to use it is to read a question, think about the question, and come up with an answer.

The Vivid Schemer turns the Q&As in black and white into a live conversation on the screen, which can guide you to think in the right path.
Since your thesus was that stews are not possible without braising, and myself and several other helpful HNers have comfortably refuted you, your claim of victory and expertise is....odd to say the least. Enjoy your stew and have a great holiday.
Alan Kay has every right to be bitter. He's a great software architect, and came up with OOP as a perfectly reasonable policy for managing complexity. Now most people associate OOP with commercial garbage and that VisitorSingletonFactory nonsense.

If you came up with a set of really good ideas that were later bastardized and mutated into the sort of business horseshit that's destroying software, wouldn't you be pissed off?
Perhaps your economy won't recover to its former glory, like the way Japan's didn't. Then you'll have at least one first-hand empirical data point, even if you're unable to learn from observing others.
I think you might be taking my analogy a little far there.

I wasn't suggesting a straight find/replace of car with firearm...
That's a good question - I wonder if they have enterprise sales people that handle that?
Www.betabrand.xxx (safe for work)
antiterra said it better than I could, but I had to downvote you. We're used to techie snobbishness all the time, but calling people whores for working in one sector instead of another is not only stupidly arrogant, it's offensive.

Would it be whoring if you took money from Zynga instead? Groupon? Facebook? Yelp? Or any number of other disreputable companies that have engaged in allegedly immoral/illegal behavior?

FWIW I don't even work in banking.
Dropbox's price problem has nothing to do with the price per GB. The problem is that the lowest non-free tier is a whopping 100GB.

There is just no way I'm going to use anywhere close to 100GB. There is no way I'm going to use even a quarter of that space. With the bandwidth I have access to is just to inconvenient.

I'm probably going to switch to an alternative next may when my subscription runs out, it's annoying because I like dropbox but their prices are getting too inconvenient.
In my own experience, the development process is usually to blame, more than the developers themselves, their capabilities (or lack thereof) or their paycheck.

The project I work for depends highly on usually inexperienced developers and we're using a development process that is task-oriented but at the same time based on continuous feedback and regular code reviews. Should it be any other way, things would quickly degenerate.
That's what happened before I arrived, and we're still (years later) recovering from the damage that that has caused to the code base.

Outside the IT industry, most bosses don't want to hear about code. Coding is actually seen as a pretty trivial step in many cases. It's OK to hire an intern to add new feature X. Writing good code is not properly rewarded - as long as it works, it's stable, no-one complains, it's OK.

Not to mention stuff such as niche technologies, that usually create a barrier to entry that would-be employees have to overcome, thus concentrating the know-how, power and pay in the hands of a few bored people that won't bother learning the next thing.
As with all court actions, it's not what you did that matters, but rather what they want the court to think you did.

Engaged in fraudulent business practices?

Commingled funds?

Used the corporate entity to further these goals?

Sure you didn't. But now you have to prove it in court with the rules biased against you. Spend $10k+ on an attorney (and sit through court proceedings for months) or settle for $10k+ even though they're wrong and they're just shaking you down.

Take steps ahead of time to make your venture a less attractive target (lawyers chase money- either their client's or yours). Make it not worth their while, and you will significantly decrease your chances of landing in court. The easiest step? Don't be a single member LLC.

If you're an internet retailer, companies like Amazon have in past years located out of OR where there is no sales tax (thus providing a competitive advantage).

Other than setting up in Oregon to avoid sales tax, or setting up a C-corp out of Delaware if you're going to raise funding as a serious startup, you get no benefits (and some drawbacks) setting up out of state.
Did anyone else take notice of the percentage stake being 8.88%? It's interesting because eight is a lucky number in China where the buyer is located. I haven't noticed such a blatant use of this particular superstition in a western business deal before.

Also, this post currently has a score of 88....
I've wondered why nobody has done a good Dropbox clone where you run the server yourself. I'm guessing there is no business model.
Now our vocabulary grew past the basic white-red-yellow-green-blue-black separation and I believe it will keep growing. I say this because I consider cyan and magenta to be new ramifications of that spectrum, both colors are well recognized by name today.

I think this is due to how information is accessible today. Languages seem to be able to separate a hue in two or more once the actual names are already established—when the burden of naming and categorizing hues gives place to the lesser burden of only memorizing the already named hues, then we can afford to create another new name. Although brands of nail polish and ink have dozens of different names for their colors, they often don't reach a consensus, and the same color can have different names between brands. Without a consensus (language is primarily based on consensus) all these subtly different hues can be said to remain unnamed, I guess...

I also wonder if there's a limit to this, to how many colors we can name before considering naming all colors in hexadecimal on a daily basis.
Flickr Going Free for 3 Months to Entice Instagram Deserters
"Worse yet, the way things are going, it’s only a matter of time until alpha insurgencies like Hezbollah and the Zetas have their own fleets of armed or kamikaze drones."

And who will make and sell them those drones? Probably the same companies that are selling them to the US Army today. The way things are going right now, I envision warfare in the future being much like in the Terminator Salvation movie. The only difference is that the "machines" might not be self-aware (although they could be automatic), but they will be controlled by other humans. But in places where the war will actually happen, all you'll see is a battle between machines and men being slaughtered by them.
> psychotic mass murderers.

"Psychosis" is a real word with real meaning. It's frustrating when people use it as a slang word because that use stigmatises people with mental health problems.

It's possible that someone in a spree shooting has never had a psychotic episode and was not psychotic when they were shooting.

(https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001553.htm)

Psychotic episodes are not just caused by mental illness. They can be a symptom of other illnesses - Brain diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease; Brain tumors or cysts; HIV and other infections that affect the brain; Some types of epilepsy; or Stroke.

(It's a shame that 'psychotic' is similar to 'psychopathic'. And that most people have almost no understanding of either condition.)

> The same applies to drone warfare. It’s suddenly so much easier to pull the trigger, and you’re not putting any of your own people at risk. And so more people die.

The military kills people. We stopped caring whether those people were civilians during WWII. Our military kills people with a variety of weapons. Shock and awe didn't feel particularly targeted. The cluster bombs that kill and maim hundreds of people each year don't feel particularly targeted. Cluster bombs are currently illegal, but the US and Britain have been trying to get the ban over-turned.

I don't understand why drones, as a weapon of war, are getting so much attention at the moment compared to other weapons of war. Dead civilians are dead whether they're killed by drones or landmines or cluster bomblets or whatever.
> Also, this post currently has a score of 88....

Woa.. spooky coincidence...

Anyways, spot on.
It's trivially easy to change those with xset:

> xset m <ACCELERATION> <THRESHOLD>

and:

> xset r rate <delay in milliseconds before auto repeat starts> <repeat rate per second>

I'm of the opinion that it's not a window manager's job to deal with mouse acceleration or keyboard repeat rates in the first place.
Further: do you have any respect for actual women who engage in prostitution?

No.

Ditto for drug dealers.
Drones are only the beginning. The US military leads the World in developing military 'bots. The problem with having such an excessive military as ours is that the civilian leaders use to commit more and more stupid acts. With robotic weapons, so far fewer body bags returning to Dover, what will our "leaders" do then?
Minteye is so easy to hack
Mine Kafon — Low-Cost, Wind-powered Land Mine Detonator
It only disproves that the particular delta-epsilon function works though. That just proves that the proof writer wasn't clever enough to find a working d-e, not that there isn't a d-e.
Governments are not standing to the side anymore - Hacker News
A bit off-topic, but I find ConEmu much nicer than console2:

http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

Really nicely customizable.

smooth and friendly window resizing;
tabs for editors, viewers, panels and consoles;
run simple GUI apps in tabs;
Windows 7 Jump Lists and Progress on Taskbar buttons;
run old DOS applications (games) in Windows 7 or 64-bit OS;
thumbnails and tiles in Far Manager;
normal, maximized and full screen graphical window modes;
window font anti-aliasing: standard, ClearType, disabled;
window fonts: family, height, width, bold, italic, etc.;
using normal/bold/italic fonts for different parts of the console simultaneously;
Chinese verions of Windows supported;
using 24-bit colors in Far Manager 3.x;
ANSI X3.64 and Xterm 256 colors;
cursor: standard console (horizontal) or GUI (vertical);
optional per-application settings (e.g. palette);
The hilarious thing about this is, of course, that Shakespeare is actually popular culture, we just glorify it because it's older than the word we made for it. And it's good, of course, but praising it as some kind of pop-culture antithesis betrays lack of understanding of culture itself, and is an example of how many people mistake something that extremely mainstream (but 400 years ago) with arthouse movies.

And to return to the issue of code quality, academia is not a magical land of perfect code. Code I read in academia, in scientific and bioinformatics code, was easily one of the worst I ever read, and I currently work on a huge codebase that started 10 years ago as someone's attempt to learn a new programming language. The "best" code comes either from obsession, or from requirements actually going down to the code quality itself — either because it's used for didactics, or because e.g. reliability requirements demand actual proof of correctness (which is rare, but there's some industrial code that actually has this requirement, see Maeslantkering).
Drones really needs to be studied badly in terms of how they are going to change the future of warfare, especially as more and more new countries gets access to them.

If I was a secret service coordinator, I would be shacking in my boots when I think about how to protect the president when any enemy, whether they are a country, a terrorist group, or just a lone nutjob (and how do you even identify a lone nut job? The norwegian police pretty much admitted that they couldn't, after the debacle with the loser who shot up a kid camp), can make or adapt a drone and fly it from far away?

The president is safe now, because very few people are completely unconcerned with their own lives, but with drones we may never know who was really responsible for the attack.

Drones even have the potential to be more dangerous to political groups than nukes, because nukes are so difficult to make that the only entities who could make them are the large, advanced, countries that have too much to lose if they were ever used. Drones are much easier, especially as all it really takes to make a lethal killing machine from a standard drone is to strap a rocket launcher on one.

And yes, private people can buy drones (http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/select-site) for surprisingly little money (less than all but the cheapest computers) -- true they can't carry any load at present, but that is almost guaranteed to change in the future since drones have plenty of business usages, in industries such construction and transportation (and possible in the service industry, if the tacocopter takes of).

And if there is one thing a terrorist could get their hands on with relative ease it is rockets and even if they somehow can't you can properly do pretty decent damage just putting an AK47 on it.

There is a final, perhaps more sinister issue with drones -- unlike nukes you don't have much, if any, idea of where they came from; and if you don't know where they came form, how do you make sure that the enemy knows that you will retaliate? And if they don't know that, what is to stop them from using the nukes on you? Heck isn't it better, all things considered, that you attack first?
On this entrepreneurially-focused website I'm going to offer that you can't afford to be an idealist about both business and engineering- probably neither. Good-enough at the right time in the right market trumps perfection without all the outside business forces lining up every time. If you're an artist at heart, no-surprise, it's far more charming to the world if you're financially successful.
This is an interesting take on that: http://spacemonkey.com/
Looks nice, I'll take a look at it.
Steal a tacocopter and stick a granade under it -- that should enable you to take out the target (and leave a pretty decent mystery for the local authorities to solve. How do you prove who flew the plane? Who fixed the handgranade?).
I agree.

On Chrome (on OS X Snow Leopard) the white text on the blue boxes is blurry.
"I've been running into this issue since the 1970s as a second-language speaker of Chinese. My wife, a native speaker of Taiwanese (whose parents, like most Taiwanese persons in their generation, were educated in Japanese under the prewar occupation of Taiwan by the Japanese Empire), tends to this day to confuse "green" and "blue" when speaking English. Those colors are both 青 in her mind."

I don't think this has anything to do with the Japanese. Historical Chinese poems often refer to 青天, ie "green sky". 青 is probably what we would call cyan, since there is another Chinese word for green - 绿.
the employer/employee relationship isn't symmetrical.