skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect it'd be more problematic in for instance Japan, Korea or China.

Linguist David Crystal, who has surveyed world use of one or another "interlanguage" for official use by international organizations, has found that actually most frequent and most exclusive use of English as an interlanguage is in east Asia. It is remarkably "natural" for a Korean person to try speaking English to a Japanese person (even though Korean and Japanese are cognate languages), and it is more expected still for a Chinese person to speak with either of them in English. What I find remarkable, but have observed more than once, is speakers of different Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") speaking to one another in English. Online, which is mostly the context Jeff is talking about in his blog, the early inconvenience of typing in the CJK languages (now resolved, as an in-country issue, but still a big barrier to switching among those languages) resulted in much Internet communication in east Asia being in English by default.

After edit: France was mentioned in the reply above to which I reply here, and I'll mention that the Carrefour retail chain has stores in Taiwan, and the signs inside the stores are in Chinese, of course, but also in English, NOT in French. There is no reason of national pride among the Carrefour staff sufficient to overcome the practicality of using English to reach customers in Taiwan. (Taiwan has a large population of English-speaking foreigners, the plurality of whom are Philippine guest workers.)
I think this represents life before bug tracking systems:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2008/07/18/Life-after-Bug-T...
Line Number 42, Column 101:String.fromCharCode(0xdc00+n%0x400);}else{return '&#'+ncr+';'}});for(var i=body.length-1;i>0;i--){if(cp1252[body.charCodeAt(i)]){body=body.substr(0,i)+'&#'+cp1252[body.charCodeAt(i)]+';'+body.substr(i+1);}}
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------^

But seriously, I'm curious what he has to say. In lots of companies the bug tracking overhead overwhelms the actual work done.
Selling Software to the DIY Generation
I think submodules are a bit of a failed experiment, yes. Or, perhaps, a work in progress. Their usability is just awful. That said, if you don't use them the rest of git works just fine. ;)

Does Mercurial support submodules or the equivalent? Not in core, from what I can tell, although a casual search of Google reveals the third-party "Forest Extension":

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/ForestExtens...

There's some talk on a wiki about putting this extension's functionality into Mercurial proper, but the wiki link is broken. That doesn't bode well. I don't know Mercurial so I have no idea if Forest is actually being used by folks, if it's akin to git submodules or more akin to Braid, if it's got usability traps of its own, etc. The docs page is filled with TODOs.
Create your own URL shortening server on Heroku with Shorty
Anxiety at work due to constant layoff pressures
"each cons" wasn't a typo...
Well, that's the question underlying the article. Consider the hypothetical case of a movie that is very controversial: all 1's or 5's. Even if your system can tell that a user is quite likely to fall in the '5' camp, the only safe prediction for a high variance movie is something close to the middle. Even if you are pretty sure the user would give this movie a 5, the squared error for the small chance of a 1 is enormous.

But a rating close to the middle is never going to be chosen as a recommendation if the algorithm involves recommending the movies with the highest predicted scores. Instead, an RMSE based system is always going to prefer safe 4's over risky 5's. This doesn't mean that improved predictions can't yield improved recommendations, but I don't see truly great ones ever coming from a prediction based approach.

Personally, I want a recommendation system that maximizes the percentage of recommendations that I would rate as 5's, and don't much care if the misses are 1's, 2's, or 3's.
Our survey says: http://modernsailing.com/

Happy to help. :P
Okay, I must be being unfair. But at least look at my post again to understand why you're catching some flack in this thread... I believe that is one of the common lines of thought.
what exactly are they angsty about? i'm not sure.
I think this is a good choice. I found learning mercurial after using svn for years to be very easy. And why not choose a system written in the language that you are writing? Sort of a recursive dog food feast...
We use Forests and they are pretty awful. I would recommend against using that extension. It is awkward to work with, makes it hard to rollback your repos to a consistent state, and is painful when you have a change that applies to both repos.
Hedging their bets?

murcurialhub.com is registered by github
Good luck mirroring youtube, or all of the thousands of pages on the list. And you're out of luck if mirroring defeats the purpose of your site (eg gambling sites & that dentist site).
TheFWA Startup Story
huntanelk.com

Is elk common in the us?
Green Porno 2 premieres tomorrow: Sex lives of marine animals
Why I'm Missing the iPhone gold rush
My wife's friend runs a small business that produces magazines for upscale shopping malls. I can see her using this service for sample production or prototyping. Even though the per-book cost is high, the pay-off from increasing the probability of a sale is even higher. However, she would use a traditional printer for actual production printing.

It doesn't seem like there's much of a market for this service beyond prototyping though.
Single player PC game developers: We're All Charity Cases Now
I'm am a fan and proponent (but not quite fanboy) of Git... but I think this is excellent news! First, with Mercurial implemented in Python, this is a great case of "eat your own dog food".

Second, I want competition in the SCM space. I think the biggest tragedies with Subversion and CVS before it was that their dominant positions implied that there was "only one way" to do SCM. Hopefully, by keeping at least two competitors around, there will be more stimulus for invention and improvement.

...sure, it'll make developers live a bit harder, as now there is yet another decision that needs to be made. But come now! If developers can decide between Vi and Emacs, surely they are capable of deciding between Git and Mercurial (and no...don't even try to tell me there are more than two choices for text editor ;-).
Did you read the article? He's talking about internal engineering efforts, not gathering requirements and general interactions with the customer.
Skype for the iPhone sounds great -- I'd love to be able to easily make free calls over wifi using my Skype Out account (the current Skype-enabled apps like TruPhone fall short, imho).

But, and correct me if I'm wrong, without background processes Skype for the iPhone can't take _incoming_ calls unless it is running. Which means that it will never be able to completely replace my ATT minutes for calling while connected to wifi. It would be amazing to take calls via my iPhone on my Skype In number, but it's not feasible (no possible?) to have to keep the app open and active all the time to do it.

Not Skype's fault, but a major problem with the iPhone, in my opinion.
Is that most frequent per capita or total occurrences?

At least with the limited contact I've had with Chinese and Japanese developers the level of English wasn't particularly high, so I guess I'm a bit surprised by that. In the Chinese teams they even went as far as to try to suck in someone from Hong Kong so that he could be the bridge between the Chinese and German (the team I was on, though communicating in English) groups.
I understand that the parent poster's point is that most East Asian software engineers don't speak English well.

Now, given that a Japanese and a Korean are to communicate, of course it's more likely that they will do so in English.
A graph is nonplanar if and only if it has a subgraph that looks like either (1) five vertices all connected to one another or (2) two sets of three vertices, with every vertex in one set connected to every vertex in the other.

"Looks like" means: can be turned into by repeatedly replacing -o- (a vertex with two edges coming out of it) with -- (a single edge between the vertex's two old neighbours).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planar_graph for details.
It's O(n) in the general case, so certainly also for the special cases on planarity.net.
Why we treat our pets like royalty
Best places to live and launch?
Laptop repair using a propane torch
I seriously doubt 3,000 gallons of water in someone's garage poses any risk to the neighbors. It's not something I would want my upstairs neighbor to have, but he's in a house. Realistically it's probably .3-4" of water spread out over his property. Much less than a heavy rain storm. There's no way that would have an effect on the sewer or power systems. They just had a sewer line bust in my town and in 2 hours it leeched 460,000 gallons. It barely made the news and only did so because it had broken before and made a sewage geyser (sounds like Mike Rowe should help fix it). 3,000 gal is literally a drop in the bucket.
Richard Branson 'lucky' with F1 - but nothing else
The BGA cracked on my laptop's video chip, for the second time. This is how I fixed it. The possibility exists that it's a bad idea to try this at home.
LineBLOCKED CSS layout.
Feedback sought on the above.
Please don't post the link elsewhere as its in a draft state.
Thanks!
Having run for election last year [1], I'm confident that voting tends to be more illogical of the two.

First, most people tend to vote in accordance to their philosophical world-view. And since most people are inconsistent and illogical [2] with their world views, then their voting will be likewise inconsistent and illogical [3].

Second.. eh. I need to get back to work. More later if y'all want.

Notes:

1 - I came in dead last. Which I thought was still amazing because I never ran for anything other than college clubs before. I don't begrudge the guy who did win. If it couldn't be me, I'm glad it was him, and not the other folks who ran.

2 - Most of the readers on this site are developers, who have a far more consistent & logical approach to things. While I value consistency and logic, I recognize that I am frequently far less logical and far less consistent than I would prefer.

3 - In general, pointing out the inconsistencies in a person won't make friends - just enemies.
My eyes want compensation.
Aha, perhaps I have found the Mercurial equivalent of git submodules! ;)

Although, actually, I'm pretty sure you can get git projects with submodules to roll back to consistent states. But it might take ten separate commands, five attempts, and a visit to the FAQ. Submodules are conceptually tricky and their workflow is a mess.
Optimizing OCaml global illumination rendering code (MiniLight) by Mauricio Fernández.
What am I? A Salad?
The programmer behind securitization confesses
Anything with a good REPL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REPL
Github mostly provides the pretty web interface. There's no reason they couldn't do the same for the hg crowd. So, not so much hedging their bets, but looking to expand?
As a resident, I can assure you that your statement describes a fair number of Baltimoreans.
If anyone in London (or elsewhere in the UK) is wondering why the US and Germany get all the fun, we're working on setting up hacker spaces in London and Birmingham:

http://hackspace.org.uk/

If you're somewhere else in the UK and want to help setting one up, get in touch!
Splitting these connotations is a tough battle. The "skeptics" movement faced the same issue 30 or so years ago. "Skeptic" was seen as equivalent to "cynic," and to outsiders can still share some of the same emotional attachments.

People thinking about doing this with their startup should bear this in mind.
svn's externals work quite well, on the other hand. I know, I know, svn is so 2007, but after fiddling around a bit with git, my impression is that spending time writing code is an order (if not more) of magnitude more important thank screwing around with a version control system, and svn mostly 'just works'. I think that eventually things like git and hg will surpass it, but version control isn't where your startup is going to "make or break" it (unless you're github:-).
where are all these points whenever someone asks about git?

If you go looking for rough edges in an open-source Unix power tool that's under development... you're going to find them.

Based on my research (but, please note, not much actual experience) git submodules are ugly, confusing, and perhaps even dangerous in the hands of anyone but an expert. I avoid them. That said, it appears that lots of Rails developers use them every day and can't live without them. Should this feature have been kept out of the official git release, just because it's still being worked out? Not an easy question to answer. Every project maintainer has a different philosophy about such things, and there are a lot of judgement calls to be made.
1, He empties it one day = the side walls now have the Earth pressure on the outside but nothing on the inside and so collapse inwards taking down you neighbors walls. Why do you think they put those big metal retaining walls down the side of excavations in the street?

2, It leaks and 250,000l of water flows out under the house washing away the soil that the foundations stand on. His neighbours house falls into the hole.

3, The houses were built on a concrete raft (common where the ground is unstable) he has just cut a big hole in the raft, it cracks and his nieghbours house falls over.

That's ignoring the risks from dumping that much water into the drainage system, leaking chemicals, humidity/damp etc.
Computing as Social Science
Sound exactly like forests. You CAN get back to a consistent state. But you have to be very careful look at the commit history and hg update a few times.
WOT covers more than just malware or phishing. Measuring vendor reliability, for example, is something automated systems won't be able to do. The rating system is meritocratic, meaning not all votes are equal. Users must prove themselves trustworthy before their votes are given any weight. No, we aren't selling website demographic data. Finally, the project was started in 2005, before Firefox had even phishing protection.
yourglobaltime.com
Even here in Italy, which doesn't have a strong tradition of using English, most programmers use it (although I am currently working on a Rails contract where all the models have been translated into Italian, with the accompanying pain that that brings...)
According to that definition, we enjoy flying blind, then. We never did any substantial research in any of the areas that you suggest and we managed to do just fine.

Doesn't mean that you should never do those things, just that I generally find them overrated as your ability to gauge market sizes for non-consumption products is very limited (which is what we try to do almost exclusively, attract people who haven't used a product in the category before).
I don't think the government should ban gas stoves, but I don't want my neighbor running his own gas lines that don't meet the building codes.

Can we agree that there is a grey area which covers where lines should be drawn in terms of personal rights vs. infringing the rights of others? It is certainly the crux of our system of government.

We obviously disagree where the line is in this particular case, and I totally respect your vigilance.

I do take issue with your statement "having a swimming pool is never illegal" -- that is certainly incorrect, at least by definition of the building codes in the jurisdiction I live in.

But I agree, we are surrounded by slippery slopes.
With high expectations I clicked a heading entitled "Document based DBs will rule the world" but found someone lifecasting "hello world" on CouchDB.
"Bitterness, anger, jealousy, sadness: They all make me happy."

Exactly. Coming full circle to the point you actually derive happiness from what you once eschewed is probably the most important thing you can ever teach yourself to do.
There is some interresting things for a non american guy in this article, although i think the way he bounds the fact of being a hacker, and the fact of being american is truely stereotypical, and a little bit sad also seen from outside.

I'd have prefered if he dug the intellectual property thing a bit more.
IBM patent application diagrams method for offshoring employees
My issue is not that they exist. I've got no problem with warts in software. I don't think there's a project anywhere that doesn't have some sort of issue.

What I take issue with however is that these warts get conveniently forgotten in the buzz. Even worse, I'd be willing to bet that most of those rails dev's have no idea what is solid and what's a work in progress; they're being done a disservice, really.

I suppose my concern is that there's a fine line between enthusiasm and hype, and it's difficult to know when you've crossed the line.
since it is gzipped, there is no progressive download of the page

Gzipped data can be incrementally decompressed. Are you sure browsers download the entire page before starting decompression?

(Not that this would make the test much better; I agree it has numerous flaws. Just curious about what browsers actually do.)
The only crucial killer is that you cant have it running in the background (which makes it essentially useless).
(the not-over-3G thing is easily overcome with a jailbreak + app)

I use Skype as my landline when at home (and dont wish to pick it up when not at home) so if they could overcome that it would be a brilliant alternative to a wifi skype phone for me (plus I could easily check voicemail at hotels when I travek etc.).
Well, just to state the obvious, no particular database will "rule the world".

I don't think this either, I was just parodying the overly-editorialized title.
Don't your customers complain that you write the requirement documents in English instead of the local language?

A big advantage you have as a local developer over an Indian developer is that you speak the native language of your customer. It seems kinda silly to throw that kind of an advantage away.

Besides, you can't really apply the principles from Domain Driven Design if you translate everything to English. You would end up with one language in your code and another language to talk to your customers, instead of a single ubiquitous language. This becomes especially difficult when you have a complex domain with tricky business rules that requires frequent collaboration with domain experts.
I have run into serious issues with the document based approach. Imagine a domain where you have several different types of documents. You still end up doing joins. In the example the author gives, doing a query to get you all of the unique tags can be slow. Or, if they are dates, trying to get a max(date) can be tricky. The biggest problem though, is document size. For a complex domain, there are big tradeoffs between keeping the entire graph in the document, which is slow to read, or creating a variety of document types, which brings you back to joining.

A hybrid approach can give you a little of both. For most of the kind of applications I build, I use relational databases, but I dump a denormalized view of the data into Lucene for searching and such and use a caching layer for most reads. This way I get some document type performance on many operations, but still have the normalization and simple transactions of a relational model.
Looking for feedback on how usable people find this?
Thanks!
Not at all. I am worried about the implications on the study conclusions on interrogation techniques. The validity of a confession obtained under coercion can be questioned when you show the effect an "expert" opinion can have on someone's own capacity to assess his/her situation.

Cops will need to interrogate their suspects inside an fMRI machine...
What? Problems can happen sure, but lets not exaggerate.

1, I can't say for sure, but I think it's a free standing garage. Plus it was standing just fine without water pressure on it before he started. Plus water barely puts any pressure outward anyway (most of the pressure is right near the floor).

2, 3,000 gallons is 11,000l. So how is it going to leak 250,000l of water? I don't think any residential water meter could put out that much water in a week! And that for a full pressure leak. So totally bogus.

3, he specifically did not cut into the slab.

That much water? What much water? He's not dumping anything. And if it was a regular pool he would be doing exactly that, without you getting all worked up over it.

You want to explain problems with what he did - fine. But don't exaggerate, and make up non-existent problems.
Tom Gootee's article is worth reading. He did a lot of the heavy lifting summarized in this article.

I've tried this and it works -- but...

You must be very, very careful with the solution -- whether it's Ferric Chloride from Radio Shack or a muriatic/peroxide homebrew. Gootee's article and others show how to create safe 'bubblers' for this step. Look at these first.

Please be careful. You are entering 'Breaking Bad' territory here.
Just looking at the python/ruby communities mostly from the outside, I wouldn't discount that many python folks dislike Git simply because many rubyists like it. I'm not saying there aren't valid technical reasons, (and frankly I don't know much technically about either Git or Mercurial) but I'd be surprised if emotion/religion doesn't play in at least a little bit.
Well, I know nothing of SVN externals. But I tend to believe this guy who says that SVN externals are inferior to Piston, and that Piston is the equivalent of git's Braid:

http://codeintensity.blogspot.com/2008/03/svn-externals-are-...

He strikes me as someone who has come by this lesson through direct, painful personal experience.

I've settled on Braid for the moment, and we'll see how that goes. Submodules offer more features, but at the expense of my ability to explain them to anybody else.
Brian the atheist on Family Guy might have been a little too real
Conversely, do you feel they should make decisions based on the number of developers that do like a system?
Oh for the love of.. Can we leave this "taking away the guns, declaring martial law and controlling our lives" stuff to digg, or various subreddits?

Please?

I like to think that people in here aren't QUITE that retarded.
Med Reviews
Medical directory containing info on all popular drugs.
... It's an above ground pool. The water would hit the concrete garage floor and go outside (and probably some of it going directly down the inside drain) down the driveway and into the gutter. But instead if it went into his yard it would be nothing more than a rain storm--no houses are washing away.
Replying to your reply to my reply to you, my main point is that if a Korean is with a Japanese person, they MIGHT speak Japanese (I have seen that happen), or they might speak Korean (I have seen that happen more rarely), but most likely they would speak English with each other. Add a Chinese person or a Thai to the conversation, and it is overwhelmingly likely that they will all be speaking English to one another. The standard of spoken English varies from one country to another in east Asia. One problem is that many of the better English speakers eventually emigrate. But English is the general language of intercommunication among people from Asian countries, for lack of any other language in which speakers have stronger proficiency that they all speak.
The view seems to be that business assistance is best provided by non-profits looking only to assist and survive rather than profit minded investors looking for young companies to hopefully make a killing from when they blow up.