skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"With Skritter, you can learn character 44% faster than with traditional methods, see our study"

What are your criteria are for verifying the validity of the study? I've proofread lots of graduate papers about studies of second language acquisition and in almost every case the studies are summarized the same way: the results are (un)promising but no definite conclusions can drawn because the sample size was too small and/or there was too strong of a selection bias and/or there were some other significant flaws in the study. A study that would justify such a bold claim would be, as far as I can tell, a landmark study in the field--likely worthy of a Ph.D. People could probably get Ph.D.s just for studying your study! :)
There is definitely a great difference in the price that customers are willing to pay in different segments of the market--especially K-12 vs. college vs. non-traditional learners.
I soon find that except for her own personal history and certain categories like television and airplane crashes, Price's memory isn't much better than anyone else's. She struggled in school, is no good at history before 1965, and seems genuinely miffed that she was once asked when the Magna Carta was signed ("Do I look like I'm 500 years old?").

That was the most interesting part to me out of the entire article. It raises the question of whether she consciously makes a decision to remember facts that she's interested in (herself, disasters) and exclude others or whether she just never spent any mental energy remembering these 'outside' events.
if I expected a filename with a leading dash, I'd follow the same convention as I did before: "cat ./*". You're link suggests the same thing.
I am not a vision specialist, but I work around a lot of them.

Look into the OpenCV image processing library. I haven't used it, but it seems to implement a lot of basic functionality to get you off the ground.

If you can't find anything good from the last ten years, then look at Yann LeCun's recent papers. (Google wanted him to be head of research, but he preferred academia.) In particular, investigate his convolutional networks.

The work of Rob Fergus is more applied, and should lead to good recent pointers.

Look for works experimenting with the NORB dataset.
This is the source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/bill-gates-car-engine,7517....

However, I couldn't figure out whether the article was accurate so I decided to post the patent application instead.
LivingSocial: 1 in 10 Facebook Users Uses It.
Never Eat Soggy Waffles.
Point in the four directions clockwise. It took many years of saying this alloud before I had it anywhere near down. I still ocasionally have issues. I also had problems with left/right and the months of the year.
That's a pretty awesome story -- I've always wondered whether it was our memories or our ability to recall them that faded! Does anyone know of good reading on the subject?
> What if somebody creates a file named "-rf *" and a Linux user tries to rm it?

They'll delete their working copy if the naive Linux user doesn't properly escape that. At the worst, they'll loose some recent changes and have to re-checkout. This is why you're using version control, right?
Cool! How can I add more than 1 character at a time? For example say I want to add all the HSK1 characters with one click, is there a way to do that?

[update: I figured out how to use Select: List. Strangely it's taking a long time to add the list. The HSK1 list should already exist on your server somewhere, no? Maybe it's doing it character by character? Is this an App Engine-ism? I would think a simple UPDATE student_character_list INSERT '?' WHERE source_list='HSK1'; would be pretty fast (if I even got that SQL right) but then maybe App Engine doesn't support SQL?]

I just created an account. Is there a difference between the functionality for my fresh account versus the hackernews account, other than different usage data?
N. Korean Defectors Bewildered By the South
Also worth knowing about is Microsoft's attempt at a Firebug clone: IE Developer Toolbar.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?familyid=E59...
I still have the same left-right confusion. For me, the odd part is that I have no trouble with port and starboard.So my wife gives me driving directions in nautical speak.

I figure if I care about it enough, I can probably fix it one day.
sort of on topic but playlist.com really has an amazing user experience (in the music space). Songs keep playing while browsing, and even if you are not logged in and a song is playing, if you want to add it to your playlist, you can click add, it iwill log you in, add the song, all while the song plays. Great stuff.

(IIRC playlist is a YC alumn)
World Bank launches API serving data for 200 countries over 50+ years
This is an under-appreciated market.
If I'm not mistaken, ASU has a supercomputer that costs $0.04 per CPU hour. This makes it cheaper than EC2.
Samsung C5220 – A perfect union of simplicity and affordability
Samsung C5220 is equipped with a fully functional and performance oriented 1.3 megapixel camera. You can easily capture all your life’s favorite moments with the help of its camera.The phone allows you to listen to your favorite tunes in a wide variety of different formats such as mp3, WMA and AAC. The phone has an expandable microSD memory to allow you store a whole music library.
Gautam Gambhir To Open Innings With New Mahindra Bolero Stinger
Street Smarts: My First Year (Running a Startup)
Creating Server-Side Image Maps
The way these things turn out is both sad and terrifying.
How To Hack The Coordinates
Distributed testing the easy way.
Although about python, the same idea holds true for packages and applications made in all other languages too.

Include tests with your program.
I've loved thesixtyone since the moment I came across the site. It's exactly what music needs in the digital age. I've been exposed to so much more independent music than would have ever been possible without this site. I completely agree with the previous comments about the interface -- It's fantastic. Everything is very pleasing, responsive and intuitive!
Ahh. Thanks. That link has a picture right up front. Looks like an internal combustion version of the flashlight you shake to light it up. That makes a little more sense.

http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/engine,0101-194921-0----...

Since there is no flywheel (or connecting rod) for that matter, they have to power the piston through its intake phase and then induce power from the ignition phase.

I like it. You could make a very small very fast little motor out of it.

edit:

I still think this:

http://www.gizmag.com/go/6245/

and this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5386004.stm

are more they way of the future than a magnet being blasted back and forth inside a tube.
Yes, the basic technology is flash memory, but it is packaged and accessed in the form of a disk drive, and it is conventional to refer to it in that way.

Claiming "512GB flash memory" is a pretty non-standard way of saying "contains an array of 8x64GB SSDs", or however they've organised it. Other vendors don't do that. The implementation of the storage array is a pretty salient factor in a device of this type, wouldn't you say? I would certainly want to know, for example, the interface by which the array was accessed, its filesystem, its RAID type, etc. Referring to them as "memory" implies a memory-bus-speed interface, and the x-25 is a SATA device.

http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/extreme/index.htm

The implementation and interface is highly relevant. To take the argument to its absurd extreme, they could bundle a couple of hundred 2GB USB sticks in the box. Would it still be cool to say it had hundreds of gigabytes of "flash memory"?
I had this unusual ability to memorize entire chapters of Biology and History. And unusually I could do it only with these two subjects, as for me they were the most difficult to understand and relate to. Let me just give you an example. The tests papers would question things like:
a) give any two symptoms of malaria (2 marks)
b) list all symptoms of malaria (7 marks)

And I hated to lose marks and overall class rank because of this one stupid Biology, and let's say I covered malaria but this time they chose to ask about treatment for cholera.I reasoned to myself, they could ask anything. So I might memorize all symptoms/treatments of malaria AND cholera. During one such exam preparations (must've been grade 7/8) by the end of it I had an epiphany that I'd just memorized the entire chapter. I even parroted it back to my mom making her happy that here I was ready to take on the diseases of this world. The notable point is that only after that realisation, I became very good at memorizing entire chapters. I remember by 9th grade I could almost memorize the 4-5 chapters of Biology. Surprisingly it happened mostly with Biology, a subject I hated the most, Chemistry equations which our teachers never explained because even they didn't know what the fuck was going on in there with those molecules(S8+8O2=8SO2?), dates in History and exact word-for-word quotes in languages -- all things that needed memorization. I could never remember say for example the 4-digit number plate of the cars which just passed by at 60kmph even after I had summed up its digits and they came out less than 30, and done so for all the 15 cars that passed by within 30 seconds or so (try this game, its fun and it'll improve your number skills).

And quite unsurprisingly, after my schooling, when this ability was no more required, I slowly started losing it. I always wondered if I could get that 'magic' back so to speak. Is there a name for this condition - the ability to channel immense memory powers when needed?

btw, if you guys are wondering this was an Indian school system. I also had other freakish abilities, but for now I'd leave it at that.
Here are two that go well beyond Mr. Popeil's contribution.

lightning rod = extremely practical and still in widespread use today

bifocals = one pair of glasses instead of two, still in use today
I tested 'while(1): print "can it hang?"' on it. It didn't hang. It didn't print anything. Just threw java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
Upvoted, but would like to add to bazookaaa: easiest way to change this habit is to set your editor to insert two spaces when you hit the tab key, that way you don't have to think about it ever again.
Wow... Does anyone know if his book is similar in style? Very entertaining...
Ext2fsd (http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/) works fine with ext4
No Basis For Earnings Fear
I got errors testing basic "Hello World" scenarios, too.
The "reasons for homeschooling" are too vague to be considered meaningful. The primary reason cited is boils down to "there is something about the school I don't like." Well, duh. What don't you like?

The second most popular reason was religious/moral reasons. That needs to be broken down into much more detail. Are the parents looking for creationism? Polygomy? No sex ed?

A geographical breakdown of the data would probably be extremely helpful. I have a feeling there are isolated communities that make up a huge portion of home-schoolers.
Five Best Cars Saving Gas
At least the first sum you mentioned does not add to profit.
This seems very similar to dollar cost averaging...
I had a very hard time learning east and west as a kid until I started playing Lands of Lore...

So I guess it was probably a question of motivation....
Well all it tells me is to stay out of his projects. Everybody knows that there is only _one_ space after a dot.
Android "Cupcake" Update on the Horizon
Accounting rule changes that were long overdue. I know of at least one case of a mortgage firm whose loans were performing but was put under by the decline in market value of its assets.

Presumably if Goldman Sachs' success is solely due to changes in accounting rules, we will see most other financial firms follow in their footsteps.
What strikes me as odd about this article is that it is supposed to address "what-aboutery", but instead the whole article is nothing but "what-aboutery":

"
That's why Japan needs to speak up about Burma, the Chinese need to speak up about Africa and Americans about things like Guantanamo Bay.
"

Nothing about the original article, or the "how to spot a lame argument" are addressed, instead the original author is accused of just "finger wagging" and looking for an excuse to "piss on Dubai".

He seems to utterly miss the point of the article he is responding to:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...
Link looks down from here.
You mean http://www.colr.org ? :)
How true that is, and of course that leaves the giant unsolved problem - how to keep a site vibrant and interesting once the marketers and SEO types discover it. This site seems to be trying new things but a visit to the new section suggests it's not invulnerable. Presumably killing them all isn't a viable solution, so either everyone periodically moves on to the next new hot site, or we learn to live with them (and them with us).
It looks like they replace the crankshaft with electromotive components, attaching the piston rod directly to either a linear actuator or a rotating generator.

At first I was pretty skeptical if the usefulness of such a device. The crankshaft in an engine transfers power to a load, but it also performs an elegant and complicated synchronization task for multiple cylinders and ancillary systems (like lubrication, cooling, fuel supply, ...).

But the crank also imposes a practical limit on stroke length because a long stroke in a small space gives you pretty high angles and less efficient power transfer. The short stroke puts an artificially-low limit on the fraction of energy from the combustion that can be recovered.

Attaching a kinetic-to-electric conversion device directly to the cylinder allows the stroke length to be longer (basically unbounded) so a larger fraction of the energy can be captured, and less wasted as heat.

Then a multi-cylinder engine basically becomes a computer program, where it's easy to implement fine timing, synchronization, load-balancing and load-prediction tasks using sensor networks.

I'm skeptical that it would be more useful than just dropping the mechanical conversion and it's relatively high losses, and using something like a fuel cell instead.
I just signed up, but once i get to my home page I click practice & it doesn't allow me to start.

I'd like to learn a simple character as soon as I've signed up.
You are correct, sorry. That's tier capital, right?
Getting Cloudy: Clojure on Google App Engine
Lessons In Survival - why elite military forces bounce back faster
20 years of weird Game Boy variations, offshoots, add-ons, and tributes.
All of the utilities that use GNU getopt support using ' -- ' to delimit the end of the parameters:

$> echo 'hello world' > -h
$> cat -- -h
hello world
Bayern München - Barcelona Live Streaming
Bayern München-Barcelona Preview. Are you a Atletico supporter, a UEFA Champions League fan? Then catch the live goals of the 1/4 Finals clash between Bayern München vs Barcelona (20:45 GMT, 14 April 2009).
Printing to standard output doesn't work. The only thing that prints are the values of the last evaluated expression it seems.
I found this comment of Joi's from his post very, very telling:

I was impressed most by the Palestinians who were trying to cause change in Palestine and the Israelis who were trying to change the way Israelis think.

So there is no possibility of Palestinians/Israelis changing the way Palestinians think?
Education.

Given that parents can more freely choose the curriculum, all sorts of novel ways to educate can find a niche.
"The criticism existed for a decade, at the very least. It is true however, that many people are ignorant and weren't aware of "Dubai issue" until now that it's gone mainstream in journalism."

If "Dubai's issue" has been known for at least a decade, then why did Western dignitaries, businessmen and the collective Judeo-Christian/Capitalist/Democratic/Western/etc elite decide to ignore, and instead choose to buy homes in artificial islands, shop, work, ski and golf in the "gulf paradise" that was apparently built with "slave South Asian labor"?

To this day, it's the White Man that's edging the colored laborers in terms of pay:

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/research/salary-survey-report...

It's only when the paycheck bounces that the Westerner comes to realize the error of his ways and cries "Equalité".

To this day, Google, the darling of your new economy and entrepreneurial spirit is trying to get sponsored by Dubai police to filter their search results:

http://www.ameinfo.com/192326.html

That's your "Do No Evil". Your words, as Westerners, are worth nothing.

Pathetic.

[Edit: and yes, I would _love_ to get some disagreeing remarks, along with the obligatory head-in-the-sand down vote. I can't wait to tear someone's feel-good opposition a new one. Hypocrisy has no leg to stand on, and I am more than happy to show you Western hypocrisy crawl on its belly like the wet, spineless worm it is.]
This, though, raises a question. Why is it that the rise in productivity hasn’t had the effects predicted by Marx and Keynes?

For Marx, the part about fishing in the morning was after the end of capitalism. In the interim, I think he said something about the capitalists keeping most of the fruits of all the increased productivity. Is that part looking terribly far wrong?
Hm. Use one letter variable names for scoped variables? Excerpt from lines 92-112:

"* The length of an identifier determines its scope. Use one-letter variables for short block/method parameters, according to this scheme:

a,b,c: any object
d: directory names
e: elements of an Enumerable
ex: rescued exceptions
f: files and file names
i,j: indexes
k: the key part of a hash entry
m: methods
o: any object
r: return values of short methods
s: strings
v: any value
v: the value part of a hash entry
x,y,z: numbers

And in general, the first letter of the class name if all objects are of that type."
So you demand hard stats to back up the article, but when it comes to sweeping, unsupported statements, you have a feeling about it?

I'm left wondering why exactly you would conclude that a "huge portion" of homeschoolers live in isolated communities.
snowballed to destroy Microsoft's reputation and profits. A one bit difference in the OS will hurt their bottom line for years to come.

Have you looked at MSFT's profits recently? http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/10k_fh_fin.html

If that's what happens to the company in one of the worst economies in decades, and they have an OS that has been repeatedly panned.... Wow. I wonder what the company is going to do when the economy does well.
Steam engines used to work like that diagram (without the coils).
Learning from the great newspaper crackup of 1918.
>Put up names and photos [...] of the first people who helped [...]

I like this idea.
Even if one could accept that Amazon cannot possibly plug all vulnerabilities and should not be expected to do so against all attacks, we're still left with the obvious mistake of implicitly entrusting their users with the ability to -- automatically and without proper vetting -- alter whether or not certain items display on certain areas of their site. This fact, given automation via a bug or not, means that the tactic could have been used more maliciously and more covertly to bring additional damage (say, by getting an author's book delisted).

At the end of the day, do I think Amazon really deserved to be "taught a lesson"? No; he could have just contacted them with the exploit and been done with it. Could it have been worse? Most likely, yes. Plus, I found the resulting e-uproar to be quite hilarious. To think, people actually believed Amazon would intentionally and openly discriminate against those groups out of no where... it's very laughable, you must admit.
That is awesome and about time this kind of data gets opened up. Now I'd like the IMF to do the same thing!
I think it uses about 5GB or so - that's my guestimate, I didn't pay attention when I installed last time.
I hardly ever think back.. I'm always thinking about what I am going to do or what I want to achieve.

My memory scarcely goes back further then a week. It tends to make my live a bit empty, I don't remember doing anything.
A geographical breakdown of the data would probably be extremely helpful. I have a feeling there are isolated communities that make up a huge portion of home-schoolers.

You have to read the entire paragraph. He has a hypothesis about the geographical spread of homeschoolers (the feeling you mentioned), and he would have liked some data to test that. That's not the same as making a sweeping, unsupported statement on a feeling.
I installed Windows 7 two weeks ago. It's really, really nice.

I did have some stability problems right after the install: One of my two video cards was a PCI graphics card that was over 4 years old, and NVidia isn't making 64bit Win7 drivers for it. So, after a quick trip to Fry's, I updated the most recent NVidia drivers, and I'm golden.

The OS seems beautiful and well thought out. It's nice to see MSFT get a little religion about design. It ships with a lovely command line/scripting language called PowerShell 2. I've been using Powershell 1.0 for a year or two, and I'm really happy with the updates. The integrated Powershell IDE is actually quite nice.

Did I mention that the OS was free? MSFT's Bizspark program for startups lets you have access to almost all MSFT's software library for 3 years at a cost of $100 at the end of the program.

It actually makes me think about doing Windows desktop development using IronPython + .NET. At very least, I'm definitely going a desktop widget for my web app.
Lubrication, fuel, and cooling systems all work more efficiently when powered by electric motors. The reason is they increase drag unnecessarily at high motor rpms. (But they also cost more).

I think this would be a logical way of making a car engine more efficient. Fuel cells are cool but the infrastructure already set up to refuel and maintain petrol engines is vast and not ready to go away yet.
No, don't hold back Mahmud, tell us what you really think ..
...or when you are ready to start taking advantage of the improved functionality.

This, to me, has the tone of "WTF, why haven't you switched yet? This new thing is shinier and fancier!" only in a nice and polite manner.
I did read the entire paragraph, thanks very much, but that's not what he said at all. If he had a reasoned prediction of a causal correlation, I might agree with you.
Should YouTube pay more? 154 million Rickrolls = £11
I wonder how many false positives and false negatives there are for the monotonic heartbeat test. Could they skip putting the recruits through hell, or do they learn enough from it that it would still be worth it?
What I think is this: People are full of shit, everywhere. I distrust faux-activism, any sort of righteous indignation, and I specifically distrust appeal to morality in the "collective".

No group is better than any other group, long live the individual.

So now, sho, can I roll you your own joint or do you wanna take drags from mine?
This functionality is already present.

If an user wants to enable his "wall" then he can add his contact info on the profile page e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=d0mine
Do not program defensively. (See http://www.erlang.se/doc/programming_rules.shtml#HDR11.)

I cross-referenced to the Erlang documentation, and they provided no other real justification for this rule, other than to say that the burden lies on the caller. Is there a history behind this convention? Is there a considerable benefit, other than more stream-lined code, to coding this way?