skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always viewed this as a plus for tabs. Personally, I think two spaces is too small. If I'm looking at someone's code and it's hardcoded to two space indentation, I'm screwed. But if it's using tabs, I can set it to whatever I want. Some people like 2, some 4, and some 8. I prefer to use tabs to denote logical indentation, and then space for formatting. But not many people agree with me, so I usually just use spaces.
The Startling Effects of Going Vegetarian for Just One Day
I have the strangest memory. I can remember facts, theorems, and all sorts of things that are easy to reason about, but my experiential memory is crap. I find my friends talking about things we did together and I can't participate because I don't remember very well.

However, I'm beginning to suspect it's because I spend too much time thinking to myself and not enough time paying attention to the outside world. Does anyone else have a similar experience?
Enquire: Everything you wanted to know about your C Compiler and Machine.
Hacker Newspaper: reformatted Hacker News
More information about this here:
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html
Giles talks about his motivations and the technology behind this on his blog:
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news...
A lot, I think. Some of the libraries we called had switched to Mango because Rosetta Stone had become too expensive.
What you are saying is not true. If some individuals (like one billionth of Earth population) decided to buy, shop, play golf, etc. in Dubai that does not mean that everyone on Earth collectively ignored/supported/whatever some medieval regimes in middle east.

Generalization is seldom appropriate and certainly not in this case.
Incidentally, we support clojure, jruby, jython, beanshell and javascript in Fiji, with a nice GUI interpreter and the ability to open GUI widgets. The JVM and the publicly available JVM-implementations of all these languages makes it easy.

The lotrepl webpage, though, is a nice spin of the JVM language support. Reminds me of the much-more-powerful http://codepad.org which supports C, C++, haskell, D, Lua, OCaml, and many others.

(For Fiji see: http://pacific.mpi-cbg.de , and in particular http://pacific.mpi-cbg.de/wiki/index.php/Scripting_Help )
Yep. I have sold more than a few licenses to homeschoolers over the years. Beyond just curricular aids there are all sorts of, e.g., compliance needs, planning needs, record management needs, etc etc.

Take note: Homeschoolers are a very diverse bunch with disparate needs. Obviously, an English workbook for a homeschooled 1st grader and an online study planner for a homeschooled 8th grader needing help in math are going to look pretty different.

On the plus side: single decisionmaker (mom, typically). Purchase cycle resembles B2C far more than it does enterprise IT B2B, which is quite common at school districts. Guaranteed to be strongly motivated about education and family time. Less allergic to new technology than public schools (because if you make someone's job redundant, well... great! That means mom is free to do something other than whatever busywork she was just doing.)

These are all nice things to have in a market when you're selling to them.
Twitter Office Tour
Why? What is difference does it make to you if some guy who was born in the US got the job, or some guy who was born in India got the job?

Really, this idea that people should prefer people who happen to be in their "own" "nation" is rediculous, nationalism is rediculous.
Amazon Says Listing Problem Was an Error, Not a Hack
Ah. You've probably just added the entire list at once, where what you want is the "Add starting from..." checkbox. You should delete those (using Select List) or you'll get overwhelmed. We'll work on that UI.

Yeah, App Engine doesn't do SQL. Makes things interesting.

No difference in functionality--everyone is the same right now.
World Bank Open API 2.0 Launched
Liking or enjoying something does not mean it cannot be labor. It is labor as long as I would rather be doing something else.

Anyway, look at the picture Marx painted: "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind." This is dilettantism, a reaction against work. Not many people would find this satisfactory as a life's occupation. This is the image of life a person finds appealing when he is overworked. Marx himself would have found such a life intolerable.
Ah. I think we'll improve the post-signup flow to land you on the vocab lists page.
Replacing the mechanical parts with some more efficient electromagnetic innovation is good and such inventions might help the >110 years old Otto-cycle engines go on a bit more.

However, that was October 2007, and the search towards alternative energy sources & radically efficient engines, still keep growing. By leaps and bounds these days.

This PATENTED innovation still concerns itself with the "pistons" i.e. an Otto-cycle which is doomed. So it's not much of a real innovation.
Right, sorry. But my point still stands. SSD != RAM.
The real reason why developers are awkward
Thanks, swombat. I guess printable drill sheets will go on the feature list, but they sound pretty low priority.

You're right that writing in the screen only isn't going to do anyone's handwriting any prettiness, but so far it looks like knowing how to write each character transfers from one to the other. Perhaps calligraphic style can be learned by interested students on their own?
I have to agree with the thesis of this mini-article. The mind-set of productive coding (for me) is extremely anal and abrasive. The computer doesn't care about niceties, it only cares about correctness, and so to feed it, it is more important to express things exactly and correctly than nicely.

I often find myself being a lot more brutal in my communications if I'm in the middle of, or emerging from, a coding session, than the rest of the time.
The GE Windmill (an experiment in augmented reality)
It's her mind, she can do what she wants with it. She doesn't owe anyone for it.
LG Ke990 Viewty Black Unlocked  At Keepontalking.com
LG KE990, an unproblematic phone launched by LG is out of this world production leaning characteristics. LG Ke990 handset performs in vicinity because it in certainty undemanding to use or handled. It incorporates 3.0 inch touch screen of 240 x 400 pixels.
Amazon begins to re-rank affected 'adult' books; theories swirl [UPDATED]
Ah, yes, you're right. Perhaps I'll also say that there aren't a lot of effective competitors, especially for Chinese writing.

We are making our own set of language data, which is a lot of work but which does help differentiate because students can see we have their textbook.

I always wonder how similar "very similar" is. Of course I'm curious. We haven't seen anything that (we think) is similar yet.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the troll from this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=560075, showdead=yes may be needed) was a troll. LA Times links to this blogger claiming the code doesn't work. But it doesn't seem to be definitive. http://bryant.livejournal.com/672165.html

Weev's explanation is still the most likely candidate but it seems pretty likely Weev didn't actually do it himself; he just piggybacked on the outrage.
github is too new and too unstable in terms of numbers, so far. Last I checked (a few months ago), Ruby was the most popular language according to github, which doesn't jive with any of the other data sources (or my own gut instincts). I've been keeping an eye on it, though. Stackoverflow is another one that's interesting, but currently has too much bias.

Twitter... hrm. Yeah, might add that in the talk section.

HN... I'd feel kind of bad about having an influence on the numbers myself;-)
You can't be serious. You're talking to someone who left academic science to go into software, yet even I don't blithely assume that more than a handful of my colleagues could have done the same thing, even in a good market. Furthermore, you've totally ignored the fact that I wasn't talking about PhDs in English literature (I know quite a few un- or under-employed engineers and scientists, who are neither unskilled, nor lazy) so that you could draw a caricature of the slacker intellectual.

I suppose that you could take the attitude that everyone who isn't picking up the proverbial shovel right now is just "whining", but I think you're missing the point: if we're in a position where our most educated and talented people are digging ditches and serving coffee, then everyone else is well and truly screwed. It isn't "whining" to observe that it's probably not in our best interest as a society to have lawyers and scientists stocking shelves and slinging espresso to make ends meet.
Hey, thanks for posting that... Argh for posting it the one time I took a vacation in I don't know how long:-)

(It's my site, BTW).
Control group vs. Skritter group, track the time they spend spend studying characters specifically, give them a huge quiz at the end of the semester--not enough? You're right that we can't get a large sample, but we can get a large effect because the Skritter method will drastically favor long term retention.
I can't imagine how overpriced their services might be. For example, to read a recent story on "10 Reasons IT should Support iPhone" they charge some $739 (summarized & linked within: http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/04/13/forrester-to...).

Who knows what they charge for their "inside stuff."
OTOH: Charlene Li worked there for some 8 years. They must have some sharp folks.

How to evaluate them/their offerings? That's a toughie.
"What you are saying is not true. If some individuals (like one billionth of Earth population) decided to buy, shop, play golf, etc. in Dubai that does not mean that everyone on Earth collectively ignored/supported/whatever some medieval regimes in middle east."

Except it's not individuals. It's your governments, US and UK, that are propping up every tyrannical backward regime in the Arab world, not to mention minion usurping entities like Israel. The Petrodollar pwns your faux-democracies and you KNOW it :-) 100 years ago the Westerners went into the "middle east" to capitalize on arab oil and take advantage of the illiterate Bedouin. Remnants of this is still seen in Western culture, the caricature of the stupid wealthy arab:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd1D9T1koCI

Alas, that's not how it turned out to be. Leaders of the free world are not wasting time bowing to oil Sheikhs, kissing rings and holding hands (need I link to the recent BO controversy?) Bin Laden's family were escorted out of the USA by the secret service few days after 911. British company, BAE, was caught red-handed in bribery to close a multibillion dolars arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and the Sheikhs threatened dire consequences if the UK government prosecuted BAE and got their way.

The West and its values are a _bitch_ for hire, and a very cheap one at that. And you know what I think of them when they cry foul wrt to "human rights"? I just think they haven't been paid yet to keep quiet :-)

[Edit: P.S. How come I'm the only one here posting links and substantiating evidence? you guys are just content with gut-feeling? ;-]
I was curious to see the numbers for Python vs. Ruby. I had expected Python to be more popular than shown, it seems to range from 2x Ruby to 20% more. I would think a regression for the changing popularity of each language would show Ruby passing Python at some point, does anyone think that will actually happen?

My favorite argument for Python over Ruby was always that Python is more popular but it seems like that will become less true over time.
How do I know if I’ve had a Miscarriage
Recently there has been lot’s of research on women suffering very early miscarriages. Medically spoken you can’t speak of a miscarriage before the second trimester of pregnancy. That is why it’s more referred as an early term miscarriage. Studies on people who have had early miscarriages, especially very early miscarriages proof us more then half of the women have been pregnant before without even knowing.
Isn't that pretty dramatic? Do you think you're a better than average case because you also wrote the program?

The Supermemo technique should be good at keeping the pace up to get to that magic 6000 character level. Once you get a lot more data I would think you would have something worth publishing in journals of education and that could be a very nice PR opportunity for you, showing that your software dramatically improves the time needed to become fluent in Chinese.
Thanks for the positioning advice! I guess I just fell again for the builder's blindness and forgot all I learned from HN about marketing as telling stories to people.

We actually do have some users who put together a kung cu list for us... uh oh!
There's a Google group where people can make suggestions for additions to the site. Objective C is probably a sensible one to include, at this point, though.
I'm not a hacker, but work with a at times very awkward programmer, who often sends out emails which are a monument to pedantry. Reading this article makes me more understanding.
On the flip side, should one be worried if they are working with a programmer who is not awkward, then?
I don't need additional evidence for stuff that is common knowledge. Certainly, what you say about western nations' exploitations in the past (and present) is true. That does not make criticism of Dubai untrue or unnecessary.
Dork Yearbook
Generally I agree, but for the pedantic there are other issues. Tabs at the beginning of lines aren't a problem. But, for example, it's common to see multi-line declarations of, let's say, a hash where each line looks like this:

key <tab> => <tab> value

This might look perfectly fine for someone using 8-width tabs, but it will most likely be screwy for anyone using 4-width tabs or smaller. The tab's location is calculated as the distance where the cursor position modulo the tab width is 0.

E.g. one key is 2 chars long and another is 5 chars long. You tabbed it using 8-width tabs. Looks fine. If someone loads it with 4-width tabs, they see the two lines aligned differently.
Yes, I'm probably the fastest on paper because I avoid some of the quirks with the time tracking system. Our top normal user hit 2000 characters essentially from writing scratch (had some reading knowledge) in 100 hours, but now he's at 2200 characters / 180 hours because of some crazy quest to hit 98% retention or some such.

6000 characters is very extreme. I think 3000 is a more magic target.

I expect we can produce some very sexy stats, once we build a data analysis framework for it. Do you think we could publish just based on our online practice data, without doing a more traditional study?
Putting recruits through hell is training, not just a selection task.
No. The book was the summary of the course notes from the Berkeley/Haas Business School Customer Development class. The stories attempt to add some color to the book.
Thanks, Devin! (Want to get on our front page for saying that?)
Old School Hacking (Jamming proximity fuses during WWII)
I never had bank risk-adjusted capital regulations memorized, and it is much too complicated for me to care to relearn now.

However, the addition of a new liquidity source on the balance sheet in general has no direct effect on the income statement. Borrowing money is not income. Indirectly, it will have an effect through the interest expense owed to the owner of the liability and the interest income earned from the additional cash. However, the net interest income or expense is likely to be much less than the $10 billion face value of the liability.

A caveat: I didn't read through their financial statements, and I refuse to do so unless someone will pay me.
It's all about unit cohesion. The psychology of it is well-understood. People are afraid of failing so are reluctant to push their limits and expose themselves to criticism from their peers. By putting everyone through an ordeal together, everyone sees everyone else suffering, that barrier is broken down. The benefits of this type of training go way beyond the military.
The Wacom definitely preserves the rhythm. I dread the thought of what it would take to do cursive instructionally. Thanks for the writing ideas. I think there's a lot more we can do with it.
Look, I mostly agree with you. I give a pretty short shrift to selective outrage and fickle talking-point moral indignation also. However, the fact remains, regardless of who raises the point, that the Dubai government is complicit in wide-spread, institutionalised abuse of its most vulnerable working class, and they should stop.

Now are you going to argue with that, or perhaps claim that I have no standing due to the crimes of my distant ancestors and/or corrupt countrymen? Because I don't think that makes any difference at all. We consider every case on its merits. What BAE or whoever did was wrong and hopefully they will be held to account. That affects the current topic not a whit.

Beyond that I don't even know what you're trying to say. That the world sucks and people are hypocrites? Well, yes, we can all take that as read, what's next?

"Your words, as Westerners, are worth nothing."

They are worth as much as anyone else's. What was that about the supremacy of the individual again?
5 cm. fir tree removed from patient’s lung / MosNews.com
MazePath, in Java
The comparison's not really meaningful, except to oil-burning electricity plants, but:

"most [internal combustion] engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine#Ener...
Put me with a perfect stranger and give us 80 minutes on the rugby pitch together and it's mind-blowing how fast a deep friendship can form.
Maybe it's just me, but the layout is much worse for a link site. This is not a site with a bunch of articles, it's just a list of links. A simple list is easy to scan and it's easy to spot things you may be interested in. The left right laying out does not improve things in any way, in my opinion.
Anybody know of a plug in to tell if there are mismatched tags on a page? I can't seem to find one for firefox, my iPhone does it nicely in the error console :(
I use Twitter because I don't have enough to say that I can adequately express in a blog. I think Twitter is a fad, but I don't think it's useless. Either way, good luck finding me on Facebook.
I don't experience slow-downs as frequently with HN as I used to, so I can't quite agree with it being faster. Also while it is definitely quick (as it's static HTML) it could also get out-of-date, HNs low score threshold for front-page items means that the front page is updated more often than other sites, e.g. reddit.

However it is a different way to look at things and I'm very interested in learning about Typogridphy (http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/).
Ah, right, I couldn't remember what the level for basic fluency was.

As for publication, I'm really not sure. I think it would depend on you finding someone else's data for Chinese language learning for comparison purposes. There's probably some conference somewhere you can present at, if nothing else.
Pretty cool. I'll try reading that for a couple of days to see how the experience compares to reading HN. Giles, can you add the link for the HN comments as well?
I second that. You could keep the link subtle, for example use the title as the hyperlink to the comment page, but don't underline it on mouseover.
I think zombo.com is the other time you're allowed to do it.
Er... from http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news... (posted by chrislo)

Hacker Newspaper is a superior user interface for Hacker News.

I beg to disagree - see below.

It's more performant, more readable

It's hard to skim.

it doesn't turn visited links damn near invisible for some insane reason

I don't need to read the same thing again. Visited links can be invisible for all I care. I visit them less than 5% of the time.

and it makes it much easier to skim the headlines

No way. Suddenly I have to scroll through screens of large-font nonsense instead of just getting it all within about 1.5 screens.

and avoid getting into useless, time-wasting blather

Comments, to me, are more than 50% of the value of HN. I often read the comments before the article, and sometimes don't bother reading the article at all.

To me, this "reformatted layout" is very, very inferior.
That's how you're taught about lift from an aerofoil in school. It's wrong.
there's a guy doing G-measurements at really small scales here:http://www.stanford.edu/group/kgb/Research/gravity2.html
i'm still astounded at just how good the 1/r^2 relationship has held up for what? 300 years?
20 fresh Twitter icons from famous illustrators, free to use for your blog
“We think you’d also like…” and the Math of Suggestion - Part 2
Dubai Real Estate companies – List of Real Estates.
Here is the complete comprehensive list of Real Estate companies in Dubai. Get all the details of all the Real Estate. You will also find the address & contact number of all the Real Estate Companies, yellowpages.ae has a lot of information about real estate in Dubai.
> Information about the number of unique books written about a language at a particular store does not imply anything about popularity.

Sure it does. Java is more popular than Forth, and as a consequence, there are a lot more Java books than Forth books. Sure, there are various other factors involved, but there is very definitely some correlation. Anyone else remember how many Ruby and Rails books started being pumped out when it started getting popular?

Yeah, sales numbers would be nice too, but over time, editors won't publish books on things that won't sell.

Also, that "particular store" is not just some mom and pop bookstore in Podunkville, it's Amazon.com. It is, last I checked, one of the most popular book stores in the world.
This is the continuation from here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=548584

http://www.gruenderszene.de/it/we-think-youd-also-like-and-t...

As noted in the last round, this is a pretty light introduction to recommendations targeted mostly at only moderately technical folks (the audience of the blog that published it).
And so is Tcl for that matter.
I often read the comments before the article, and sometimes don't bother reading the article at all.

Same here. To me this is essential. The comments tell me quickly if the article is going to be a waste of time.
I don't know if the Firefox Error Console handles it (it detects CSS and JS errors fairly well) but the Web Developer toolbar has a shortcut to validate the current page.
If you're working with IE Firebug Lite is also worth knowing about: http://getfirebug.com/lite.html
How To: Stop procrastination (Dan Ariely)
Shouldn't we make programming more social? Something like programming 2.0. :-)
Seth's Blog: Imminent