skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the article is quite obviously talking about verbal communication

How is that "quite obvious"? The article plainly talks about "communication" in general, not "verbal communication" in particular. That may well be the author's intent, but that is not what is written.
Perhaps you should read "Why it's expensive to be poor." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619110
Tweetmeme is Growing Ridiculously Fast: 20% of Twitter's Uniques
How did this get on the frontpage? Only two upvotes and it's nonsensical.
It's very interesting to see a study with negative effects of multilingualism. I experience this a lot and never even considered it could partially be caused by knowing multiple languages. I'm extremely curious to see how much the effect increases as number of languages does (as far as I'm aware this is fairly common for Europeans)--hopefully it's a diminishing effect!
It's bemusing to browse these as experiments, but is by no means newsworthy. After looking at his source I felt oddly compelled to share it with you guys.
What I resent is that English is not my first (and preferably only) language.
This is why rapid switching between two native languages is the easiest way for coordinate bilinguals to talk (listen to Latin American folks on the NYC subway). No tip of the tongue there, and always the most apt expression at the right time.
Will this also allow you to preset some about:config settings?
What I find similarly odd about bilingualism is that often I can't seem to translate one of the languages I speak into another. I don't have any problems expressing my thoughts in whatever form in either language, but converting already thought stuff from one language to the other is extremely hard.
Maybe this stems from the way I learn languages (I've never been able to relate to the classroom-way of teaching; learned everything from talking to friends / reading prose in the foreign language - I don't think about which language to speak in, it just comes naturally, maybe best seen by the fact that I can dream in 3 languages, depending on what language I've spoken most on that particular day), so it might be hard to reproduce so you guys probably can't see what I'm saying, can you. :/
Author of this blog has just published a book on business models:

http://business-model-design.blogspot.com/
Unless these numbers are from a crystal ball and apply to circa 2015, it proves nothing about the relevance of Ruby skills a decade from now.
> I have resorted to filler sentences or repeating myself as my brain searches frantically for that right word.

I have gotten into the habit of first declaring what the word starts with, sounds like, and approximates. This lets the listener help me out. Then I usually use a metaphor, which is often inappropriate: "how much groping in the dark did you have when you [started using this analysis software]?" Then I get weird looks but you end up grabbing their attention, sometimes they find the word for you, and other times the vocabulary comes back to you a few sentences later.

In the above example, I didn't find the word, but thankfully the point made its way across. It was further weird because this was at an MRI scanner, so somebody was literally "groping in the dark."

I also remember embarrassingly forgetting the word for "fly" (bug), pointing around in the air, and said, "the, the, the, thing." I use pronouns lavishly too: did you cut a hole in the thing to put the thing in the thing? --> did you cut a hole in the wood block to put the slab's protrusion into the wood block?
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It's not very smart of him to do that, because you can bet half the discussions about the article will focus on it and completely miss the point.
Sandi Metz: SOLID Object-Oriented Design (Video)
Many great programmers are excellent communicators.

In fact, in my experience there is a positive correlation between being a great programmer and being a great communicator (especially in writing). Being able to clearly understand a concept, break it down into its component ideas and their interrelationships, and then explain that structure to someone else is very similar to being able to program well.
sigh, slashdot humor, long time not see.
He's comparing old languages to a modern language.
They completely miss a couple huge segments of bloggers, those who write because they want to write regardless of audience, and those who write for a small social network such as family or friends.

I believe they also make an unspoken presumption of posting regularity as a metric for everyone, when in fact many bloggers are far more casual about posting.

Then there are statements like, "So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?" This makes little sense unless the activity of blogging is simply for commercial success. I really don't think that's a well-meaning attempt at understanding the wide community of blogging and the nature of on-again off-again bloggers who make up a large percentage.

This includes myself. I've had several blogs, and currently I don't blog. None of my blogs was a "failure". At each new juncture I had found a new voice in my writing and my previous work was no longer of interest to me to have out there. This is not the experience of all bloggers, it's just my experience.

I expect to blog again soon. But with new social networking mediums, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, each with quite a different flavor and audience, I find that some things that previously would have made a blog entry make more sense as a twitter, or are more appropriate on Facebook, and so on. The article almost, but not completely, misses this complexity to social networking.

It is also my completely non-scientific impression that the New York Times more frequently contains a negative take on blogging in general. It would be interesting to analyze that and see if it's actually true or not, it just seems to be the case as far as I can tell.
FDIC Will Cap Interest Rates For Weakest Banks In 2010
thank you. pinchmedia looks promising. will check them out
Ruby's Enumerable in JavaScript
Apple may have been inspired in part by their experience with XGrid [http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/technology/xgrid.html], based on the NeXTSTEP application Zilla [http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/macosx-talk/2000-Se...], and perhaps by PDO (Portable Distributed Objects) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP]. I mention these somewhat obscure influences in response to your grid observation. Obviously there are several other (probably more immediate) influences on GCD and OpenCL as well (LLVM, OpenGL, various academic research on parallelized programming, etc.)
Languages are keys to cultures; forsaking them all in favor of one is not only silly, but a self-imposed intellectual and emotional exile.

Try to love whatever culture and language your parents gave you, for starters, regardless of their utility or perceived social stature.
Essay Questions from China's "Brutally Long" College Entrance Exam
Popovich is a super repo man, one of a handful of specialists who get the call when a bank wants back its Gulfstream II jet from, say, a small army of neo-Nazi freaks.

Anyone wonder why the bank is lending money for private jets to neo-Nazis?
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I always thought the main strike against English was the ungodly spelling. (Or maybe just having a lot of phonemes?)
I learned three languages when I was younger (Persian first, then English and Spanish at the same time) and can swap into them instantaneously. However, the languages I learned later (Portuguese and now some smatterings of Chinese) require me to stop, think, and listen for about 10-15 minutes before the language takes over in my mind, and I may converse more fluidly. This contrast alone is quite interesting for me.
choose an easy to use wiki rather than [[[]]]] grammar...

Try http://www.geniuswiki.com
Marketing budget. Most of the money spent is on the marketing. Surprised that all that marketing and advertising money worked?

Many good films never get seen because of low marketing budgets - and are even not allowed good distribution.

These businesses with offices disguising themselves as 'studios' are the leeches.
Research support unit pay: 'unreal' or 'not out of line'?
Wow, that explains why this happens so often with me and my family. We're all bilingual and quite often can't think of the right word.

However, if we are just speaking amongst ourselves its a lot easier because usually while you can't remember the word in the language you should be using, you remember its synonym in the other language.
The situation is that artists get ripped off by business people.

Becoming more of a business person (in a lot of cases) destroys the art that person makes.

In Australia there are new laws for collectable artwork. Where the original artists will always get a percentage of the work from every sale. As the work gets resold, always for a higher value, the artist gets a cut each time.

Good for artists, ok for collectors, good for government controlling artists.

To counter your argument - the market does not get reduced - but the artists also get a cut.

I'm not sure of all the sociological research that went into this policy, but it seems very sensible. I also know that it is backed up with scientific research - so you can look up the reasoning behind it.

I know some of the research was that many artists sell their work for almost nothing, and the collectors make most of the money. This has been going on for a long time. Consider Van Gogh who lived in poverty for all of his life... even though his work has generated many millions of euros. If this law was in place, he would have perhaps been able to share in some of the value his work produced(money wise).

Places like Sweden and Australia are way ahead in many areas socially compared the the US. Especially in the area of copyright, and helping artists. Sweden is a world leader socially, so paying close attention to what they do, and the scientific research behind their social policies is worthwhile.

Even though this seat is a political victory, it shows a deep understanding of the issues by the Swedish people - who are a very well educated population.
You registered a new account to tell us about Google? Thanks, but I think most of us have heard of it already.
I really thought that they'd make versions of these languages that would compile to Dalvik bytecode, so that people weren't restricted to writing Java Android apps. Makes sense given it's a custom VM, right? Guess we're halfway there now.
Innovation is defined as taking an existing idea and improving it.

Copyright inhibits innovation by putting up legal barriers to innovation.

This is the main reason why copyright is bad for innovation.

Making original ideas is a good thing, but improving existing ideas is much more common, and useful. Copyright fails to help this, and indeed places significant blocks to this.
Pretty simple - a 30 minute phone survey for a $25 Amazon gift certificate is a lousy deal. Do you really need 30 minutes of questions? You are going to restrict yourself to developers who have a high tolerance for boredom.
Related to this is another key performance technology in Snow Leopard, OpenCL: http://images.apple.com/macosx/technology/docs/OpenCL_TB_bri... .
Things A Venture Capitalist Will Never Say
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I just love this thing. It's completely perfect and perfectly complete.
What about Engadget? Or are only web 2.0 sites considered tech anymore?
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/techcrunch.com+mashable.com...
You won't "take a hit", but you will "fail to utilize the hardware as efficiently as you could". Both GCD and OpenCL have their roots in open extensions to C. Both offer potentially significant performance gains for certain types of tasks. If enough developers find it advantageous to use either blocks or OpenCL, these technologies will likely show up on other platforms.

Regarding the scheduler, I'm not sure enough details are known outside of Apple at this point to know what the results would be on Snow Leopard. Your milage would obviously vary when porting to some other OS. It's easy to imagine that running a PThreads app might hog some cores, or be punished inappropriately by the scheduler. These things can happen when running more than one threaded app on a system today, without GCD. This behavior, even if not documented, should be relatively easy to explore with some simple demo apps, though, without porting your entire app.

And, uhm... you will need to refactor your application to take advantage of the new API. (Was that a trick question?) Apple's guidance indicates that you can make modest changes for big gains by focusing the refactoring effort on the parts of the app that do the most computationally. For some apps this can be a small amount of work for a large gain, particularly if you can take advantage of OpenCL as well as GCD.
How is this comment worth 6 points? I mean, sure, it answers a question and all, but it's not very insightful or thought-provoking. What exactly is this "pg" guy bringing to the table here?

Is there something I'm missing?
I've discovered, that communicating sth to "normal" people isn't more difficult because of programming. But it's sometimes less understandable what somebody is trying to say, when I'm in "strict thinking" mode.

It's the same with switching between natural languages - I've once met foreigner in Poland in place where I wouldn't think he can be. He was talking to me in English for more than a minute before I've recognized that I must mentaly switch to English to understand him :)

I think social contacts are difficult for programmers, because programming does not require listening to anybody.
Hmm, allow me to elaborate.

1) In his point about DRY, he speaks of humans not remembering very well. It seems unlikely that he would be referring to written communication here, since there would be no need for memory on the part of the audience. It's pretty much why writing was invented. To implement DRY for speaking.

2) Let people be people -- let them be vague and a little incorrect -- listen more for the gist of what they're saying than the exact terminology.

Be a compassionate speaker, a compassionate listener. Embrace the 'all too human' aspects of the strange bipeds you interact with.

"Listening" and "speaking" tend to be used to refer to verbal communication.

3) References to real-time, in-the-flesh actions and reactions, i.e. "yelling", "watch as the eyes glaze over" and "look at us with that 'freak' expression".

I do agree that if we subscribe to a literal interpretation of the post, then these points may not be conclusive, but then that would just prove the OP's point that us programmers find it hard to deal with ambiguity in communication. I don't know if that was a conscious intention on his part, but if it is, it's quite clever, especially given the reactions I mentioned in my first comment.

Of course, there's also the possibility that I am wrong, in which case, I've read too much into his post. :)
Tutoring company pilfers logo from Linux distro
IME, it's phonology that has been the most pain, not syntax. I think English as a second language students my just benefit from singing lessons, to make them more conscious of their voice and its production. Once you can hack your voice, you will be able to hear better, and then pronounce better.
the fall part wasn't that improbable.
They interpreted the last letter this way: "It had become obvious that we were dealing with a person unwilling to comply with our request."

I'm not so sure, however. I interpreted it as being a step away from an offer to change the logo while still saving face.

Edit: I've sent this opinion to them; maybe it will have an effect?
Proposed one-way trip to Mars complete with a Big Brother style reality show.
Exhaustive feature/spec comparison of Palm Pre and iPhone 3G S.
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I'm going to assume you're serious. Pg is Paul Graham, founding partner of Y Combinator, so he is extremely qualified to answer questions about what YC will or won't fund. Simple answers to questions always do well here karma wise and they don't always need to be thought provoking, especially when a simple "yes" is enough.
The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S. - BusinessWeek
"Garfield, Far Side, ..."

That juxtaposition is freaking me out.

There's a head asplodin' just waiting to happen.
I found Q2 section 3 about "An American peasant, so poor that he had no food to eat, was forced to go to odd jobs for a local rich person" somewhat funny/interesting. I would have like to see the questions associated with that prompt.
Microsoft’s Ozzie Says Cloud Services Will Yield Lower Margins - BusinessWeek
China Tries a New Censorship Strategy - BusinessWeek
That's really irrelevant to the point at hand (as well as rather speculative.

The disfluencies that this study looks at regards rarely used words. Fluent casual speech isn't the best place to look for such disfluencies anyway, so i don't know that listening to people on the subway is a good demonstration.

Also, while code-switching may be a way to get around tip of the tongue experiences, it is a considerably more complicated phenomenon, and there is likely to be a variety of other factors and considerations to take into account when studying code-switching.
I agree, they were at most 2 more e-mails (and a law firms letterhead away) from getting it removed.
"	Learn commercially valuable skills"

I'm betting Java, but it could be C#.
Well, that sort of blows the raison d'etre for Hecl's Android port out of the water, but it's really cool to see nonetheless, and one of the reasons why Android is a great platform for those who want to hack on stuff.

Actually, I think Hecl will still be useful for some things: it compiles directly to dalvik bytecode, whereas these are native processes which are launched/managed/interacted with via jsonrpc.
The EuroLisp Symposium and the Future of Common Lisp
I am suspicious that this macro would not be necessary in a language with better libraries. For example, this code:

(zap [firstn votewindow* _] (uvar user votes))

In Python you wouldn't need a macro for this. You could just write

del uvar(user, votes)[votewindow:]

or

uvar(user, votes)[votewindow:] = []
ASK HN: Illegal Book/Mp3/* Downloads.
Hello HNers,

Today I stuck in an argument with one of my good buddies about Illegal book downloads. The guy believes that illegal book downloads are okay.

He refers to it as Borrowing a book from a library. But my point is that libraries have certain restrictions which an illegally downloaded e-book does not give us.

Then he said the deleting the book after referencing is OK. I don't agree with that because it doesn't help proving his "library theory" in anyway.

Then he asked me why I always refer to a physical library. Then my argument was that true online libraries do not give a complete copy of the book to download. Maybe they just let read it online but not save it locally in anyway (not in an easy way at least). I gave Google books as a close example. SO he said he would rather prefer Google style than than downloading a whole book. But then again Google do not give the whole book to read. That's how it differ from an online library & Google has a reason for that. "The complete content has a value".

I know there are lots of ACTUALLY free books out there. There the thing is the authors are so great not to expect money for whatever time/effort they put in creating content. But if the author expect for money & we bypass the paying step in anyway, I believe it's illegal.

This is the case with the software that has a price & software that are zero cost. If the author expect money we should give him/her. But it's always good (err.. GREAT) to have DRM free digital copy.

What do you dear HNers think about this argument?
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Good call.

The speculation isn't unfounded though, although it isn't appreciably strong here. Word choice comes substantially faster when the most efficient expression can be chosen without any self-monitoring. It's quite plausible that in this case you'll find less instances of tip of the tongue.

While the experiment here relied on rare words, and I'm just one data point, but I get ToT probably once for every 2000 words I say. When rapid code-switching is consciously available, I can quickly avert it because I have fast access to good candidate words, which reduces the apparent occurrence.

If ToT is taken as a speech disfluency from unresolved competition for word access, you could mitigate it simply by creating an imbalance between the signal strength such that winner takes all (in which case the subway example does demonstrate something useful, although as you point out, the variables are jumbled up). Somehow I got a deja vu just now. This has been discussed here before, or somewhere, or what I am writing is coming from something else I have read...

I also realize that ToT cannot be reduced to simple competition, but it is also plausible that slow access and competition manifest similarly, i.e. obstructed speech flow, while partial semantic access. WEAVER++ tried to explain this and I liked it very much (obviously I don't know what's state of the art now).
Honk if You Think It’s Over
They got 0.9% in Germany, which, given that Germany contains almost nine times the population of Sweden, is even more, although less impressive.
I actually liked the article because I used to be confused about the fact that anyone would choose this limited protocol over RPC but I'm starting to get it.

I personally will still stay away from it. I'm sure that if I implemented RESTful system, eventually I would need some special functionality that would force me to either emulate RPC over REST (what was the point implementing it in first place if I do that) or end up with 2 interfaces - one for REST and other for RPC, making things confusing.
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I agree, the second email sounds like the fellow is trying to backpedal while still saving face. I think he is waiting for Dusty (the complainant) to list demands.
It was done with e-gold until recently. My guess is that now they use other online currencies that are out of US jurisdiction.
He really operates out of Florida? That seems kinda nuts.

The guys in Cryptonomicon did it better- at least it was in a jurisdiction where enough money buys a lot of immunity.