skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found myself unable to understand a native-born American English speaker within 75 miles of where I was born and raised.

Inner-city ghetto dialect can be very difficult to understand.

Among educated classes, you'd generally have to get into professional jargon to have similar difficulties (ask a set of biologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to discuss "starting a culture", for one example).
The funny thing about the Netherlands, (or at least 90% of it) is that there is no natural stone to build with. No rocks, no pebbles, no stones, nothing. Just sand, clay and peat. In most places, the bedrock is hundreds of feet below the surface. Constructions were made of wood and mud, because everything else had to be imported.
The page is the product, kind of. I think I have a lot more work to do on making it clear. Thanks and sorry for the confusion!
My knowledge of English is based on 24 series of "The Simpsons" so I definitely agree with the point about watching TV.
> Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks [sic]. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin.

Marks, really? If you want to pose as a scholar, at least learn to spell the names of important historical figures. And this isn't a trivial correction -- because you think his name is Karl Marks, your post will not show up in Web searches of the topic you think you're writing about.
Ah. I guess I am pretty out of touch with the online payment systems world, as none of the international payment gateways work in India from a vendor's point of view.
Shameless plug: This works similar to a script called 'up' which I am the author of: https://github.com/helpermethod/up
Think of it like USA Inc. with every citizen a shareholder entitled to dividends from GDP. It is not free money.

Also, your economics is pants. Giving $1000 to everyone is going to make a lot more difference to someone eating out of dumpsters than it is to Bill Gates. And it isn't about rescuing people by giving them a lump sum and expecting that things will be fine, it is just about giving people enough time for reflection that more of them have a chance to sort their shit out. Life is hard and people are disorganised bastards, if we try and make it a bit easier for people we might get more done.
Having some accidental knowledge of this market:

1) Professional speech therapy is surprisingly inexpensive and mostly sold to parents, who mostly pay out of pocket (as opposed to via insurance, even though it is semi-medical).

2) Lots of professionals pay for accent coaching / accent modification, which can be accomplished by someone with patience, a good ear, good rapport, and no expensive degree. This is a good part-time job for people with an "in" in a particular foreign community, by the way. (I'm personally aware of Japanese executives who spend $X00 an hour for it. Cheap at the price if it gets you the promotion, right?)

3) Professional translators would suggest shadowing, which is taking source material (like a news program, video, etc) and just trying to reproduce it exactly like the original in real time. This is maddeningly difficult the first several times you do it, but you will get better really quickly. (I tape myself doing it, which is useful if you want to get e.g. native feedback or just have a record of progress.)
As far as I know, we've never yet created a cryptographic algorithm that's withstood more than 20 years of scrutiny. We could assume this trend continues into the future, and that any crypto algorithm we do create will be broken within 20 years. This means that encrypting a piece of data isn't some magical eternal protection--it just seals it in a time-capsule that'll "degrade" after 20 years or less. (Sometimes far less.)

But, so far, this property has also been pretty much irrelevant: almost all the things we want to do by passing along a secret are time-sensitive, and breaking the secret 20 years after the fact doesn't really buy you anything. Being able to impersonate the SSL key of Microsoft.com-as-it-was-in-1993 doesn't let you do anything to Microsoft.com-as-it-is-today.

This policy scales down, of course: in military comsec terms, you only need the encryption on operational details to last until the day after the operation is carried out. After that, your "secret" has become "plain" (something quite obviously blew up, etc.) and so the enemy breaking the encryption on the orders won't tell them anything they didn't already realize by hearing the explosion.

This is why the military keeps multiple different kinds of ciphers for different levels of secrecy, by the way: they assume that the more things they use a particular crypto algorithm for--the more signals the enemy gets to intercept that use that algorithm--the more enemy sigint folks will be put to the task of breaking that algorithm. So "top secret" encryption isn't meant to withstand any more scrutiny than "secret" encryption; it's just generally a bunch of orthogonal crypto primitives to the ones in the merely-secret crypto, and only used rarely, for the kinds of orders that need to stay secret long after execution (e.g. covert ops on allies.) Thus, enemy nations will have comparatively little reason to have analyzed and broken it--and breaking the secret-level ciphers won't help them, because of the orthogonal implementations.
It's the same, but only takes 5 minutes to setup. It provides more space than launchrock for content and explanations of your product/service. And it only costs what most people charge per hour/2 hours. I figured they would only need it for 1 month, hence the larger price - but I'm beginning to see that gets people's backs up.

Based on your feedback I think I need to expand and include these differences as part of the landing page. This would also be a useful exercise for people using it - to compare themselves to the competition.

Thanks.
Actually 'I was just following orders' is not a defence. It's every soldiers obligation to question the moral standing of their orders. An illegal order, such as being told to bomb a church/mosque/hospital is invalid and shouldn't be obeyed.

Obviously it's very hard to have the moral courage to accept being bradley manninged (because some orders come all the way from the top), but the obligation to question orders has definitely been established.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/1...

UN accuses Syrian rebels of chemical weapons use

Syrian rebels have made use of the deadly nerve agent sarin in their war-torn country's conflict, UN human rights investigator Carla del Ponte has said.

"According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas," del Ponte, a former war crimes prosecutor, said in an interview with Swiss radio late on Sunday.

"We still have to deepen our investigation, verify and confirm (the findings) through new witness testimony, but according to what we have established so far, it is at the moment opponents of the regime who are using sarin gas," she added.
It's not much cheaper but much more limiting - you no longer can help people out.

It's an example of false economy.
Talking about sex in wheelchairs: Startup ending the stigma
I guess you are right on that point. The apostrophe in "who're" is not enough to steer thoughts away from "professional sexual service provider" ;-)
Having some solid experience with Unity, have to say that it was already great environment for creating 2D applications. Only sprite management and object alignment support had to be reinvented from the scratch, but some very solid addons are present on the market for pretty long time. If I recall correctly, the author of the most popular one, NGUI, was hired by Unity to implement native 2D support.
This is a very significant issue that I think should make Netflix re-evaluate their initial release model.

For me, and for a significant number of attentive television fans, a big part of the experience is reading the nightly discussion post by our favorite reviewer and discussing the episode with everyone in the comments section. I'm part of the very active AVClub community and teasing out what happened with the everyone else who just watched the episode greatly enhances the viewing experience.

For FX's The Bridge whose lead character falls within the autism spectrum, a certain commenter who is also on the autism spectrum writes a few hundred words that illuminates what it's like going through life in a very different way from most others. I have learned a great deal in the process, and it's something that is possible only because one episode is available per week. If they were dumped at once, maybe I'd rush through the whole thing at once, or she would and this exchange would never have happened.
I've noticed that Google Chrome gives me noticeably slower speeds than Firefox, et al.

From high ping. (+100 ms)
To slower download speeds. (8+/- Mbit/s of the advertised 30 Mbit/s)
To slower upload speeds. (2-3+/- Mbit/s of the advertised 5 Mbit/s)
(Oceanic Time Warner Road Runner)

I used to really like Chrome, but after noticing the speed discrepancies I've ceased using it.

I'm not sure if it's due to Google Chrome's FreeBSD implementation vs Windows, but I get similar speeds using Google Chrome, and Chromium, on other Unix-like systems as well.
(Not a Windows user, so I've not tested Chrome/Chromium on Windows.)
Really? okay, thanks. I figured 1 or 2 hours of time as a cost would be fair, but it doesn't seem to go down well. I had also planned on them not using it for more than 1 month. So I guess I'll half it until people stop considering it a joke :)
The connection to counternarcotics is a distraction from the real story here. Legalizing drugs changes nothing. The article points this program was used in routine law enforcement, e.g., bomb threats.

I'd like to know more about the "administrative subpoena" process. How often are innocent people's phone logs dumped? Why not just install cameras in the TVs and be done with it?
Casting pointers to integers isn't all that common to do. When I see that warning, I take it very seriously, because it almost always means I made a real mistake.
Right that's why I ask. Why rewrite it? Was the author bored? Is this a serious project?
I wonder how difficult it would be to write a C compiler (probably using LLVM would make sense) that translates an entire C program into English.
> So, our Turing machine simulator consists of a sequence of `mov` instructions, followed by an unconditional branch back to the start

Newbie question: Wouldn't it be possible to just `mov` the start address of the program into the instruction pointer register at the end of the program?
ha :-) It is really a grammatically-correct gotcha ;-)
The language construct "who're" looks too much like "whore" and too little like "who are" ;-)
The difference is that in Rust you can write unsafe implementation of safe interface. In C++ you cannot specify safe interface. (You can and should document memory management assumptions in C++, but C++ compiler does not enforce such documentations.)
You could be right. For most European cities this wouldn't have a terrible effect, as everything is close together and we have things in walking distance.

The US however will be absolutely devastated.
You couldn't read past an awkward English construction in a post about foreigners learning English?
Not really. I found that shows like Person of Interest, Continuum or even bits of Fringe are best watched in a row. I would say American TV production schedules of 24 episodes a season is the bits that are killing TV watching.

I would definitely not mind 6 episodes per season of high quality entertainmen (aka British TV production schedule).

I wouldn't know about the water-cooler effect because I've never actually experienced discussing with other people last night's TV.
Fixed, thanks (btw, liked the way you put it).
I'm in the same boat as you. I deactivated my FB account roughly 2 months ago and deleted the app from my phone.

I feel a lot happier. I'm not constantly and pointlessly checking FB. I still hang out with friends, I communicate with them via SMS, phone, email, IRC, Twitter, and so on. If someone really wants to contact you, they'll find a way.

I've started to use Twitter more, it satisfies my needs. To improve the experience, I put most organization accounts in a private list and unfollowed them. I also unfollowed a bunch of people I didn't personally know. I don't want my Twitter feed to be a constant stream of advertisements and junk posts (like how my FB feed was). I'm slowly trying to reduce the number of people I'm following to 150 or less.

I did log into FB once since I deactivated my account, and that was to remove a lot of information such as likes, groups, "friends", etc.
SPECULATION: I'd guess that they already have some kind of social security system that costs them a lot plus they would use progressive taxation to get most of the money back.
I think belonging to a church probably helps a lot too, just because I know quite a few Christians from foreign countries and all of them have pretty mild accents. Even the ones who've only been speaking English for a few years.

Language immersion would be the obvious factor there but I have a hunch that group singing plays a big role too.
I cannot tell you how much I agree with this.

When someone in US says good communication skills are important, they think it's racist.

I am from Pakistan. When I tell colleagues to master English, they think I am still mentally under British imperialism.

There is a huge trove of knowledge on the internet which you can only benefit from if you can read/write English.

It was only after I focused on my English that I was able to stay up to date with latest tech, prevent reinventing the wheels and get remote jobs. I could always feel that English gave me a superior advantage over my colleagues.
C++ Mathematical Expression Parser Shootout
A benchmark suite for pitting against each other the best implementations of open source C++ math expression parsers in a fight to the death style tournament.
This is a wonderfully-executed middlebrow dismissal. I hope pg adds it to his detection corpus (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714217)
A benchmark suite for pitting against each other the best implementations of open source C++ Math Expression Parsers in a fight to the death style tournament.

http://code.google.com/p/math-parser-benchmark-project/
the problem is that these people tend to enjoy discussing "this week's episode" with their friends, and that's hard when they've watched the entire season/series.
Sir David Frost, the life that was
Why is WinPhone a failure but OSX a success?
OSX has about 9% market share and has taken a long time to get there.

i don't think it is considered a massive failure

c.f.

Windows Phone which has about 4% of the phone market and growing fast, but is considered by many to be a failure.

why
Well think about how your request plays out.

She stays on her job for the next 2-3 years until they figure out how to automate her job.

Then for the next 30 years she is destitute or working a more menial job until the number of marginalized citizens become a large enough to pass a basic income bill.

Then all the people in control of these automated industries ask themselves, why am I going to pay 20% more tax for these deadbeats when I can move to Ireland or Dubai?
Thanks for that. An enjoyable read. Shame it's so out of date now.
It's a perfectly idiomatic contraction in spoken English, though.
Very relevant on Hacker News.
Swiss/German Band 'The bianca Story' crowd-sources their new album production.
And this explains what's _really_ going to happen. The 90% of their sys-admins who've already morphed into dev-ops staff, are going to get officially re-classified as "not sys-admins" – and will continue to have unfettered access to the VMs, hypervisors, storage pools, hadoop clusters, and password databases that the analysts and management at the NSA use. (Only they'll invent some new rules, so it'll probably become a _double_ capital offense to embarrass the US government, the next Snowden-scale whistleblower will face getting assassinated _twice_…)
Playing in a band isn't exactly a job today, but I can't see how it can be automated. It can become less popular or forgotten altogether, but not automated.
We would need something like a basic income or some other way for people to support themselves without working. It's not reasonable for everyone to survive only by the value of their labor. Especially if automation makes it nearly worthless.
I'm a Groucho-Marxist, so I refuse to be a member of any club that will have me, however it is nice to find something I agree with you on :)
Do you have some implicit requirements, like a degree from elite US schools or similar?
Sir, your English is superior comparing to mine!
Top Tablets 2013
Separating neuromyths from science in education
Exactly. They're like Madonna, or more recently Lady Gaga, they create nothing, but they take themes from the underground and bring them to a mainstream audience (and in doing so become far richer than any of the creators).
Only everyone on Android. Sadly my friends use ios and windows, so we have to wait.
How I stole my way into learning design.
It would seem that it could hurt, judging by the weaponry the beautiful carry.
Yes! All these articles about English knowledge are incorrectly centred in the accent. Accents are not a problem! The problem is the language: the vocabulary, the grammar and the syntax. Of course, if the accent is so strong that nobody can't understand you, you'll be in trouble, but, in general, the main problem is not the accent, it's the knowledge of the language itself.
"It has been going on for a month now." can also be said, using a contraction, as "It's been going on for a month now." which possibly could've easily led to your mistake.
It's not always about rules. Using "who're" can be grammatically correct, but it is bad english.
I actually think Chuck Norris is pretty bad-ass. Few people achieved as much as him in martial arts.
I have some excellent feedback on the site, thanks everyone who signed up and left it.

One idea is to charge $99 for unlimited ideas/landing pages per month, which I really like. Then maybe $15 for one page.

Also, thanks to "ifthesourceofthispageisanexampleoftheshityouwillpush_nothanks@lame.com" who simply says, "Lame". :)
Well they should be proud of their origin and heritage. But here is a story - I was studding telecommunications in the university. One of the things we learned while working with A29 (purely analogue switches from end to end) was that noise and latency were very important.

Latency was not a problem until it was below 100 ms then up to 500 ms it gradually decreased the quality of the conversation but not in significant way. Now at the 500ms mark something funny happened. The person thought that the other party had not heard what he said and begin repeating it while the beginning of the other person answer begin his phone. The comprehensiveness of the conversation decreased dramatically.

It was the same with noise - from a point on it was terrible. I think that accented speech could be considered as noise.

A friend of mine was doing project with Huawei a few years ago - the Chinese team was with strong accents and he was with very strong Eastern European too. They had trouble communicating in English.
Asgard and Hubot: Simplified AMI deployment to AWS
This is hardly a typical environment. All code would be challenging, even commented code. Excessive commenting would be necessary: write the program again in English.
> Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more.

What in the case that the person doesn't want to get paid more? They can live comfortably enough on what is given to them and value the free time more than the extra money.

What would be the way to deal with this?
If you've never read this article in Jacobin magazine, I think you'd quite like it: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/
The Problems with Incubators, and How to Solve Them
I wouldn't say "incorrectly centered" -- they're not referring specifically to the accent, they're just using it as a metronym for "all the things people who have a native language get wrong about a non-native language", a concept-cluster which doesn't really have a proper name of its own. Someone who says "where they doing" is usually referred to as having an "accent" in this sense.
This seems to violate the spirit of the law if not the letter. Still, kudos.
Well, they wont have to take up prime real estate. You could move them somewhere cheaper to build, and in a dense arrangement.
Sorry I was really tired when I wrote that, I meant Cambodia not Indonesia.
If I didn't already know English, I wouldn't have been able to learn programming. My curriculum in university has been largely in English.
The propaganda against our differences is disturbing me. AFAIK, there's no "accent-free" dialect of any language. If some people can't understand you because of your accent, and if it's important to communicate with them you can, of course, push yourself a bit as long as they do the same. If nobody can understand you because of your grammar, than that's another story.
Nah, SF rent is overpriced. You'd have to be pretty thick to think that you're getting a good deal.
The worst for me has been sitting thousands of miles away working on a VDI, watching the screen refresh line by line with every change in code. We spend 8 to 10 hours for 3 hours of productive work. :-(
The work Jeff Dean seems to be doing is _excellent software engineering_. 'Software Engineering' here I would define as 'the application of computer science'. Which is not a far fetched definition, although many dismiss it when the topic is raised.

He does that very well, applying computer science in an engineering perspective and creating very good/performant/useful products. There's a lot of credit in doing that well.
Operation: Reinforcements
From US guy PoV: Gee, this guy does the same work as I do, but he's paid 5 times less... something is wrong with our company.

There are reasons US guy won't want to live in India, right? So the salary should compensate at least some part of those reasons (I mentioned in another comment here).

Most people with jobs from poor countries have to support way many family members or relatives than that US guy.
I would suggest three things (apart from the obvious 'speak in english with others'):

#1 read english books. translate every unknown word from dictionary. the words improve vocabulary; the sentences improves grammar.

#2 watch english movies with english subtitles. this helps greatly in understanding the accent. plus english in movies is a hell lot easier than the one in books.

#3 talk to yourself in english. there was a period in my life where all my thoughts were in english. it makes you comfortable with the new language.

ps: these are just general points - your english is pretty good!
Thanks for the info. How inconvenient is it to swap out waste and new water? How does that work in the first place?
That's how I learned English. Not in school but because I was programming and my native language was lagging a couple of decades behind when it came to programming materials and books.

And once you use it for programming, it's logical to use it for asking questions on the Usenet (then) or internet forums (today), and reading papers on interesting subjects, and communicate with your peer programmers or contacts around the world. By then you realize how much you would lose in any translation which makes you want to read any novels written in English too and watch films without subtitles. And eventually you land your first job where you also need to speak English in addition to your native language, and maybe in your second job English is the primary language of the company and you only use your native one for chitchatting locally over a cup of coffee. Roughly, by that time, English has slowly become the second native language in your life.