skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More entertaining than informative I'm afraid. Project Lead v.s. Guy Who Uses. I don't mean that as a criticism of Rob, I just don't think it's fair or expected for him to have the depth of knowledge in AngularJS that Tom has with Ember. I'd have done worse.

I know it's a pain to have to evaluate all of these frikin' frameworks all the time just to get moving, but I'd really recommend building a non-trivial app in both ember and angular.
Making web more fun with AI
Yeah, the reform of Vuk Karadžić[1] few centuries ago has made wonder for ex-Yugoslawien languages that made them truly phonetic. One simple rule: "Write as you speak, speak as you write" allowed children to be fully literate as soon as they learn the alphabet. Of course, there are edge cases where something is written differently than pronounced, but are edge cases that accounts for less than 0.001% of the words, and can safely be ignored.

If I could change anything in English, or German that would be introducing this same set of writing "rules" as in Serbian or Croatian. I would even go so far as to replacing all europeaan alphabets with phonetic transcriptions[1] that I used to see in older English dictionaries or something similar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karadzic#Linguistic_reform...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
Wouldn't this favour the short smartarsery that's one of the not-done things hereabouts?
"'you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into'?"

Don't forget that this applies to you as much as anyone else. None of the rebuttals presented by the author of the "faq" are that strong as far as I am concerned. You would say that is because I have irrational beliefs and I would say that it is because the author completely ignores (as far as I can tell) the corporatocracy that big government enables; uses empirical evidence of phenomena from a big government environment and instead of attributing these phenomena to that environment, uses them as evidence against libertarian philosophies; and in general uses arguments that aren't particularly compelling.

Now the truth is probably somewhere in the middle but I think it is important for you to at least acknowledge that your dismissal of other ideas or beliefs as lies can probably be attributed to bias as much as the converse. In which case, "stigmatizing such fervent belief in comforting (to the believer at least) lies as childish.
" is not a very good idea.
A colleague of mine once employed a young woman as a secretary/admin assistant. One day her family advised him that they had arranged a marriage for her and as she was no longer living with them she and her new husband would both qualify for unemployment benefits. If my colleague refused to pay her the equivalent of two unemployment benefits (after tax) she would resign. The next week she did.

Perhaps we should think of unemployment benefits and minimum wage laws as a subsidy for technological progress, in particular automation and artificial intelligence.

Low-wage workers are competition for automation, at least in the early stages when a new technology is just getting off the ground. Remove them, and there is likely to be more demand for technological solutions to do what they used to do. In the long run, everybody wins by giving private enterprise an incentive for more automation.
English is a Germanic language and I would argue that it is particularly difficult for Native speakers of Romanic languages to pick it up.

I'm German and my experience has always been that English is a very simple language and yet versatile enough to allow for very nuanced expression.
I suspect a lot of the problems with British English come from how many different influences we had in the origins of the language. It doesn't really make much sense because it's a weird bastardisation of Germanic, Latinate, and Celtic languages (with a few choice French words for good luck). The pacing when speaking it can be pretty wonky because the words don't really flow together like they do in other languages.

I don't really understand the whole uproar over people's grasp of English. If someone's less proficient, or slower to respond; I wait patiently or simplify my own English to make it easier to understand. I'm genuinely impressed by how much effort everyone else puts in to learning the language that I can't hold someone's skill in it against them. The best I can achieve in another language is to describe how my car broke down in German.
omg u r teh next steven job?

What really is the point of this article? Can someone wake me up when we are ready to let go of this passive income bullshit, worshipping the 'entrepreneur' as someone who can pull money out of their ass crack by finding and statistically needling their way into some exploitative niche and start focussing on things which have real social purpose and meaning and value to their creators and users?
Please make sure to follow up with a blog post about how you coped with being on the front page of HN.
like 99% of all the headlines that proclaim to do/learn something in a relatively short time period there is always something that is not counted.

Learn to write apps in 10 minutes! here the source code for an hello world, to learn anything else it will only take the rest of your life.
He means the last commit on sparkey
"Well, honestly, drugs should not be legal to sell and to purchase."

Care to cite any reasons here? See, when it comes to cocaine, Congress has not revisited the debate since people said these sort of things:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70F1EFA3A5A1...

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/negro_cocaine_fi...

Yeah, you read that correctly. Black guys who use cocaine become more accurate with a gun and will attack white women! Also, Jews are selling it. Cocaine also makes it nearly impossible to kill a black man using a standard issue handgun, so let's upgrade the caliber.

"Have you seen what (crack) cocaine does to people?"

Yes: I have seen the children of the wealthy doing cocaine at college parties, then going on to get high-paying jobs on Wall St. Truly ruinous, truly!

How about we drop the boogeyman and drop the anecdotes and start citing some sources? You claim that cocaine destroys people; let's see the proof.
"Correlation is not causation" started useful but has become less useful the more cliched it became. And OP is right that it's particularly useless among people who've already heard it.

The whole reason people felt the need to mention "correlation is not causation" is that correlation is evidence of causation. Some people seem to think this catchphrase means the two are unrelated which is also false.
The author mentions that he spent a lot of time using English without ever listening to it. A big problem is the way English( or languages) are taught or learnt that causes these problems.

One trick/method that I used while perfecting my German accent was shadowing that I found in a lanaguage forum somewhere. I took a book that I understood in the target language, in this case it was Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links; bought the audio book ( Mord auf dem Links), then repeated after the reader at pace without looking at the text. It was tiring mentally sometimes, but it helped greatly in pronunciation and aural comprehension of the target langauge.

I did the same for movies. I remember getting the Matrix in German. Technical writing is different I guess but I hope this helps someone, at the very least, in acquiring an idiomatic proficiency.
It might also be interesting to rate-limit commenters (perhaps based on their previous upvotes per comment).
If you are new to HN, you may only post one comment per week.
The "better" (as measured by karma) your comments are, the more comments per week you may post.
This might make commenters consider whether their comment is really so important that they sacrifice another opportunity to comment in the future.
To me the key passage was this: I looked into his eyes, and realized, with overwhelming empathy, that this guy, who'd worked hard all his life, and who was a really good, conscientious fellow, was hanging by a frigging thread, and had lived his entire life with one foot in the abyss. No resourcefulness, no connections, no education. Crappy genes, crappy family. And none of it was his fault. He was truly doing his very best with what he had.

The basic goal of trying to maximize individual liberty is certainly sound. But we have to remember that as a species we evolved as groups, not just as individuals. The evolutionary fitness of a group is in part a function of how well its members act as though they're all in the same boat, as opposed to every man for himself. (As just one example, a basketball team that works together will usually beat a squad of prima donna ball-hogs. See Robert Wright's book Non-Zero for more details in a popularized format.)

In addition, we humans are inherently flawed -- to one degree or another:

+ We cling to easy answers, even when they're wrong.

+ We seek immediate gratification, ignoring the long-term downside.

+ We want to be free to do whatever we want and for "someone else" to clean up any resulting mess. (Think of the teen-aged boy who just drops his clothes on the floor, knowing that later his mother will pick them up. Or the banker that writes "liar loans" knowing the government will bail them out. Or the business that pours its waste into the local sewer system by night.)

So we humans still need some regulation, with an eye toward the longer term.
Sketch Mirror: Preview your iOS designs directly on your devices
Antithesis sounds close to Anti thesis in English (As opposed to American English)
The secretary might still have quit anyway - it probably depends on the level of BIG. Ending the pointless simulation of a job search for your acquaintance doesn't require a BIG, and a BIG alone probably doesn't represent the optimum solution either.

Those points don't mean that a BIG is bad, but since people tend to only see one side of an issue after they've made up their mind on it (whether rationally or emotionally), I thought I should bring it up.
A technical explanation of how the map is generated can be found at:
http://blog.paperscape.org/?page_id=2 .
And here are two introductory blog posts by Sean Carroll and Physics World:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/08/17/a-map-of... ,
http://blog.physicsworld.com/2013/08/16/welcome-to-the-arxiv...
Yes.

Before HN, Reddit.

Before Reddit, K5.

Before K5, Slashdot.

Before Slashdot, Usenet and Listserv.

Before Usenet and Listserv, every community ever.
Taking Inventory: My Love/Hate Relationship with Dell
Bell Labs was a part of a government-approved monopoly (AT&T).
The Silent Power Of The NSA (1983)
You are free to any speech, so long it doesn't contain any videos of soldiers gunning down children from a helicopter, or you do not "encourage" copyright infringement, or post how to circumvent a lock on property you have bought, or enables gambling, or if it might look like one of the forbidden form of porn if you tilt the head on the side.

Then its DNS takedown time. Either by making sure that resolvers will lie, or removing it from the Internet on a US "because we say so" basis. No judge, no jury, no trial. Those stuff is only for "real" things, not virtual "sites" on the Internet.
How To Infer Topology
Oscar Wilde is the original author of that quote. It was the answer to a question posed to him ("What's a cynic?").
I remember my interview at Spotify where we discussed how to implement thumbnail display service in the most effective way. What we actually came to is something along the lines of this library.

I always like it when a company focus on their real problems in job interviews and manage to avoid the brain teaser trap. That way you can have a feeling about the job that you are going to work on there, and see if you really like both work and people.
7 SASS features you should be familiar with
Military comsec basically has to assume the implementation will be immediately made available to enemy sigint, since they build crypto implementations into things like secure phones which can just be stolen off a dead soldier and pulled apart.

The implementations can be upgraded in the field when a flaw is found, as with any firmware (and frequently an implementation will be cycled out for a different one even if it is thought to be unbroken, just to put any time that's been put into breaking it to waste.) But enemy governments are precisely the people with enough resources, and reason, to want to break entire algorithms.

The thing is, it is a hard problem--so they only bother to break algorithms where they know they'll get big rewards for doing so ("top secret" doesn't usually mean more valuable to enemies, after all; usually it just means "fewer people should know this ever happened.") A standard secure phone will have all the Suite A and Suite B ciphers[1] built into it, but since so many more transmissions will be using Suite B ciphers, there'll be comparatively less strategic advantage in cracking the currently-used Suite A cipher before it's cycled out for the next one. So Suite B ciphers sometimes do get cracked during their "useful shelf-life" and have to be immediately switched, while Suite A ciphers are usually left alone.

---

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_A_Cryptography, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_B_Cryptography
They used it in japan. It's probably economic. Why, because you could:

1. Outsource the job.

2. Use dead times more efficiently/share loads.

3. Now it's easier to automate more stuff. For example, after hearing you're request , the lady could give you a map+text+video explanations and move to the next customer.
Some can make more by taking informal jobs, which they don't have to report. With that, they are locked into a local maximum. And I've heard anecdotes from social workers of people who do prefer taking the "free" money to working. When you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of families, there will always be a few outliers.
I was born in America, raised learning English, and to this day, my written skills are nowhere near perfect. Nor are my verbal skills. I am constantly writing and rewriting sentences because the intangibles of communications, such as tone, style, prose, format, are extremely important and often overlooked. Not to mention, my grammar after 29 years is still far from perfect.

I've attempted and now partially understand, read, write, and speak Spanish, Swedish, German. Having experienced all of the intricacies of other languages, I don't envy those who are far behind me trying to make it in an English.

That being said, what's the lesson learned, or probably more apt - what's the solution? This is why firms like YC exist, is to provide support to founders that lack all of the acumen (and trust me, there's a lot) that is required for 21st century business leaders. There's often a meta discussion here on HN about the "technical co-founder vs business co-founder". This is one area where having a business co-founder with great communication skills is a great reason to partner up with that person. Unfortunately those who do lack communication skills often find it difficult to understand those who do have good communication skills.

I wish I could help somehow...
Heh, I grew up speaking English and still had that problem just because my reading vocabulary surpassed the vocabulary in usage in the country where I was.
Why do these hslda articles keep showing up on HN? This is the second one in as many days. I'm not questioning their value, just their placement on the homepage of Hacker News.
This is very well articulated and at least partly rings true for me. However, after typing out a response of the nature you described, I hit the back button rather than submit.
In one case a documentary serious about Scottish fishermen had to be subtitled because the accents/dialect were incomprehensible to general viewers in the UK:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_%28TV_series%29

What I find amusing is that as someone from the area in question it appears that most of the people being filmed are trying hard to talk "properly" - their real accents would be much thicker.
Did your poor sensibilities just get offended?
There are quite a few points of contention to be made with your comment:

First off, to group "24/7 on-call Wordpress support" with passive income is... well, a very, very long stretch.

on things which have real social purpose and meaning and value to their creators or users

"Someone I can turn to when my website blows up because of this new plugin I added" most assuredly provides meaning and value to WP Curve's customers. Also, I'm not sure who's exploiting who in that relationship.

But you're right, Dan should shut down WP Curve and the customers who are paying him real money to solve real problems and focus on more meaningful things.. like maybe building a social discovery app.
It's true that the kernal of the idea may have originated earlier, and developed over a longer period of time (which is kind of what Dan explained during the interview). But the point I was getting at with this title was that it was less than 1 week from the day Dan decided to pursue this idea and actually start this company that he had 10 paying customers.

Most founders have an idea, decide it's something they would like to pursue, then spend many weeks/months working to validate it, build MVP, attract customers. You can't deny that WP Curve started and gained initial traction exceptionally faster than most.
Whoa I sense passive-aggressiveness :) I'm still waiting for those benchmarks. The code is very clean and simple I was just picking bones. The use case seems to be overly specific tho. Is there any other example use cases where this library could be useful?
Translating the documentation from English is akin to providing obese people with scooters inside chain stores: instead of facing the problem head-on you're just avoiding it and learning to live with it.
If I agree with a point, there is very little I can add to the conversation.

But if I disagree, I can say how I disagree. And this can move the conversation forward. Like this comment here.
How would the card game work? It sounds like an interesting idea.
The problem of PG (and yours) it's the lack on empathy, simply as that. Like "antirez" says, English is not a hobby: English is pushed down the throat of a growing share of people around the world today. And they need English to live a normal life, not for fancy careers.

Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives. How you would feel if all your efforts will be worthless just because you're born in the wrong side of the world, and you sound funny.

The problem is that many English speaker have no idea how is like to learn another language, hence they lack of empathy.
Interesting, but why not use a mouse or trackpad while holding that sandwich?
You are obviously right, but it doesn't contribute to a solution of the political problem.

Today, means-tested aid receives a huge amount of criticism about supposed "leechers", even though abuse is basically a rounding error, and the vast majority of recipients are not at fault for their situation.

Imagine how much worse the criticism could get when there really are leechers because leeching is officially approved.

So no matter how nice a BIG is, I often wish that at least part of the massive amount of political energy spent on promoting it would instead be targeted towards poverty-reducing and power-shifting policies that have a higher chance of being implemented and remaining implemented.
I am what most would call a conservative and if what was being offered was a complete elimination of all social services, entitlements, and government largess, then count me in.

I would much rather a BI than having this menacingly powerful centralized vote buying machine.
Meh. Not so much.

The problem here is the difference between a conversation and a mob of emotional ranters (And I plead guilty to being in the latter category many times). Most of these comments are meant to provide context.

The author seems to forget that it's much better to have a reasonable conversation in context than it is to simply wander far afield on whatever the outrage of the day is. Correlation does not equal context. Companies are there to provide shareholder value. Google doesn't owe you anything. And so on. Yes, these can be throwaway catchphrases (bumper stickers), but hell, I'd rather have the usual half-dozen bumper stickers and then talk reasonably about something that try to un-fuck a conversation built of some bullshit fallacy with somebody talking very emotionally about things about which they aren't fully informed.

We make the mistake over and over again of rewarding emotional content, not useful content. I'd argue this post is a prime example of that. The reason the same phrases come back again and again is that we continue to make the same cognitive mistakes again and again. Ignoring that won't make it go away.
Wouldn't visual feedback be easier to comprehend?
How do you cope with the pronunciation though? It is my 5th year living in Germany, and as an italian I find the pronunciation much more straightforward in German than in English.
Ask HN: LDAP Directory as a Service?
Do you work with LDAP, or are you considering it? If so, this might be useful to you.

We're preparing an infrastructure service for LDAP directories, similar to AWS's Relational Database as a Service (RDS).

Why? Well, there are some compelling use cases for Directory as a Service. Here are a few examples:

1. Offloading the operation of non-production LDAP directories to a managed service. For example, any development or test directories that you would usually create and/or operate yourself.

2. Designing a cloud-first application that uses an LDAP directory as a data store. One of the most popular uses of LDAP is managing users and authentication (think Microsoft Active Directory) -- and for good reason. LDAP is optimised for searching, with very fast retrieval of users and other indexed objects.

3. Relocating an existing on-premise application to the cloud, where the application uses an LDAP directory as a data store. The benefits are the same as in the cloud-first use case.

While we're in beta, we're happy to spin up a free directory for you to try. The LDAP flavour is 389 Directory Server, which is the open source version of Red Hat Directory Server. You can apply for a free trial directory at http://try.ldap.io/beta

Here's what's currently planned on the roadmap:

- Administration dashboard
- Single tenancy
- Different LDAP flavours (OpenLDAP, 389 DS, OpenDJ, OpenLDAP)
- Scaling and replication (master-master, master-slave, provider-consumer)
- REST and JSON-RPC APIs
- Cloud agnostic infrastructure (AWS, Google Compute Engine, etc)
- Friendly web client
- Dead simple schema updates
- Premium support

We'd love your feedback, whether positive or negative. Thanks.
Show HN: Birdy – Micro-blogging engine
> There are no dictation exercises beyond the age of 12 because it's too easy.

Then I am 31 years old and move from Finland to London and need to spell (dictate letter by letter) my name in a bank – something I have never done in my life. I do it really slowly, and the bank clerk probably thinks I am borderline retarded, can't even spell his own name, something even kids learn to do. :-D
Butterfly inspires new nanotechnology
The New Deal disproves your thesis, such as it was.
I agree. If you want to integrate then prepare to learn to speak German, otherwise you'll only have expat hipster friends.

Try the VHS for language learning. It is cheap and worth every cent: http://www.berlin.de/vhs/
An income guarantee removes all incentive to work or perform well.
Do you also offer Kerberos?