skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Following such a method you can learn a language in 6-12 months"

Were you able to learn Chinese in 6-12 months? What's your mother language? I know a lot of Westerners who've learned Mandarin and no one achieved fluency in anything near a year. For someone whose mother tongue is near the Romance languages, I can see picking up another Romance language very quickly (I know Latin, Greek, and French and I can essentially understand Spanish even though I've never studied it). But I don't think an English speaker is going to pick up Arabic, Russian, or Chinese in under a year. I'm on year 7 of studying / speaking Mandarin, and I still have problems sometimes.
"All but extinct" is a little strong. That's all I'm saying. A few million people paid bug bucks for Visual Studio.
1110i Earpiece Speaker Ways Problem | repairmobiles.saaqi
For me the email client and finder for file management. I am going to try entourage but its not outlook, its outlook light. Apple should look at the fact there are five separate mac products that emulate windows explorer, that alone should tell them that Finder is lacking for file management.
That's because Apple provides new API features in new releases of the OS and software developers take advantage of them. It's not that hard to write software that runs on many versions of OS X, but it does limit the features you can take advantage of. I think it's worth not being able to use some apps on my older computers if they provide something worthwhile, so this doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
>>"A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house."

Let us see, many movie stars, many wall street bankers, many atheletes, many businessmen etc. make far bigger amounts of money.

...and Seth Godin has a problem with the author of one testbook making money
1 & 2 are both in Leopard. Apple ditched the weird Spotlight results window in equally weird but more functional views in Finder windows. 4 is in Snow Leopard.
For TC gossip, mudslinging, equals traffic, they don't care about startups or technology anymore.

I hope they die a slow and painful death.

OTOH, Venturebeat looks promising...
The problem is the lack of an open market. Amazon has provided more transparancy through reviews, but there still is no freedom of choice for the consumers when a textbook is assigned. There is virtually no competition on price possible.

Moreover, you can't just choose another textbook, as the topics that are covered may differ slightly. Even in math, when you use another Calculus book, there is a reasonable chance you miss out on some stuff, that just happens to be on the exam.

I'm not sure Seth's solution will work and I would rather propose that teachers should be clearer on what kind of problems the student should be able to answer/solve, while keeping in mind that the student should be able to use any in a range of at least six books to study the material.
If textbooks become a thing of the past, every student will carry a netbook / tablet (which runs educational software, browsers etc) to school.
I don't buy it. The example of ISO9000 for instance. Customers value it because it's cheaper and easier than researching a companie's business practices to see if they're stable and predictably repeatable. When it sucks innovation out of a company long term, that company gradually loses business and control of capital until it goes under. The market effeciently reallocates resources to those who provide the greatest value for least amount of consumed resources. Of course it's not efficient at keeping every company alive and healthy, no matter how wasteful and worthless its products.
For those who don't know what he means, see: http://www.kickerstudio.com/blog/2009/02/gorilla-arm/
Have you found a replacement for "jump to file"? Command+T is great until you have a lot of same-name files in different directories (it doesn't take the directory into account).

e.g. in a Django project it'd be common to have users/models.py, events/models.py, polls/models.py - you press Command+T and you can only search on models.py, if you type "pmod" you don't get polls/models.py. Highly annoying when hopping between files is so common.
This post just seems tacky, complaining that because marketing textbooks don't mention his own concept of "permission marketing" that they're out of date.

Also complaining that Stewart making 20 million for text book is unreasonable, when he himself has made a substantial amount of money from writing educational books. Not to mention the 30 million he got for his games site Yoyodyne. Obviously that was completely reasonable.
The comments point out a couple problems with the analysis, notably that it's comparing Detroit to some of the densest urban cores in the country rather than another sprawling suburb-city.

I'm really curious if the same thing will happen to San Jose in 50 years time. Like Detroit, San Jose is a monoculture, with an economy based upon American competitive advantage in one particular industry. And San Jose already has a population density lower than Detroit: 940,000 people on 178 square miles. When the software industry gets off-shored to other companies and large Silicon Valley dinosaurs can't compete anymore, will we see pieces about urban decay in San Jose, with the crime, falling home values, and urban prairie that results?

BTW, does anyone else hear Dire Straits' Telegraph Road in their head whenever they read a piece about the decline and fall of Detroit?
It seems like you want to create a matchmaking site for entrepreneurs. In your mind, is this really the level of detail you'd want your users to provide?
The new <video> tag has to be one of those life changing experiences for the web.

Theora rocks!

(and the big buck bunny video rocks too)
Is it a fact that implementing fixed-width fonts actually requires a complete rewrite of all code and rethinking of the fundamental data structures? I think there's a pretty big gap between making a nontrivial change to an existing codebase and starting all over.

I certainly don't agree with Joel on everything, but I think he makes excellent points in the essay I linked above. I think every programmer maintaining a project hits a point where they want to rewrite everything. The code is full of hacks, the API is crufty, the requirements have evolved, etc. But that doesn't mean that such a rewrite is a good idea. And I bet we could all agree that a rewrite is not implicitly a good idea. All other things being equal old, tested code is better than new, untested code.
I'm a Jr in High School and I made my first iPhone Game. Suggestions/Feedback
Link to the game on the App Store: http://is.gd/U1L6

Its called Castle Defense for those of you wishing to search for it. It has been a 4 month collaboration with 3 other team members (1 other coder, designer, and composer). The two goals of the project have been to make a fun game, which at the time hadn't been done before, and hopefully be able to pay for my college tuition. I've learned a lot already however I would appreciate it if HN had any suggestions or feedback on the game.

Thank you,
Greg
Also, drag a file over a folder and hit <SPACE> to open it instantly.
Too complex to exist
Satellite dishes might be banned, but this doesn't mean that they aren't very widespread. This isn't the United States or Europe.

I believe there was an article in the NY Times about this exact issue. Everybody "middle-class" and up has a satellite dish. Every few months the government confiscates them, at which point everybody goes to the local black market dealer, buys a new one and puts it back up. Quite often the new one is their old one because usually the black market dealer is whoever is in charge of the local branch of the satellite dish confiscation agency.

Ah, reminds me of the bad old days in the Soviet Union.
I would like to know how to do this. Do you have any links?
Satellites are illegal in Iran, nevertheless they're not uncommon either. It's like saying there's no music piracy in the US because it's illegal.

There are periodic crackdowns when the police destroy satellites dishes, but they just get put back up 6 months later.
Search ALL Craigslist using Google - What's the problem?
A lot of talk has been made about real-time results to search all of Craigslist, like crazedlist. But what about Google sites like allofcraigs.com?

I have posted ads on Craigslist that have indexed by Google within 2 hours. There is a small benefit to the delay, as most spam ads are flagged before Google indexes them. Fact is, nobody is going to search all of Craigslist using crazedlist, or allofcraigs.com, to find important items they can find locally, that's what craigslist is for. Therefore, real-time results are not that advantageous over sites that use Google custom search.

Thoughts?
Yup, I think you're probably right.

We generally don't do that because we can't justify it in terms of the business

True, but Joel's point is that a rewrite can actually be bad for the code not just the business, because you throw out years of real-world testing and bugfixes.

And to be honest, unless Textmate 2 is significantly worse than 1.x, I'll buy an upgrade license.
I'm not a fan of Seth Godin either, and my first instinct was to comment that 'Godin linkbait must die'. But I do agree with his points, although as usual the analysis is shallow.

Something that deserves more attention is the fact that the textbook industry in the US runs like a cartel (as alluded to above, with professors requiring a particular book for which they get free copies, and the proceeds from which help to pay their salaries).

In Europe I preferred buying college textbooks to learn programming, because they were cheaper and better value than the commercial offerings, without the fancy graphic design covers and marketing outreach.
The Internet is incomplete, says its co-designer, Vinton Cerf
I think an underrated problem is that new users are all greeted with these directions: "... answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

I bet that fewer than 10% of the interesting tweets I've read involved what the author was doing. But this quote leads to the mistaken public perception that twitter is just a bunch of people talking about what they had for breakfast. Many new users send out one or two boring tweets, assume everyone else is doing the same, and give up on it -- much like how the author described his original Twitter experience.

I'm not sure what a better prompt would be -- maybe "What are you thinking?", or nothing at all. Regardless, I'm sure they could make a sizable impact on public perception and newbie usage patterns by changing that quote.
Twitter Road for San Jose?
I just wish there were some easy way to get it to play fullscreen in Firefox, or detached in a resizable window. One of the big goals of these web standards is to give users the power to decide how they view web sites instead of having it decided for them. I happen to have a large screen, and I want to embiggen my videos.
True, but not referencing Google? I think a marketing 101 text probably needs to say something about the importance of having your website be discoverable in an internet search, or at the very least review how the commoditization of online advertising has led to a shift in the landscape.
The problem I think I'll have is not so much the actual switching of buffers, but making sure they end up in the right pane when first opened.
I agree - You forgot a few other benefits to using Google to search all Craigslist.

1. Quicker over-all search
2. Relevant ads pertaining to a search query.
3. Easy to use

I created allofcraigs.com for fun, and I'm surprised by the response so far. Thanks for the mention. Best regards
I think you mean "inherently" rather than "implicitly": Allan has been pretty explicit about why he considers a complete rewrite a good thing.

Assuming that's what you meant: I don't think anyone suggests that complete rewrites are inherently proper. It depends on a host of factors, and the pile of failed rewrites in the world is a testament to the risk involved.

In any case, examining what "people" are clamoring for is not necessarily the best way to make decisions. Before TextMate 1 had been released, no one was looking for anything quite like it. When you send tools into the world, it's impossible to tell before hand what will be done with them, and I don't think you should dismiss the introduction of substantial new features (so substantial that they couldn't be built on the previous architecture) with a hand-wave like "most people" not wanting something "totally different".
I once took a course in statistical physics. As an aside, the prof. neatly showed that the Black-Scholes equation is actually a simple diffusion equation. It requires a few variable substitutions and the like, but then it has the exact same form. And of course that makes sense.
I prefer PDF to paper. The Intel IA32 Architecture Volumes would be god-awful in paper form.
Very good point, though I think that even brand building is going to start to move towards real metrics (be they "clicks to learn more" or something else).

But sure, there's always going to be a cachet with having a really strong brand that advertisers want to associate with.
because you throw out years of real-world testing and bugfixes

Very true, but you also get to trade in on the experience and information gleaned from the use and development of a product over many years. I think it is safe to say that Allan knows far more about Textmate now than he did when he started it, and perhaps that insight has allowed him to bring some significant improvements to the text editor as a whole.

Maybe I'm just biased; I tend to rewrite stuff before I've even written it once.
Except that it is difficult to take a class without buying the textbook, and they are expensive. When was the the last time your professor mandated that you see a certain sports team play, but base tickets cost $100?
What? Long-Term Capital Management didn't use Black-Scholes. It hired Merton and Scholes, but used a completely different trading strategy.

They tried fixed income arbitrage with very high leverage. Black-Scholes ONLY applies to options.

The work that won the Nobel Prize had nothing to do with the downfall of Long Term Capital Management. Get your facts straight.

Variations of Black-Scholes are still used successfully in the trading world. The only difference is that no one thinks that returns follow a normal distribution anymore (but the Black-Scholes formula allows you to choose any probability distribution you want).
What did LTCM in was Russian government bonds - they strayed out of their area of expertise.
Why You Do What You Do and How to Use it to Your Advantage
Absolutely. This piece tremendously downplays the access that Iranians have to outside information. I spent a wonderful three months in Tehran, and I'd wager a majority of Iranians have bypassed internet and television access controls put in place by the Government.
Finder is pretty horrible. Keyboard shortcuts are all over the place and overall I find Finder really unintuitive.
The Cut/Paste in Finder issue comes up a lot, because in people that use the GUI for file management the basic action becomes a deeply ingrained habit with a specific mental model.

Windows-style "pick up here, drop there":
- make selection with mouse
- cut with keboard
- navigate to destination with mouse
- paste with keyboard

Mac-style "carry from here to there":
- make selection with mouse
- drag with mouse
- navigate to destination with mouse
- drop with mouse

You can learn to use the other kind, but if you have to switch between them often you'll likely grow frustrated with one or the other. With the Finder for lacking Cut and for others lacking spring-loaded folders and Expose.
What if? Well then we'd pull out its power plug.

I was just posing an interesting question, especially as regards to the whole notion of "superior" intelligence. Superior in what regards? By whose measure? Eliezer should be given credit for promoting an information theoretic approach to that question. At least that seems to be a fundamental measure with a good chance of escaping cultural biases concerning "intelligence."

I am certainly not in some simpleminded superior AI is going to kill us all camp. Perhaps we will have very powerful AI optimization tools that have no sense of self, or self-originating volition whatsoever. There would be no reason for such entities to act in their own self interest, and therefore no danger for their interests to conflict with our own. They would have the disadvantage, though, of never coming up with something neat on their own initiative. I think there's enough more than enough initiative from human sources. What's needed is better optimization.

(Of course, only one rogue self-directed AI entity escaping into the wild could possibly -- not certainly -- doom us all. But this is not a new kind of danger. We have been facing that sort of danger -- where one robust and virulent enough example could escape and wreak havoc -- from technologies based on molecular biology for a few years now. So far, so good.)
Wouldn't it be better to give the students Mathematica or similar software? It could do the work [...]

This is really a tough one. My opinion is no - the sweat is the learning. Skipping the problems would just lead to knowing a lot about math, without actually knowing any math.

On the other hand, it's tempting - and in the Real World (tm), people do just plug their giant, buck-nasty equations into Mathematica and avoid doing all the book-keeping.

I guess the question is: should pilots all just train on auto-pilot, while having only a conceptual understanding of what piloting is about? Or should they learn to pilot manually first, and then use the auto-pilot judiciously? There are legitimate points going both ways - but I vote for the 2nd.
Terminal.app - if there was one app that I wished would resize itself to handle the widest possible line, that is it. Alas, it just zooms to fill the entire screen - which is somewhat comedic at 10 pt Courier on a 2560x1600 30" Monitor whose longest line in the scrollback-buffer is 75 characters.
Seth is usually a bit hit and miss, some things he says are interesting, other's are just not.

This post is the latter - yes it's a rant, but it's completely way off base. If he doesn't like the current textbooks, like any good entrepreneur, he should write his own.

This particular line I found hypocritical.

Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online.

In my window, that particular line is being rendered just above where the adverts for his books are on the left.

Yes, people should give away their work for free... I mean, you're doing it, aren't you Seth?

Hypocrite.
I prefer hypertext over both of them, especially now that we all have tabbed browsers. There's a reason why people will voluntarily spend hours learning things from Wikipedia.

http://xkcd.com/214/
Here in eastern Europe, university is somewhat different then in the anglo-saxon world. We don't have homework problems (homeworks are never part of the final grade), and exams at the end of the semester are usually oral where the student has to prove theorems/algorithms or in general present some kind of theoretical framework. There is usually a problem-solving exam mid-year, but it only makes up 0-25% of the grade. It's usually managable to pass the problem-solving exam, the real Suck is the oral examination at the end when you're face-to-face with the professor.

As a result of this skew toward the theoretical side, our textbooks are light on problems and practicalities and full of theories, proofs, derivations, etc. (Even a Calculus 101 textbook.) They look more like upper-level textbooks in the anglo-saxon world. As a result, these "textbooks" are usually kept around for later reference.

This is currently changing with the introduction of the so-called 'Bologna process', which basically transforms our systems to more closely match the anglo-saxon world for compatibility reasons. Eg. before we only had 5 year MSc degrees, now we introduced the 3+2 Bsc/Msc system, which is a Good Thing.

Just because a (text)book is kept around for later reference doesn't mean it should be printed, as an electronic version is actually more searchable. The main obstacle is the 'reading off an LCD screen sucks sitting at the desk' issue, which once solved with a good DRM-free paper-like device will do to the Book Industry what MP3 has done to the Music Industry.

Already you can torrent almost any book, even ones that only interest a handful of people in the world, such as research-level physics books (example from my field: search for 'darksiderg cosmology'). The fact that these highly specialized books are torrented a few months after their publication date is pretty puzzling to me =) But I don't complain, as I can preview before I buy (we don't have bookstores selling english-language books, so checking them out at the bookstore is not an option). But once people can copy these to a book-like device, publishers will have to look for another revenue stream. Fortunately, with research-level books, the answer in theory at least is pretty simple: just cut out the publisher, researchers already generate print-ready Latex files anyways. In reality it will be a long struggle; a good use-case is research journals where the publisher is completely unnecessary but is still holding on, researchers are still signing over publication rights of their papers to companies like Springer.
I have no first hand knowledge of the Satellite dishes so I'll defer. But I still find it unlikely that people in Iran have Satellite internet connections that (in the U.S.) cost more per month than average iranian makes in a month. Beyond that I think the Government is aware of Satellite Internet and clearly Ahmadinejad had a plan in place to block communication yesterday. So don't you think it's reasonable to assume there was a crack down sometime directly before the election?

(I admit it's speculation but I just can't imagine them blocking every other type of Internet access and leaving Satellite up for the heck of it)

As for your 3 months in Tehran that's great but Yesterday wasn't an average day. The government was specifically blocking any sites that could distribute news (something it normally doesn't do). So your first hand experience isn't terribly relevant.

Can you (or anyone) point me to an Iranian source that was getting information out of Iran yesterday? If the general public has so widely circumvented such measures you'd think we'd have tons of first hand accounts.
FAI advocates are not satisfied with a 99.999% chance that the universe will not be turned into a uniform distribution of paperclips.
I'm in India right now and I've spent a total of 14 years here. The places I'm referring to are the ones the article seems to talk about: China, India, Japan and Korea.

A few months ago, there was a discussion on this right here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482257
I think this calls for a filk...

Man, this could be worse than Tim Draper performing his version of Smooth alongside Carlos Santana, with the words changed to be about entrepreneurship...
"1 & 2 are both in Leopard"

Sorry about that - you're right about the deleting and copying in Leopard. As with the Finder in general, files cannot be cut/moved, and renaming is not available from the Context Menu or by pressing Enter (though it is available by clicking the file names).

As for #2 ("In Folder" or "Location" column in Spotlight results), can you please tell me how to display such a column?
According to their git changelog:

http://repo.or.cz/w/MacVim.git?a=tags

and their Google Code updates list:

http://code.google.com/p/macvim/updates/list

MacVim has seen a huge number of changes in the 2+ years that TextMate has been under development: not least Leopard support, Vim 7.2 integration, and a ton of interface and speed improvements. They're on Snapshot 45 right now...
i'm a fan of newer hardware with older software for speed reasons.