skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps the real problem here is that, conceptually, o-umlaut (say) is not really a separate character from "o". Rather, it is an "o" plus an accent. Typographically, this is obvious; how to store o-umlaut in a text data structure is not so obvious. Unicode takes the view that it is a separate character, and perhaps this is the wrong view.

Putting it a different way: the problem isn't that diacritic marks are bad, nor is it a clash of cultures. The problem is that the Unicode standard does not match up well with the way people actually use character strings.
You can afford a good dental provider
Dental providers are sometimes your best friend especially when you need expensive dental work or operations.
There are a number of countries besides the US that self-identify as "built by immigrants". Canada, Israel, and Australia come to mind. And in the United States too, there is a world of difference between being a Mexican, Dutch or Canadian immigrant. Like many big life changes, immigration is lived differently by everyone, but everyone will tend to look at the broad phenomenon through the lens of their own experience. Spoken as an Eastern European who moved to the states in childhood...
Wait a minute, this has happened to me during a lightning storm. The phone rang, and the caller insisted that I had called them. I thought it was just some freakish bug in the phone system caused by the storm, but now you made me wonder if it was actually a prank instead.
For me it was The Source (anyone remember them?) some time in the early 80's. Then Compuserve, and then GEnie. Those were the days ....
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So you're gonna risk your mental health and your brain just to score "higher" than your peers by some arbitrary benchmark? I thought higher education was for learning and self-development, not pushing your body like a machine.

If amphetamine use is a mental "hack", then so is cheating or paying someone to do your work; call it crowd-sourcing, or distributed education, but that doesn't lend it any legitimacy.
Yes, the states are trying to suck every tax dollar they can in this recessed economy. ...working exactly against the federal strategy of keeping money in the economy.

I don't know if there's any new info in this article ... because every browser I've tried cuts off the text in middle of third paragraph (even in "printer friendly" version). As usual at wsj.com the readers comments are worth a gander, however.
Of course the BBC sometimes (often?) take their news from the agencies (PA, AP, etc.) and then it gets complicated.

(and let's not even start on what the Daily Fail and other vocal competitors will say.)
Maybe the XBox will kill Windows - after all, games have been the only reason for it's existence for a while now.

Edit: I meant to say "justification", not "reason".
Edwardian Science and technology was the last time we actually had real progress in science and technology...

Is anyone else driven into fits of giggles by the sight of someone typing this phrase into the Internet?

Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha continues to please. Google tells me that if you type the phrase "life expectancy France 1910" into Wolfram Alpha the number "51.37 years" comes out. 17.3% of French children born in 1910 failed to live beyond age ten! Someone should go back in time and explain to these kids, and their mothers, how great it is to live in a "high civilization".

(For the curious: The life expectancy number for the UK was 54 years in 1910. Alpha doesn't seem to return a contemporary result for the USA: it keeps giving me 1933 numbers, by which time US life expectancy was 61 years and the death rate by age 10 was only 8.4% in the USA. Modern numbers: France in 2006: 81 years, 0.48% dead by age 10; USA in 2005: 78 years, 0.87% dead by age 10.)
One grandfather was born in Sligo, Ireland.

The other side of the family is related to Miles Standish's English family
Mistakes : Which hosting to go for?
The fourth on the fifth
I have 2 desktops and 2 laptops, all running Windows. FWIW, I still like being able to open the hood and tweak.

But not enough to change my OS completely (a la Linux)
The only advantage to the "streaming model" they give is that it allows you to pay for stuff. I very much doubt that is a major issue for kids today. Also, it evokes this picture of passive consumers, as if they really only thought "let's take satellite TV to the internet". The internet is not TV.
If you honestly believe that, you have either a) never worked in any company with more than 10 employees or b) have serious issues with reality.

In either case, not the kind of person I would take advice from.
Born in US. Family lived as expatriates in Central America for 20 years, so I was raised in Honduras and Costa Rica. We returned to the US when I was 13.
Why, because companies force Windows on their users, or because of the nifty group management features of Windows products? While I have worked at companies where some boss could edit my Outlook schedule, I can't say I have really missed that feature in later jobs. Possibly some megacorps have essential stuff to do with Windows. But what about private use (which is what I was thinking about)?

Anyway, not sure what your problem is. I wasn't even giving advice in my comment.

Edit: maybe you can enlighten me about the wonderful world of the Windows Exchange Server (which I presume you are referring to). Perhaps it could actually improve my life - any pointers?

Edit2: reading my original comment again, I realise that I phrased it badly. What I meant was "justification", not "reason". Of course there are all sorts of business tricks that also made it persist.
If I do have a great concentration on test day (I usually do) but distracted much when preparing the test. Should I take any kind of stimulants to help out?
Encyclopedia Dramatica on Python (funny)
Indeed. I never saw college as being competitive. Assignments were assigned, I did a good job, I got a good grade. No need for brain hacking or anything like that.

(I did find it very boring and generally worthless, so I dropped out to work on something more interesting. The real world is even less competitive -- there is more work to do than there are people available to do it.)
The company has a pending order from Portland for a half dozen streetcars and one worth $26 million from the city of Tuscon for seven more.

Does almost $4 Million for a street car seem a bit expensive to anyone else?
Ask HN: Macbook Pro and Windows XP?
To any existing MB Pro owners: I'm about to buy the MB pro and was wondering if there are any caveats I should be aware of regarding performance and component compatibility when dual booting Win XP and/or Ubuntu on the machine.

Do the trackpad along with things like the mic/camera perform as they are supposed to or is some stuff locked in to OS X?

I tried looking this stuff up but the blogspam is just ridiculous.

Any clarifications are welcome. Thanks.
Twitter’s Dearth of Deals
The conclusion of this article is the most illuminating part. In case you didn't get there...

As a public service announcement, don't worry too much about grades. This is America, not Germany, where success is determined by the solidity of your goal and the amount you are willing to work. I know you don't believe it now, but it's true. Go have a drink.
"The textbook business was wildly inefficient"

My understanding is that the textbook business is designed to be inefficient (from a student's perspective - and very profitable from a publisher's perspective).

The short lifespan and planned obsolescence of textbooks would make textbook rental a very difficult business without participation from publishers and colleges.

Nevertheless, this could be a tremendously useful service for college students so I wish them the best.
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Free Directory Sites with a High Google Pagerank | TechJaws
You're preaching to the choir. Tell my SO.
See, even living inside a web browser, there are terribly large difference between Ubuntu and Windows 7.

For example, not too long ago I had a bug which caused firefox to crash due to a flash problem. The fix involved having to download the source, editing the launch file and build it.

While this very thing is what draws many of us to Linux, it is the same thing that would push the majority of consumers away.
I have an idea for reducing congestion in Manhattan: ban on-street parking. Only vehicles making deliveries with a valid permit should be permitted to park on the street, everybody else would have to use a garage. This should clear a few extra lanes for traffic in many places, as well as forcing more people to give up their cars.
In all honesty, I have been able to use Ubuntu for most everything, but had to keep a Windows XP system going for remote control to access Microsoft-only stuff.

I installed Exchange 2007 with Small Business Server 2008, so accessing Public Folders pretty much requires Outlook or IE. (Evolution only seems to work with Exchange 2003...)

Which brings me to ActiveX. So much of what I do requires ActiveX that I also must have a copy of Windows around to be fully functional, as I haven't gotten WINE or IEs4Linux to support MS's RDP correctly.

Otherwise, I would be running Ubuntu only, as I don't really game much beyond all the games that have been written/ported to Linux.
The thinking in the USA seems to be that either you're an immigrant or you're not, with no distinction between the variation of cultures.

That's the ideal in some of the USA, but it's by no means the historical norm. The traditional thinking in the USA has always been that either you're an immigrant from Awesome Culture X or Y, and therefore the salt of the earth, or you're from Despised Culture Z or Q, and therefore a dangerous foreign influence that needs to be controlled.

The darkly amusing feature of our culture is the routine reshuffling of the categories.
Well that is not what I said. What I said (or meant to say) is that since game consoles have become so much more commonplace, people don't need Windows machines to play games anymore. The fact that the 17 year old guy from the article didn't see a difference between Windows and Linux says it all. Obviously he did not try to play games on the PC.
How to learn any language in 4 days
Thanks for the great story. I have many like that (but I'll spare you).

My grandparents endured hardships I can't even imagine. They had nothing. Absolutely nothing. And they were 4 of the happiest people I ever met. Go figure.
I've been running Windows 7 via VirtualBox for a few months now. It's okay. Better than XP? Marginally. Worth money to upgrade? Not really.

Windows 7 will probably get its "foothold" on the consumer market the same way Vista did: when people buy new computers they get Windows 7. I speculate that the vast majority of Windows users are simply running the same O/S that their computer shipped with, whether that is XP, Vista, or even ME (I've been shocked by how many people I know are still running ME (in a vague sense of the word "running")).

Of course that doesn't apply to techies like us, but when you hold mass market share you have mass market demographics.

As far as businesses upgrading their workstations to Windows 7... no way. Windows XP is pretty stable (they've been improving it for like 8 years, it oughta be) and there are few compelling reason for a business to invest in Windows 7. The only way MS will get Windows 7 into the business market will be to force it (via OEMs or by stopping support for XP/Vista).

I think Microsoft's outlook (pun not intended) is pretty gray in the O/S market.

EDIT: changed "no" reasons to "few" as trezor pointed out at least one reason I was unaware of.
Is there enough space for all the cars in all the garages?
Server side js is so 90s style idea. Extremely slow. Although I haven't tried joyents product....
ActiveX? What needs ActiveX nowadays, may I ask?
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Are you saying if Sachin Tendulkar had been smart - then he would have been pressured into becoming an engineer? Good news for future Aussie Cricket teams.

I like in Melbourne/Vic/Australia so the ranking is AFL(Aussie Rules) > Cricket > God
From what I've seen, the prices on Chegg are a little more than what you'd end up spending if you bought all the books used that you could, and then re-sold them at the end of the semester. I'm seriously considering using Chegg next semester, however, for the convenience of not having to check various used book stores for the best prices, and more importantly, of not having to go around re-selling you books at the end of the semester (plus, the guaranteeing of saving that money, where sometimes you can't even resell a book because it won't be in use the next semester at all. This happened to me when I used a custom "Penn State" edition of my Economics book. Penn State upgraded to the new edition, and no bookstores wanted it because, of course, no other schools used the "Penn State" edition.)
Just saw the Nike Chalkbot on the Versus coverage of the 2nd stage. Quite entirely on topic :)

There are sections of the road made solid yellow with Livestrong logos and supporter messages. France and Lance may not love each other, but they certainly need each other this year.
Why, because companies force Windows on their users

Using the word "force" seems odd to me and seems to indicate you have a bias against Windows which is based more on personal preference rather than rationality. It is a companies right to choose what platform they want to build their infrastructure on, and if you as a potential employee have an issue with that, nobody is forcing you to take the job.

or because of the nifty group management features of Windows products?

They are not merely nifty. For any organization of any noticeable size, it is essential. It streamlines IT management to the point that a smaller IT staff can concentrate on improving and expanding the business's infrastructure instead of merely maintaining it.

You can not seriously argue that this is merely "nifty" and has little real world value?

Anyway, not sure what your problem is.

My problem with your comment is that it is simplistic, unreasoned, obviously false and and of no value what so ever. You might as well have replied "LOL NOT Linux!" and it would have made no difference.

If I wanted that level of commentary I would go to digg.
Well, a pretty serious "geek" did amphetamines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
Learning another language can mean learning yet another slightly different syntax and API, but sometimes it means learning a fundamentally different model. Learning Erlang's concurrency model, logic programming, or something completely different like K can be a real eye opener, even if you don't use them directly.

I've been learning Prolog over the summer* , and while I'm not convinced I will make much use of the language directly, it has some really interesting ideas, which are largely usable in Scheme and Lua. For example, I also have a much better understanding of how unification, type inference, etc. work now -- Prolog is a DSL for that sort of thing, and having a good notation helps, much like knowing regular expressions changes the way you think about patterns.

* Via Sterling and Shapiro's _The Art of Prolog_ (which is an excellent text, IMHO) and the relevant chapters of CTM (all the more so).
I worry the trend is going in the other direction. I've been trying to set up a particular wireless networking device in ubuntu and the only instructions I found that I could get working involved gnome desktop apps.

To reiterate - I need to have a user logged into the desktop environment in order to get wireless networking going. At that moment I lost all enthusiasm for the prospect of desktop linux becoming mainstream.

Of course there isn’t. He lives in a web browser.
The underlying OS is irrelevant.

What about games? Nethack runs better under unix.
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I have previously sold Small Business Server to several dozen of my clients. In order to remotely manage their systems, I am forced to use either IE's RDP plug-in or Remote Web Workplace (a Microsoft-created web site on these servers that uses RDP) if I cannot get in via VPN.

And, as I mentioned, my whole email storage system currently lives in Exchange 2007 as a quite intricate set of private and public folders, not addressable by IMAP.
"...Charles Komanoff’s absolutely astonishing Balanced Tranportation Analyzer, a 3.5 MB Excel spreadsheet which is the product of many years of research and analysis..."

Do you suppose Charles Komanoff already read the earlier HN post, "How to Take Ritalin Correctly"?
"Using the word "force" seems odd to me"

I guess then it is my turn to ask if you have ever worked in a company. Whatever.

"obviously false and and of no value what so ever"

Or maybe you are just too biased to understand what I actually said.
Clearly if you think this is funny we have very different senses of humor. It's peurile and content-free.
Its cutting you off because you have to be a subscriber to view the whole article. The headline should be edited to reflect that.
I would love to see a study done comparing the benefits of Ritalin, Adderall etc. to users diagnosed as having ADD/ADHD against users not diagnosed as having it. If the former group receives significantly greater benefits that would be a strong indicator that ADHD is a distinct condition, rather than a label applied to a set of personality traits. On the other hand, if the benefits were similar for both groups it would call into question why one of them is denied (legal) access to the drug.
What Cringely doesn't recognize (regarding the "furor" around Parrot Secrets) is that in the Fresh Jerky case, there is no attempt to deceive-- they actually make fresh jerky. No faking involved.
Windows 7 has lots of new features which appeals to the corporate market compared to Windows XP. You have more options for locking down workstations with GPOs, you have UAC which improves security. Searching for stuff is miles ahead of Widows XP, which means increased productivty.

Granted, most of those features were added in Vista, but Windows 7 actually runs quite decent on older hardware, something Vista wasn't exactly acclaimed for doing.

Windows 7 also includes lots of features which are handy for portable machines like laptops. Bitlocker anyone? You also have transparent, automatic VPN back into your company's domain, either trough native IPv6 or tunneled connections. In either case IPSec is used to secure communication. In effect, the windows domain model just got network transparent. That's a pretty neat thing in itself.

Again, some things came with Vista, but Windows 7 delivers it all in a much more appealing package.

I'll shut up before I sound like a Microsoft market-droid, but to say Windows 7 adds no features which would make an upgrade worthwhile in the corporate environment is either disingenuous or misinformed.
After refreshing the page, I was able to view the entire article. Didn't see much new, though.

Don't know if the page refresh thing is a bug, or intentional.
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I'm willing to wager that the 2 millskie is gross sales not net profit. Still, pretty impressive. People love their beef jerky and are willing to pay hefty prices for it. I bet his margins are Apple-esque.
I have a lot of medical monographs at hand including descriptions of such studies. I'm still reading them. But the summaries I've seen so far in my reading are quite ambiguous as to claimed benefits of taking ADHD drugs (for anyone), especially for the inattentive subtype of ADD. Subjectively reported "this drug really helps me" or third-party observation of "this kid doesn't wiggle around so much in class" is not the same as carefully verified gains in learning from using the drug versus not using the drug.
"So how is the company doing? Just fine, thanks, though most of the sales are online, about $2 million per year."

Or after Bob Cringely writes about you, $3 million per year.
If you're statistically going to score higher than your peers by taking a pill

I agree with you that that is the claim of the people taking the pills, but where are the statistics? How well controlled are studies claiming to show that the pills help normal people?

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
> In effect, the windows domain model just got network transparent. That's a pretty neat thing in itself.

Ok, that is a compelling reason. I stand corrected.
While I don't live in the US, I am an immigrant to the United Kingdom (an EU citizen, so not even a real immigrant since I took the shortcuts and my home country is two hours away from Heathrow Airport)
How exactly can you sell Comcast's bandwidth back to Comcast?
It sounds like what you meant to say was this:

"Maybe the XBox will relegate Windows to the workplace - after all, games have been the most common justification for its existence in homes for a while now."

It's funny, the first time I read your post, this was the meaning I pulled from your phrasing - despite the exaggerations "kill" and "only". I must have known you were speaking about the home market because I had just read the linked article.

I actually think you're on to something. It seems that Windows is losing its grip on the home. Sure, I've heard tales of a few die-hard Media Center PC enthusiasts, but the vast majority probably only need a web browser, a TCP/IP stack, and some implementation of klondike solitaire.

I wonder what the market share of the Mac would look like if you just looked at the segment of the market where a person buys a computer for themselves and/or their family. They seem to have grown there.

We could be in for a historical irony, depending on how things shake out: the rise of the PC in the days of the mainframe happened because non-IT departments (and, in some cases, individuals) could afford to bring a PC into the workplace, ultimately wresting control of computation from the hands of IT departments, who were failing to provide adequate services. In the cubical farm where I work, there are a half dozen people who have decided to just bring their Mac laptop into work every day. And, yes, for work functions.
Server side PHP is such a 90s style idea. Extremely slow.
It is USA centric. But the value of the exercise, to me, is to appreciate how close to part of my family's immigration I am. I am a second generation immigrant. This is important to keep in mind when we talk about American immigration policies.
It's like real estate. It's all in the domain name and freshjerky.com is very attractive and sought after.
Of course I have multiple ancestral lines. (And my wife is a first-generation immigrant, born overseas, so my children choose the "1 generation" answer, even though I chose the "3 generations" answer.) Some of my ancestors arrived in the United States during the 1600s, and most were living in my current state of residence well before it became a state. But others arrived more recently. Not quite half of my ancestors came from the two European countries that lost the biggest percentages of their populations to emigration--Ireland and Norway--because they were dirt poor. But just more than half my ancestors were fairly well off in Europe, and came to America, in some cases as part of organized groups that formed "colonies" here in the 1800s, because they desired more freedom than their home countries provided, even though they were prospering in those home countries.

My wife grew up in another country, and one of my children was born there during a subsequent period of residence there (but has only a claim to United States citizenship by facts of birth), so I am familiar with current immigrant communities. The United States still provides a lot of opportunities that are less abundant in other countries. And immigrants by virtue of having lived in two cultures usually arrive in the United States full of fresh ideas that result in their having a more creative approach to living here when they get here.