skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it is much easier to learn Bahasa Indonesia or spoken Japanese for an English speaker than it is to learn Russian

The United States government agencies that track this matter don't generally seem to think so. But if you have other evidence on this point, I'd be glad to hear it.

I agree in general that a grammatical feature such as minimal marking of nouns for case and verbs for person, number, or gender, making word order the main basis for grammar distinctions, makes Chinese eerily familiar for native speakers of English. But even though Chinese grammar is "easy" for native speakers of English, to the degree that some Americans say "Chinese has no grammar" (definitely a false statement), nonetheless lack of a lot of cognate vocabulary or similar phonological system usually means that the native speaker of English will thrive as a learner of any Indo-European language over almost any non-Indo-European language.

The comparisons I've seen most often assume native speakers of English learning various languages to an equal tested level of functional proficiency after government-sponsored training. Length of training to reach the required level is generally longer for the non-Indo-European languages than for the Indo-European languages. The "easy" languages for English speakers are the typically studied languages like French, German, and Spanish, perhaps because of prior exposure as well as close similarity. It would be interesting to see what studies of language learning starting from various native languages to acquire various target languages are showing these days.
I can anecdotally disagree with that...in fact, the only reason I got a Twitter thingy after resisting for about two years is because the crowd in my IRC hangouts incessantly refer to "tweets."

Twitter is certainly not a replacement for IRC in these circles either, though, merely an extra tool. It is not well-suited for it, not least because support for anything like real-time conversations between multiple people is almost completely absent -- which I think the correct design decision.

Bizarrely, some of the non-IRC people are trying to sell Twitter as some kind of a chatroom, see for example this recent TIME Magazine article:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604,00.....

Edit: tautology.
Citation? I believe you're allowed to virtualise Windows 7 Home Premium - Microsoft changed their EULA to allow virtualisation of the Home versions of Vista a while back and I don't understand why they'd suddenly change it back.
Any exchange between two actors can be in one of four categories:

1) voluntary in-kind exchange ( Christmas presents, buying each other rounds of drinks)

2) coercive in-kind exchange ( corvee, slavery, conscription, bound serfdom)

3) voluntary monetary exchange ( buying food at the super market )

4) coercive monetary exchange ( taxes )

#1 is great, but unfortunately is does not scale. It works very well among family, friends, and small communities, but it quickly breaks down in larger economies.

Of the remainder, #3 seems obviously the superior way to engage in transactions. And #3 is free market capitalism. Capitalism is not good because greed is good. Capitalism is good because it forces greedy people to actual produce something of value and exchange it, rather than just taking it from others.

The financial crisis is not an example of #3 but of #4. The "too big too fail" and "lender of last resort" policies have been in place for decades. They allowed banks to take huge risk, and then when the risks failed, the government uses its coercive powers to tax the public and bail out the financial system, thus encouraging even more risk taking.
I think handholding for new users is a serious problem. It might have killed Second Life - at least to me it simply was too complicated to get a decent looking avatar and find interesting things to do. I had some fun experiences in SL, but ultimately it was too difficult to get orientation.

Hope Twitter won't see the same fate - their "recommended users to follow" thing is definitely not cutting it yet. Then again, for the mainstream users, some starlets to follow might be just the thing.
what's the optimum strategy?

For an adult learner, CONSCIOUS awareness of the different phoneme system of the target language is almost surely necessary. For some language combinations, dictionaries with International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation keys can help a good deal. Better quality language textbooks have a beginning section detailing differences in the sound system from the learner's native language to the target language.
Have better ideas using KWL charts
Text messenges were shut on the election day, but turned on later on. Other communication media went off then on with various time frames.
What is the point of the cigar section of the article?

To discuss a necessary step in mathematical induction, namely the basis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction
Running linux on a Mac laptop is a bit of a pain, mostly because of the keyboard/touchpad. The control and alt keys are in strange places (at least on my powerbook), and having only one button on the mouse is pretty irritating when you're not in OSX. I actually replaced my powerbook with a Linux laptop primarily for those two reasons; I'm always working in a terminal, so not having reasonably placed control and alt keys pretty seriously slowed down my ability to navigate on the command line and in an editor.

I'm not sure if this applies to the MacBooks, but on my Core2 Duo Mac Mini, the left audio channel frequently gets a lot of static when playing music; it seems to be a random thing on boot; either you will have static on this boot or you won't. It's a common problem of the Mini with Linux, but I have no idea if it ever happens on any other Mac.

If you're a KDE user, then OSX's finder will drive you mad. They don't have IOSlaves, but they do now have Fuse, which can allow you to browse remote file systems over ssh. If the ssh connection goes down, every finder window (including the desktop) freezes until the fuse connection times out, and it never feels quite as nice as KDE's IOSlave system, but it does make browsing of remote systems possible.

Spaces is a little flaky if you try to use it the way you use a normal multiple desktop implementation. With spaces, you can have either all windows of an application on the same virtual desktop, or you can allow them to be on multiple desktops. If you do multiple desktops, then alt-tabbing to a running application won't ever switch your current desktop. Since OSX generally only has one instance of each application running, this can make switching between windows of the same program on different desktops a bit of a pain. It's not terrible, but it isn't as smooth as it could be.

To be honest, I'm not really sure why a developer would use a MacBook at this point. When I bought mine, Linux's wifi support was a sick joke, which made it pretty pointless for a laptop. OSX is very polished and clean, but their developer tools for python, php, etc are going to be the same tools you'd be using under any other OS, I would think. Is TextMate a killer app for OSX now? What does OSX offer that's really good for web development?
This TED talk about aging by Aubrey de Grey is very interesting: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can...

And please do think about cryonics once again:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/
Netscape was working on a Java browser before their "problems".
Sleep can moderate emotional experiences
Ask PG: Have you allowed the quality to go down?
Whats happened to the homepage? This site doesn't look much like hacker news but has more digg.com type content now. On the plus side I don't visit as much and get more hacking done.
The green button has inconsistent behavior by application - firefox maximizes to whole screen, safari sizes to the window, iTunes goes back and forth from mini-Player

No cut and paste between windows - But I use the command line for most things, so it's not that big of a deal
This is my first HN post. If it's off topic, I apologize. Please let me know, and I'll learn my lesson.
Yeah, I hate the inability to maximize windows. In addition, I wish "paste plain text" had consistent keyboard commands across applications.
Your petro-dollars at work...Dear oh dear.
A friend of mine just got his first mac recently, and he mentioned this same complaint to me - I had no idea, because I almost never use the Finder for file management. (I assumed you could do cut & paste)

I always just use 'mv', etc. from a terminal. So this is genuine curiosity - is there something that other people do for which a Finder window and cut and paste is better/faster/less prone to mistakes, or is it just that the shell is not as familiar for them?
Full screen Cocoa apps, it's a hack but it works. http://ianhenderson.org/megazoomer.html
CTRL-F2 puts focus on the menu bar and you can use cursors from there. The &Accelerator keys common on windows menus though.. often aren't around, but at least in some apps have a zillion hotkeys assigned.
Iran's Day of Anguish
VirtualBox is very polished virtualization software released under GPL. I have run this on my MPB for a year with Debian, and XP as clients. It runs great.

http://www.virtualbox.org/
Both MacVIM and Komodo Edit have been around for years, and haven't really changed much while Allan has been working on TextMate 2, so I can't see how that's relevant.
Website of the people who posted the video: http://www.dreamfield.se/
Looks like Dell 2405FPW (I had one, great screen), which does rotate to portrait, but is not a touch screen.

http://images.google.com/images?q=dell+2405+fpw

Don't see any signs of third party touch screen add-ons, such as a platform under the monitor stand or a custom edge.

"Since this originates from Dreamfield.se, a group that works on HD post-production (note their about section: “Dreamfield are working with any aspect of post production and the main body of our products are made in-house.”), I’m now 99% sure this is a fake." @http://www.sampletheweb.com/2009/06/14/iphone-os-running-on-...
Processor: 32-bit PowerPC 450 at 850 MHz. The supercomputer has 294,912 processor cores. Instead of running it at a higher speed, they are quite correctly exploiting the parallelism. It's a net win for performance and energy efficiency. I guess that the desktops of the future will tend to follow a similar trend.
Can't wait. However, I mostly use GVim now.
Can we please stop saying the market is efficient?
Apple has Balkanized their OS's API. Most software out there only supports the latest release. The rest only supports two releases back. In fact with 10.6's release imminent it is hard to find software that supports older than 10.4 anymore.
But as vast as life itself?

It's pretty much required, as far as I know, for the SICP professor to thoroughly know the whole book, yet it is nearly impossible for any professor to do the same with Campbell and Reece, one of the more common intro to bio books.
combine these points with public high school budget cuts and it just gets worse. i still remember how demotivating it was being handed a heavy chemistry textbook from three decades ago on the first day of my junior year. the first 5 minutes alone flipping through those pages was probably what killed all interest in science for 19/20 in that class...i mean the authors were out of touch with teenagers even back in the 70s. so my biggest problem with textbooks has been their age: that has been the most significant in making a subject seem static and dead.

i've had CS and foreign language profs who used their own course notes updated yearly, and i ended up relying on these more than any prescribed textbook. the freshness made a big difference. the profs were also more invested in the material because they either wrote it themselves, or at least took the time to assemble. as such they were clued in to the contents and focused on them in lecture. a batch of notes also has less perceived authority than a textbook, which i think is a good thing, as it encourages questions and challenges.
And that's also not entirely right as these microbes were known before the the kid "discovered" them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria

But Teen discovers world saving tech is too good a story to let reality get in the way.
The ease of menu access on windows is eons ahead. Compare alt-f to reach the file menu with pressing ctrl-f2 to focus on the menu and then using arrow keys to reach the menu you want to get to.
Clearly not all lines are cut as new videos keep showing up on youtube.
"but I suspect that managing buffers (and making sure they end up in the right pane) will take as much effort as dragging a few windows around."

I think you'd be surprised. In my experience I have a fixed set of windows (not os windows, but panes, as you called them), and easily and quickly switch between them with Iswitch-buffers: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/IswitchBuffers

this add-on gives you incremental-search to choose among open buffers, and usually it only takes a couple of keystrokes to get the one I want - so instead of moving the mouse around and clicking somewhere small and dragging things around, I am back in business after something like 'C-x b sh' - control-x, b to invoke iswitchb, and 'sh' to get me to my shell buffer...
There should be no such thing as "over-participation". As long as you have something to say: as I implied - at least one group I participate in has managed to have a very large and long lived codebase that has little to no signs of the cruft described in the thread head. Careful choice of languages, paranoid test coverage evaluation, commit policies (like "you only merge into head if all the tests pass and no function is left untested"), extensive code reviews (one could go as far as do pair-programming all the time) and relentless refactoring and feature removal can get you very far.

You can think of the current *BSD codebases as direct descendants of the original AT&T UNIX codebase that have survived by employing one or more of the techniques I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
"Ack in Project" is so much better than the built-in search it's not even close.
>Most of his articles on it seem to be very tl;dr.

This is a good start: http://www.singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk....

These videos are good intros to EY's work too:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=611451877200179691...

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-82119137046281951...
The lack of good keyboard shortcuts for window manipulation. Window management in general is a pet peeve of mine.
Not an outlier.. I have had three hardware problems with my MBP:

1) Hard drive had IO errors and was replaced (2 months)

2) One of my keys stopped working. (9 months)

3) The right fan died. (10 months)

The last company I worked at had a small fleet of MPB's and hardware problems were a regular occurrence. Far more frequent than when I was at an IBM/thinkpad shop, but drastically less than when I worked with Dells.

Jeremy
wow, your on a completely different page - and im going to leave it at that.
Holding down the option key at boot will let you select what OS to boot, no need to mess withs omething thats hacky like rEFIt...
Last night it was #IranElection, the keyword "Mousavi", @Change_for_Iran, among several others.

Yes, there are rumors going around, but if you found the right users there were definitely people right there, standing on the streets. That strikes me as more credible than reporters which aren't necessarily getting the whole story, especially if foreign press is being asked to leave the country.

"Mackell says the crackdown on protests has also extended to journalists, making it almost impossible for the media to cover the story. "I saw yesterday a Japanese camera crew who have full government permission and were working with an approved government translator, still were beaten and arrested by the police for filming at a protest. That kind of thing is happening to a lot of people. Journalists are having their cameras taken." (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/14/world/main5087285....)

That's where Twitter -- as long as you're looking at people who are actually there -- comes in.
"The chances of a first time entrepreneur getting a meeting without an introduction from a trusted advisor are very small."

This is not true. You need an intro, but it doesn't have to come from someone who's your advisor. A lot of intros come from investors who've just met you themselves.
Bluetooth keeps on deactivating on my 13" Macbook. I've Googled this, and it seems to be fairly common.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/0413212

Resetting the power management memory seems to fix it, but this amounts to rebooting. C'mon! It's just like I'm back on Windows 95!
iPhone OS runs on x86 as well (see simulator in iPhone SDK).
> Basically, you have to separate his work as an economist from his politics or make a general distinction between quantitative and literary economics.

And we think that the Nobel folks made that separation and didn't do it to "kick Bush in the leg" (to quote a committee member's comment in a previous year about a given award)....

> I respect Krugman's intuitions even if his predictions are often wrong. It's hard to predict the future, even for a noted economist.

The point of science is to predict the future....
A new technology needs to be MUCH better than any technology it hopes to supplant. Of course "better" can have many different meanings.

Is Parrot 1.0.0 radically better than other (non-perl) VMs?
Facts on Iran, Twitter, CNN and The Tech Community In General
That's good — you've had better luck than I. It has crashed somewhat randomly from time to time for me, usually when I'm working with a lot of files or doing a search. Search works well for me, but it's sometimes slow and could be designed more effectively.
Seth is right on. Textbooks should be gone within ten years, especially the college introductory and public school pablum. I expect there will be some resistance. Textbooks probably count for a lot in the publish or perish race and they bring a nice side income. But decades ago other professors were putting together xeroxed collections of articles. Students are demanding some relief. I cant see anything but the trend snowballing.

I cant help but wonder if the demise of textbooks will lead to other significant revolutions. I remember sweating through problem after problem in calculus so I could do problem after problem on the tests. Wouldnt it be better to give the students Mathematica or similar software? It could do the work, while giving them a tool to get a deeper understanding of the underlying problem.
Second Life has no intrinsic value that I can see. Twitter does; it's persistant, searchable, real-time communication.
Very interesting. Perhaps the article should be titled "boy discovers conditions under which bacteria eat plastic". It still seems like introducing the new bacteria into the environment would be pointless, though. If the conditions in the landfill are left as they are now, I imagine the new bacteria would evolve back into what is presently optimal. If we modify the conditions, these new strains of bacteria would evolve on their own anyway... I guess I am assuming there are no local nash equilibria in the competition between different strains.
Look how many years it took them to finally do it though. Hell, there's practically nothing left to do...
I love my textbooks, it will be sad to see them go if they do. I've always preferred paper to pdf.
So, broadband companies want to be able to charge their customers for tiered access, but they want laws preventing websites from doing the same thing to them? How does that many any sense at all?
one tiny thing is that the analogue of ctrl + left or ctrl + right, with cmd, skips to the end of the line instead of to the next word, which is a smidge annoying.
Why don't more young professors release free textbooks online as a way of raising their profile in the field? Seems to me that should be a great way to advance on the tenure track, but is it actually? Certainly it's not the same as publishing original research, but it ought to at least help out in showing an interest in pedagogy.
The best way to quickly access a menu item is to hit CMD+?. Then just type in the name of the menu item. That, IMO, is a much faster way of accessing the menu than the ALT+foo shortcuts from Windows-land.
If you're interested in a third-party tool to do this, try MercuryMover: http://www.heliumfoot.com/mercurymover/ . Works very well.
Not much, but yeah search does brick out occasionally and TM must be restarted.
One example in a sea of corpses...
> Men Like Blonde Bombshells: The article claims this is all but universal but...to be honest...I like redheads. So that's disproved right there.

It can be statistically universal without being true of every instance.

For example, if you ask 100k Americans their favorite color, you'll find that more people say "blue" than any other color. I don't know if the same is true wrt blonds in almost every culture, but ....

> Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce: Maybe. But it seems like a pretty complicated thought process to be an instinct. Most men I know don't consider how they're going to pass on wealth to their son when getting divorced.

It doesn't have to be a "thought process". It merely has to affect the odds of genes being passed on. If male children of separated parents have lower odds of passing on their genes than female children of separated parents and children of unseparated parents, a mutation that encourages parents of male children to stay together will be favored.
if it were the simulator he couldn't have used multitouch since that requires you to press the Option key (it also shows 2 white, semi-transparant circles).
Lets get rid of css -moz and -webkit hacks already.

They aren't hacks. They are the official way of providing extentions whose behavior is not yet part of a finalized standard.
Is there a reason you linked to the 3rd edition? Oddly, James Watson is no longer listed as an author in the 4th edition, and a bunch of other people are added.
yeah, but can you name many others?
Use Option+Left and Option+Right. Also, hit Fn+Left and Fn+Right to go to the beginning and end of a file, respectively.
This is an outlier, since the Windows stack is so closed in general. I think a large number of VS users use it because they are forced to by their environment choice (or employer).

I tend to think of editors like TextMate, emacs, and vim to be chosen by people who invest some thought into making the decision, rather than by people that are forced to use something for work.
because sometimes you realize that in the beginning you thought that what you coded would suffice, but then users started coming up with feature requests/bug reports wanting more and you just can't do it without a rewrite, however big. like textmate not supporting non-fixed-width encodings, requiring any cjk user to use half-width fonts as a pretty annoying hack. i for one can't stand half-width fonts, so i just go with a different editor when i am working in more than one language.

and while that sounds like an incremental feature (and is), it looks like it's a nontrivial change among others to be done to textmate that 2.0 is aiming for.

if i had to wait this long to get proper cjk support (hopefully!), that alone to me justifies the long wait, and i wouldn't consider it to be a huge strategic error. that is, if this and more all happens with the launch of 2.0.
Gorilla arm.