skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks that.

I learned English when I was about 12, in part thanks to my passion for computers and in part because I had great teachers (in public school!). It's been one of the greatest gifts I've been given.

I know very few people who understand it. I do tell many how life changing it is, and how it greatly opens up your world and your mind... but mostly they look at me bewildered:

"why would I learn that? I'm doing fine!" or, "Nah, too difficult, and I don't have time"...

It's a shame, to not be able to share so many things I've learned with the people I care about, and to know how much they're missing. Ignorance is indeed bliss I guess.

I wouldn't even be here on HN if it wasn't for this.
Orbit your own satellite? Isn't that a bit like eating your own mouth?
Good idea, but it's already been thought of - L Neil Smith had Eagleburgers in one of his North American Confederacy novels - developed by a conservationist specifically to encourage the breeding of eagles.
If you read the page, you could see that all of them are using the same set of products/services, namely iCopyright Conductor which is the reprint/DRM bullshit.

Don't just tar & feather AP, tar & feather the whole bunch that are clients of this company!
I love the way there's a "discreet" LCD-style counter at the bottom of the page. That's very Geocities!

I would have thought that a company trying to do something so glamorous would have made more effort with presentation on its website.
They get to ride on a spaceship!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_%28religious_gr...
"The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'."
Maybe it's a bit like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_star#Use_in_astrophysics
If we're going to logic-chop... no, actually, it is not inconsistent. To be inconsistent, to be contradictory, it would have to claim both that the sole important thing is the natural quality of the quartz, and the sole important thing is the secret processes.

It does neither. It claims the quartz is unique, and the processes important. This is not a contradiction. (Both could well be necessary: it's common sense that good material could be ruined by a bad process, or that a good process can fail on bad material.)
It might be the socialist in me, but schools should always be public. No business should be involved in educating the next generation.

I think of universities more like a R&D department for the general public. (which also is why I think all software developed in universities should be Free)
So much useful information spreaded everywhere.

I suppose it's a good thing, but I also wish everybody would use StackOverflow and ServerFault ;-)
Quoting 5 sig figs is silly - those components aren't made in the US and so the price had changed by the time they wrote it down. Round to nearest $10 USD.
You know if we banned ALL words from press releases, we wouldn't have to suffer through press releases at all any more.
I think the two sites are complementary to linode/slicehost documentation. StackOverflow and ServerFault are not a general guide on how to setup a server from the ground up. I would only go there if I had a particular problem with my distribution or programming question.
People use the net to find a wider array of information than they did before, but they don't go as deep. On the other hand, book readers are much pickier in choosing the topics they delve into. I could probably go through my entire cycle of sites in the time it takes me to pick out a book at Borders.

I'll never forget stumbling across the 17th century tulip craze in a book from my public library. I never heard another word about it until a Matt Taibbi article a couple months ago. On a long enough timeline horizontal browsing intersects with information once reserved for those who dig deep, but how many almanacs would you have to read to know as much as a librarian?
Actually, the biggest problem is his confusion of free (as in price) with cost-less. Nothing is or can be cost-less, but that has little to do with the price charged for it.
Does anyone know if this can be used to create SUSE based appliance images for Amazon EC2 (i.e. something along the lines of rPath's rBuilder online[1])?

1- http://www.rpath.org/web/
> and one of the things I don't like about the experience is the way I completely lose awareness of my surroundings and people nearby.

That's a new one, never even thought that that might be the case. Interesting!

I've had it while on the phone and driving 'on autopilot', and since then I've become a lot more careful about using the phone in the car. (headset only anyway of course, but still). One day I missed my exit completely, and wasn't aware that it had happened until 20 minutes later (still in the same conversation). Quite a good lesson.
I am moving there soon to start a new job. I have been an east coaster all my life but I can't wait.
My mouse. I would love to control OSX entirely by keyboard. I tried the framing systems on linux but it just wasn't for me.
So, I wonder if you're thinking of starting a business based on one of these "I hate using" stories. If you are, I'd advise caution entering a market you don't actually understand personally. Yes, we all make software that eventually grows to do things we don't use ourselves (I use functionality that touches less than 10% of our total codebase on a daily basis, and never hit more than 20% of it, for example), but without understanding the core problem set of your target audience, I'm not sure you can build effective software to solve those problems.

When I worked in scientific computing, one of the founders of the company I worked for had done doctoral work in the areas the software was covering, and the company hired domain experts, who also happened to know a bit about software development, whenever they moved into new fields.

This is the reason I've never gone into medical billing, despite the fact that I know the medical billing software industry is a mess, and also an incredibly lucrative market. I know it is a mess, because my sister owns a medical billing firm, and I've seen the software her company uses. But, without spending a few months working in the field, I wouldn't be effective at solving those problems. If I ever did decide to start a company in that field, I think I'd need to spend some time in the trenches of that particular field.

Likewise, I suspect if you do find yourself a lucrative and currently poorly served market niche to focus on, you will need to also find a few companies to work closely with, so you actually understand the problems and how they can be solved. Also, keep in mind that the harder existing software is to use, the more training existing users will have had to know how to use it. Don't underestimate how hard it is to convert someone from using "complicated but familiar" solutions to using "easy but new" solutions.

Not seeking to rain on the "I hate X" parade, just pointing out that if you aren't scratching your own itch, to some degree, you have a lot of work to do just to begin to understand the problem domain.
The Lost Tools of Learning: Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric (1947)
The web is great for serendipity and will eventually leave books lagging far behind in that area (it certainly has done this with respect to library stacks). But nothing will ever replace the sense of excitement one can get from antiquarian books if one is a lover of history and traditional learning.

I have an 1850s 5-volume set of the complete works of Aristotle in 2-column format with the original Greek in the left column and with a complete Latin translation in the second. For a language lover like me, the web has nothing even remotely close to this. There is an inimitable sense of discovery you get as you thumb through pages and compare column to column in a work such as this - a sense of discovery that the web can't begin to match.

I think this has to do with both history and aesthetics. Why was such a work ever printed? What does it say about those who did it? Why all the care to put it in handsome bound volumes? Such factors combine with the unusual nature of the subject matter to enhance the sense of discovery one gets when reading such a work. The web can’t do this because it can’t provide either the historical sense or the aesthetics.

Now imagine a room full of such works from different times and places spanning the centuries. They do indeed provide an amazing sense of discovery that cannot be matched on the web today.

There is no magic to antiquarian books and there is no need to romanticize them. They are just books. But they can be really fascinating. Serendipity with such books is different from serendipity on the web - it goes beyond content to a sense of discovering how people in different times and places lived and about what fascinated them in their day. Perhaps the web can some day capture this same sense if technologists can devise a way to capture a comparable sense of the intangible elements of time and aesthetics. It does not do so today.

Of course, if one's sense of serendipity turns on the content of the information alone, then these intangible factors are irrelevant, but I think it is artificial to try to separate those intangibles from the content itself when it comes to the pure excitement of discovery..
Poll: How fast do the images load on my app?
Summary: http://doleaf.com - How fast do the images load?

I'm trying to get Amazon CloudFront set up as my CDN, and I'm trying various tricks like using multiple CNAMEs to trick the browser into opening multiple connections to CloudFront. So far, everything has just made it slower, so I'm back to a single CNAME, but even that is kind of slow.

Please go to http://doleaf.com and see how long it takes to load all the plant images. It's tough for me to get a clear idea since there are many levels of inter-related caching going on (DNS, CloudFront, browser, etc.)
under 1s
1-5s
5-10s
10-15s
over 15s
Direct link: http://doleaf.com
There's quite a bit of serendipity on Wikipedia: http://xkcd.com/214/

Almost all Wikipedia articles are within 4 hops of each other. You can open as many tabs as you like, but now you have the choice.
I know this is flippant, but if you're quite keen to run more than one Ruby web app, why not try ActiveRecord (so you get the Rails ORM) with Sinatra? It's a pretty lightweight solution.
Interesting but way too long.

The third replicator that will doom us all: the web (and the power it, along with all the connected devices consume).

More interesting (to me anyways): What if little by little Google "decides" to start showing us information that will lead to our destruction?

Like what the traditional media mostly does, except we trust Google, right?
Hmmm, these prices aren't that competitive with dedicated servers.

$479 will get you a dual-quad core dedicated with 16GB of ram these days. Even the lower end ones (2880MB) you can rent a 4GB SoftLayer box for the same price.
I'd rather start with with pondering "what's the best way (that I can imagine)" and then move to "what's the surest route to improvement".

I don't think it's usually the case that someone who asks "what's the best ...?" is really only interested in things that are absolutely the best.
I think most people are missing the point here. What he is saying is that CS (and the university model itself) has stopped being a correct vehicle for preparing students for a technical society.

I happen to agree with the guy. The model is broken, and we should move on to something much more libertarian, where the individual is in control of its own learning.
> Almost all Wikipedia articles are within 4 hops of each other.

Neat fact, do you happen to have the source? I'd be interested in hearing more on this.
So have your home PC move files from the Dropbox folder somewhere else every day. That way when you go to upload your next set of files, you've got a fresh 2GB of unused space. Since the folder would be empty, there'd be nothing to sync back down to the new PC.
Sydney, at 7.2Mbps 3G; nearly instantaneously.
I always got non-first language words confused. What interested me was when I was relearning French and learning German (to read patent docs) after having learnt sign-language (as my 4th studied language) I could think of words in sign when I was trying to find the right French word. It's kinda weird to think of a word and have an action come to mind.
I absolutely agree with all of the points Chad makes here! I just recently returned from a 3 month stay in China after studying Chinese for two years and feel the same.

An interesting story was when I met another American traveler in a hostel in Shanghai. He was clearly loving his time exploring China, but every time we spoke I felt so bad for him. He was absolutely shackled to the parts of town where he could safely tread or easily find. I would spend a day wandering through streets, major and minor, dipping into shops or checking out maps to find new locations. I could fearlessly walk into a restaurant and have some idea of what I would be getting into. Best of all, I could ask anyone to help me out or just to tell me about their country -- and in a place like China, with thousands of years of rich history, people love to tell you wonderful stories about their country.

When you speak someone's language, they feel comfortable around you. They're willing to help you out or listen to you try to explain things you're not quite capable of. There's an immediate reciprocation of the effort you put into that immersion in their warmth and desire to help. Better, if you go somewhere where foreigners are less common (seated train rides in China are a particular example) everyone is excited to meet and share with you.

All of these things are pretty much inaccessible if you don't speak the language. So, as stereotypical as the desire to stop being monolingual is for your average American, absolutely do learn another language and then go use it.

You can't imagine how tiny a chunk of the world you live in until you do.
Google Voice, FCC questions Apple and AT&T
That brought a tear to my eye.

From Los Angeles,
Le Dominator
According to the book The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign-Language Crisis by United States Senator Paul Simon,

http://www.amazon.com/Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-Forei...

the United States is EXTREMELY unusual in its degree of monolingualism among native-born people. The book said that the United States is the only country in the world, for example, in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. academic degree without gaining a working knowledge of a second language.
It is. See the description for "Personal Care". They say the average for sex is 54 seconds. :-)
I guess their software doesn't support having a name unless you are employed by TechCrunch.

TC runs Wordpress. They could give one time posters their own account, or use a workaround like custom fields. I'm sure they're aware and its intentional. One nice side-effect is that you can easily find all guest posts.

apparently people are using "@foo" to just mean "foo"

@qeorge has become a convention meaning "qeorge on twitter", but it does arise from the @ reply functionality. It became common to link twitter accounts in a message for context, i.e.:

Drinking a @drakesbrewing IPA with @jrockway
It is probably only good for communications. A spinner with poor attitude control (you do not really have a lot of room for good mechanical or optical rate gyros, not to mention the lack of any means to perform orbital maneuvers) and small payloads will probably not work well for imaging or radar.

However, there are a lot of companies and universities looking into small satellites, since it is much, much cheaper than launching larger satellites with expensive payloads. There is a lot of research in the area and a lot of small sat conferences as well (e.g. http://www.smallsat.org/). If this pans out, it could be the end of the US government's large satellite oligopoly, which currently consists of only a few large companies like Lockheed Martin (disclaimer: that is where I work) and Boeing.
Yes, you must remember that you might think of a library as a building full of books, but to a librarian it's always been a means to an end.

A librarian's job is to archive and retrieve information. For them, having to physically unshelve and reshelve books is not an act filled with nostalgia and romance -- the novelty has long since worn off. Moving books around is a tedious cost of doing business. It's what they make the new interns do. They won't miss it any more than grad students will miss photocopying journal articles. [1]

(God, do you realize how much of my life was wasted lugging giant bound journal volumes around, shlepping them on and off of photocopiers, just because I went to grad school five years too soon? You young whippersnappers don't know how easy you have it!)

---

[1] With the important caveat that librarians are not at all impressed with the archival quality of electronic media. There's nothing like being handed a truckload of seven-inch floppy disks and being told to preserve the contents for the next 500 years. The job has its challenges.
Here in Wales schoolchildren are forced to learn a minority language in school. Welsh Language is given a very prominent position - it's only spoken in Wales (and bizarrely in a small area in Patagonia). I'd sooner have my kids learn a language they can use to communicate with other people that can't speak English - it's possible that there are perhaps a couple of kids now that haven't been taught English, Welsh all but died before being resurrected as a [false] part of nationalist pride.

I find it very strange, I'd sooner Hindi or Urdu or Mandarin or Japanese or Spanish. Something useful. They may as well be learning Ancient Sumerian (I'd still probably prefer that).

Not all second languages are equal.
Agreeing with the author of the submitted article that learning a new language is a wonderful thing, and agreeing with you in your capsule summary of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity hypothesis), I have to respectfully register disagreement with the strong version of that hypothesis. Most people are stuck in their thinking because of evolutionarily developed cognitive illusions that are not language-specific.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1

Many people can be very creative and think thoughts that have never been thought before by their fellow language-speakers even if they are resolutely monolingual. And many of the features of language that might seem to be the most influential on human thought (e.g., whether or not a language has strong concord for grammatical gender) in practice don't seem to lead to any differences in thinking.

That said, even though the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong, it's still a good idea to learn a new language. That does, at the very least, expose a reader or listener to authors or speakers from a different cultural tradition, and that does tend to result in new ideas and new approaches to identifying and solving problems.
That was one of the most useful articles I have ever read.
Solving medical problems in developing countries through crowdsourcing
There's an even greater discrepancy between people with High school vs advanced degrees, but I'd be willing to bet that in both cases the difference is accounted for by people doing low-paid night work rather than any inherent preference for staying awake until 3am.
(I don't see why it's off-topic.)

Presumably categorized as "other leisure" or (less likely) "socializing".

... Nope, wrong, it's actually categorized as "personal care". At least, that's the top-level category it goes in in the survey itself, but whoever created the NYT graphic may have organized things differently. (In fact, they definitely did, since they have a "computer use" category and that is certainly not a top-level category in the ATUS.)
It depends what you mean -- for me (Christchurch, New Zealand) it took about 5-7 seconds just to get the page up, then 2-3 seconds after that to load the plant images. The 2-3 seconds wouldn't bother me much, but the 5-7 before anything shows up does.
My whole life was entirely changed by the decision to try learning Chinese after elementary school lessons in German (also a heritage language in my family) and secondary school lessons in German. The East and West can meet--just learn the language of the other side. I strongly recommend to everyone to give an earnest try to learning a language you don't speak as a native language, especially if your language-learning efforts can be paired with lengthy foreign residence. There is a lot to learn from speaking to everyday people who grew up in another country and who don't share your cultural assumptions.
Hi neighbor!

We recently moved to Palo Alto. I was standing right outside our offices and saw Steve Jobs riding his bicycle down the street.
Wow, Mountain View looks exactly like my home town.
Recursion is only considered an "advanced" algorithmic technique because people are taught to think of it that way. Recursion is actually pretty straightforward once you have a bit of practice using it.
That's really cool and creative. Nice find.

OP: I really hate to be this guy, but the page doesn't use AJAX, just Javascript. You may want to update the headline.
But if we're going off of general population types, then wouldn't that assumption apply to low-paid hispanic immigrants? I think the difference between black and the other designated races is compelling and worth looking in to.

Also, why no Asian differentiation?
What's the point of that? We already have hyperlinks.
MacTastik Weekly - Snow Leopard
My wife and I are thinking about how to educate our daughter, so I've been doing some reading. I found this essay by Sayers very compelling: use a child's built-in stages of learning for what they're worth.

Our daughter is only 2.5, but she's a top-notch "Poll-Parrot" already. Cram in the knowledge when they're good at memorizing, then teach them how to use it and what it means later, when they're better at thinking.
Everyone. Although, really, this goes beyond being just a large headache for everybody involved; it's more of a startling clusterfuck. I mean, honestly, how does a system get to be so broken that they graduate CS students who can't program a computer? Or simply stop offering core classes like compilers?
You need to understand what has come before so that you can build upon it effectively. Taking past progress for granted will not help develop the future; if anything, you'll get a lot more reinvented wheels.

Among the higher-level problems you mentioned, how many of them are interrelated? I'd rather see professors cover material that is useful in 80% of cases, even if they are well-trodden topics - students can specialise in the rest. In my CS course (UK) we studied parallel systems, including MapReduce; distributed databases and NLP can be studied optionally along with several other topics of much higher level than mere page faults. That said, not all CS courses are created equal.
Scammer Plants a Fake ATM At Defcon
Philip Wadler: What does logic have to do with Java? [video]
John Chambers of Cisco - Treasure Your Setbacks
That does sound much more sane, good to know.

I guess any increase in returns from this Google Voice palaver will get highlighted if more than the 70% is taken from the developer's account.
Hello from a very hot conference room somewhere off Sand Hill rd...
you think how lucky you are to be alive now, when the irrationality quotient is so much lower.

I can't tell if you're being serious or if this is the most deliciously ironic riposte that I have ever had the pleasure to read. Either way, I'm grateful.

Yes, thank goodness for our increased rationality since the days of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. If not for all the rational thinkers we have today, we might have had to endure one or even two completely irrational economic bubbles in the last decade alone. Man, wouldn't that have sucked?

Anyway, I agree that the irrationality quotient is lower, but I wouldn't go so far as to claim that it's much lower. ;)