skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For this to work I think the drive-chain would have to be a jointed drive shaft. I actually ride an (un-jointed) drive shaft bike - very handy in very harsh winter conditions.

However, that sort of drive chain would add even more complexity and cost.
Cheating...smart...whatever you want to call it. Being forced into speaking/learning as quickly as possible is by far the best approach I know. I can't imagine anyone having the determination to be as consistently focused as someone is when they have no option.
Heh, the onomatopoeia in this article really rescued it towards the end there.
So if some of the military is joining the breakaway sect, robots or not will not change the situation since both sides will have them.

But it is not a given that the military may not break apart. Supporting the population tends to happen in conscript armies. The US army is a professional army. They are loyal to the USG, and to the Army itself.
The PLEAC codebase was new to me. It reminds me of the idiomatic python reference (http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/han...) I've found very useful, but haven't delved into PLEAC to see if the coding examples are truly idiomatic.

Python > http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_python/index.html

Ruby > http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_ruby/index.html

Coverage varies depending on the language.
I wonder if this could print some remaining parts in the RepRap (http://reprap.org/).
Pretty brilliant marketing if it gets traction.
Are you one of those people who TeX's their notes while sitting in class? I'm always amazed by that. Wish I could pull it off :)

Long calculations are a pain, but I find doing it by hand is good, so that I can go back and find mistakes. I tend to use one long scratch pads, so that I have a sort of ongoing, live revision control. When I use LaTeX I tend to erase stuff, because I want LaTex to look nice, and of course the erased parts might have been useful later.
You know they make catalogs for that sort of thing. I believe you can even order through the mail.
I'm a bit surprised at this whole thread. I used to do some internationalization at Google, and the old policy was that cookies always trump geolocation. Maybe there's been changes.

Incidentally, Accept-Language was not always respected either, but that was deliberate -- it used to be considered an unreliable signal, especially in some markets where the user's OS was often non-localized or pirated. But I've heard that in these modern times it's more indicative of real user preference.
teen has 3000 daughters

Indeed
This warehouse sounds like a job that is far too tedious for me. I'm glad they get full health insurance and a 40 hour work week though.

I can't wait until every title they offer can be streamed to the Xbox360. They have a great selection already, but it will make Netflix even better than it already is!
Taking the Gloves Off XMLHttpRequest
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Feed Reader
CNC machines are your friend :-)
> What does the average American have that can stop a tank, or an armored personnel carrier, or a jet, or a helicopter

The conscience of the man in the driver's seat.

This is precisely the safeguard that police/military robots (controlled directly by generals or even politicians) will take out of the loop.

> robots or not will not change the situation since both sides will have them.

The side with control over the nation's industrial capacity will have them. This is the side that will win. And it will almost certainly be a cause for regret.

Technologies are not neutral:

"It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon--so long as there is no answer to it--gives claws to the weak."

"You and the Atomic Bomb", by George Orwell.

(http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/abombs.html)
The only depressing thing is how the family is handling their situation:

"Scott and Kelly spend much of their time watching TV, or playing games on their cellphones since they lost their jobs. Every day has become a slow-motion version of the one before, sitting around the house, each in the same spot, Kelly in the recliner, and Scott on the couch. Scott has gained 40 pounds since his last day on the job... On Monday, Scott picks up his and Kelly's unemployment benefits. After paying some bills, he sometimes goes to the Winners Circle bar, the tan building reflected in the glass, where he recently won $100 in a NASCAR betting pool."

Something tells me that is probably not the best approach. I have written to the reporter for their address so I can send a copy of Napolean Hill's Think and Grow Rich. A single passage from the book lifted me from a deep depression while stuck penniless in Japan to creating and surpassing my most cherished goals.
Cute super smart geeky girl band. The internet has gone down hill since then.
I moved to Curacao. Picked up papiamentu (local creole language), Spanish, and a little dutch (The official state langauge) pretty quick.

That is hardly practical for most people though. Take the classes, but supplement that learning. Watch Spanish language films with and without subtitles. Watch movies you already know very well dubbed in Spanish (I learned lots from that).

Chat up people in Spanish speaking countries and attempt to speak Spanish as much as possible. You might even find an English language student you can assist at the same time.

If you go eat at a Mexican place, order in Spanish. Yes, you will butcher it at first, yes you will feel silly. But you improve quickly by doing this.

Learning the way I did does have its drawbacks. While I can more or less communicate effectively, I know almost know grammar rules. I can conjugate correctly, but have no idea "why" something is correct.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement? Console modification issues sound unrelated to their task.
I'm about 8 months in on learning Japanese. I pretty much follow the method of alljapaneseallthetime(.com). Learning grammer, kanji, and set sentences. An SRS program like anki helps a lot with these. Then just immerse yourself (tv, music, books, games). Couple of helpful sites out there too (smart.fm, japanesepod101)
So after reading through all of the comments people have left here and through some of the related links people have posted, it really sounds that most of the folks who think this is a bad idea are people who travel a lot or are above the norm in regards to tech. Face it, if you're reading HN, you're probably a geek in one form or another.

But the thing is, most people aren't. They want to go to a service and have it work for them. To talk about Google specifically, remember for a second that this is a company that is insanely driven by numbers. Remember that thing a few months ago where their lead UI guy quit because they did A/B testing on 30 different colors of blue? I can't confirm, of course, but I would put a lot of money on Google having spent a lot of time doing testing on language localization based across a lot of different parameters including user agent, geo IP, etc. And if they're using IP's, there's probably a good reason why they do.

I'll also admit that I'm an American English speaker. I can't speak a second language, but I can read Spanish(slowly) and I understand a bit of Haitian Creole if spoken slowly. The only time I've ever been out of the U.S. is to Montreal 10 years ago on vacation.

The site that pisses me off the most at the moment is ups.com. They never remember the language I select(English) and their UX is a freaking pile of crap. Every time I go their site, I get the same cramped little box where I have to pick a language. They are a prime candidate to use geo-IP detection given their global business, and yet they don't. I contrast them to Google because they're both global companies, but while Google has put millions of dollars into testing their products, UPS looks like they hired some interns 5 years ago to design their site and haven't updated it since.
I'm not sure if there's any important distinction to be made between spying and "round the clock supervision." Either way, it's overbearing and paternalistic.
Enter the Apple tablet naysayers
If any of what he said rings true to you, you might be interested in a Kinesis Advantage keyboard. All modifier keys are under your thumbs at all times, as are Enter, Space, and Backspace. Arrow keys are horizontally arranged under your two dominant fingers on each hand:

http://tinypic.com/r/ouwshw/3

http://tinypic.com/r/10y3y94/3

Every key is hardware-remappable, and Escape is reachable with your middle finger. I've mapped F1 to "Escape-:" to get me a vim command prompt in one keystroke.
I disagree. Almost always, missiles are targeted against fixed military installations. Of course there are tactical missiles fired between aerial and ground targets, but again these are optimized for and usually deployed against hardened military targets like tanks or gunships.

The problem here is not one of drones firing at columns of tanks, but the fact that they are being deployed as anti-personnel devices targeted at guerrilla leaders. I am OK with targeting such people (and as it happens, I support the idea of fighting and defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, but I'm very disappointed with the implementation). The kind of drones we use now are basically lightweight planes, and given the physics of fixed-wing flight, that means fly-bys and high-yield single-use weapons.

If your intel is good and you have found an isolated Taliban training camp, then OK. But if it's poor, you're throwing a lot of destructive power at the wrong target. Whereas a sniper team might employ a scope or long-range microphone and observe the presence of many women and children or singing and dancing (conclusion: might be a wedding party), a drone on flyby can identify the existence of a target, but is poorly equipped to identify the nature of the target...which is one reason we've blown up a lot of wedding parties in the last few years.

Realistically, we can get away with it to an extent because the US is a big powerful country that can throw its weight around (and is allied with other relatively big and powerful countries). But a 50:1 kill ratio for civilians:bad guys is piss-poor - even if you assume a degree of dishonesty and propaganda on the other side, a ratio of 25:1 or even 10:1 is still piss-poor and exactly the sort of thing held up as an example of moral failure in history. By depending so heavily on tools which do not allow easy discrimination of military and civilian targets, we weaken our freedom to act effectively and early in other contexts.

I hope it's clear that my argument here is economic rather than political.
Why are you loading the processed data on MySQL tables? I am not sure about how much MySQL would scale, given that wikipedia has ~3million articles. Like I said, I am working on a similar problem right now and we are trying to avoid MySQL. Did you guys consider HBase or other big-table like implementations?

HN insights will be valuable, thank you!
I would much rather they: 1) fixed the appstore policies 2) create an OS X appstore 3) allow sale of media in an appstore like way so people stop creating apps to sell media and just use something Apple develops / buys

I get the feeling, that at the end of the day, the appstore will have some rating system with one of the ratings being "unsupervised content access".
So ##002# will cancel and return to AT&T VM?
Ask HN: Looking for feedback/recommendations - Hoot.com 
We are about to launch hoot.com through Facebook friends, which we figure will reach approximately 5000 people immediately. Before we do, I thought that HN would be a good place to ask for feedback and comments.

Thanks in advance.

Leo
I am skeptical as well after all of this App Store craziness.
Surfing The Mega Tsunami of Web 2010 Information
Here is a Taiwanese site called international bicycle design competition http://www.ibdcaward.org (Sorry, this site doesn't show enough information for bike design), Anyway,we already have similar bikes in production for people who take to the train and subway. More information at http://www.brandingtaiwan.org/eng/index.aspx
The IF Mode bike (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD2lFgMfh2k) folds much faster and the pedals actually connect to the wheel. I've been told that they started selling them already, but they seem to be a bit pricey.
I absolutely agree. But I'd like to add that if you use a more rapid development platform than Java (be it Rails, Django or whatever) you have more time to polish it, iron out the kinks, put a little bit extra effort into the user interfaces, and so forth.

Add to that Rails' integration with Prototype+Scriptaculous JS-libraries, enabling you to make easy-to-use drag-and-drop interfaces and so forth. At least for me, those things being easy to do, I tend to build better user interfaces than if I had to put it all together on my own. Simply because it takes less time and effort.

So, it is entirely possible that the Rails apps are more user friendly than the Java apps. I'm not saying this is the whole story, I just wanted to add that to the points you put forth, with which I completely agree.
It's really just the same people browsing both sites. I'll bet you, it's the same people browsing this site as well.
So, how does this equate to _why's Shoes framework?
The second thing I noticed was how, for a Web-based business, there were few computers -- maybe seven in the building,

Don't let that mislead you. Make no mistake about it, this is a highly automated business with a lot of thought, design, analysis, and most likely, very tightly-targeted software.

With all the talk here at hn about cool stuff like algorithms, scaling, UI design, CPM, etc., etc., etc., I still spend over 50% of my time helping customers move shit from Point A to Point B. That's it.

It may sound old school and boring, but it's anything but. When you're doing so much volume, every little thing matters. And lots of those little things can be dramtically affected by good systems. Here's where you have to get good or die trying. When the smallest mistake turns a 50 cent profit into a $100 loss, your systems must be on the razor's edge.

I bet the routing and error detection software in these warehouses is very sophisticated and handles outlying cases most people would never think of. Perhaps some journalist will take us on that trip with the next article :-)
I've been using http://www.livemocha.com/
How do you get the natives you help you and correct you, rather than just getting annoyed with you?
I think you make a good point.

I'd liken this also to Mike Caro's poker concept of the "Threshold of Misery"...Suppose you considered $1,000 a lot of money. Then, mentally, losing $400 is bad, but not as bad as losing $800, but losing $4,000 is roughly just as bad as losing $5,000 despite the fact that the difference is "a lot of money".

The government pretty consistently throws good money after bad.
Facebook Is Now the Fourth Largest Site In The World
Can you tell us more about this passage?
I don't think that works. Lots of people use a pirated OS. In Asia 99% of the people are using a pirated Windows, sometimes in English.

One of the software I've developed in the past auto-selects the user interface language based on Windows's own language. There had been at least one incident in which a customer complained about this; he was Filipino but was using a pirated Arabian Windows XP.
No known business has lasted longer than 1,428 years:

http://www.dailynugget.com/2007/04/worlds-oldest-business-cl...

Some nonzero percentage of all businesses ever started have not failed yet.

Although if I guess what the parent comment is thinking of correctly, there was a piece on HN fairly recently about how businesses that were doing well but closed were counted as 'failures'. E.g. the owner retired and closed, the owner got ill and closed, the owner sold up and the business was merged into another before it was running for 5 years, etc.
Outdated? I thought the Linux Kernel was outdated in comparison. The Minix kernel was rewritten from scratch in 2006 for version 3.
Honestly, I don't think this will make any difference. The Geneva convention seems to left on the shelf in cases of asymmetric war, not least because the weaker side is highly unlikely to be in a position to prosecute violations afterwards.
World War II All Over Again (Google vs. Apple)
Jay Leno is already a fan of CNC'ing otherwise unobtainable car parts: http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/jay_leno_garage/4...
This makes perfect sense. Because it incorporates human nature.

Defining what you want is work. No one wants to do it even in the rare cases that they can.

Asking someone to critique something right in front of them is easy. It's natural to judge, criticize, and suggest.

"Think a little, code a little..." repetitively relies on the latter, not the former.
When i was 6 years old, i watched a lot of cartoons and learned a few English words. My parents were impressed and they sent me to English lessons. After that i studied it in school, and its been 13 years now and I'm confident in my knowledge, although i have horrible spelling(because i learned it by listening and speaking mostly). Good thing spell checking exists :D
The high school Computer Science AP exam asks you to do this with Java. Missing a semicolon is a minor deduction, but it is still a deduction.
OK, let's write the performance critical part in Java or Scala and Clojure wins hands down for the rest, where we spend our development time at most.
I want a programming language which is as effortless as thought.
Assumes they were funny to begin with.
While the application approval process has very... odd..., they don't have a track record of simply stealing people's money without recourse like PayPal does (or at least not that I'm aware of). They have a large userbase and can handle the dollar level payments that many payment methods don't do well (too high fees, etc...).

It's a very different business than approvals for the app server.
Really I can't see that it's much worse than watching the professor write & talk to himself for an hour.
YouTube Gets Its Own Version Of AdSense With Promoted Video Upgrade
I used to cycle a lot when I lived in California. I knew several people that used a Bike Friday, and they were as durable and functional as a regular bike. I'd even see them on Century (100 mile) rides. http://www.bikefriday.com/
Cool idea. Just curious, did you try out for YC Paul?
Sticky Light Demo (laser interaction without camperas or projectors)
Im still struggling to get to grips that when I buy (license) software I can't disassemble or modify it. But hardware?
RE daemonizing, Ruby 1.9 does have a nice Process.daemon function (this is what the author is hoping for?). I'm also a big fan of the 1.9-introduced spawn() function. Not only does this make it easy to create background processes, but via its :in, :out, and :err options (also now found in system() and exec()) it's pretty easy to pipe one spawned process's output to another.

OTOH, I'm a big fan of the What's New in Python X.X articles. Nice features like spawn() seem to sneak into the Ruby codebase unheralded and practically unnoticed.
Jython doesn't have a GIL either. Nor does IronPython.
I want my cell phone to automatically switch between vibrate and ring based upon my location (vibrate at work, ring at home). I keep forgetting to switch.

I also want a land based bell in my house to ring if my cell phone is within 50 feet of the house (in another room, in the car).
Huh? Programming is easy. Thought is hard.
Does showing a large subest of the pages that point to it, default ordered by something that's roughly equivalent to pagerank, with the ability to then search within those results capture the essence of what you're getting at?
I think that's a great point.

The world as it is now is tight for resources. We are tight for land, oil, energy, and water. Globally we are trying to use less of all 4 to move towards a sustainable future. Farming uses up quite a large part of all 4 of those (meat farming creates some nasty byproducts along the way as well like water polution, air polution, steroids in our food, etc). We need to make some cut backs right now. Because meat is 10 (sometimes 50) times less effeceint, it's a good candidate for cutbacks. Maybe we can bring it back when we learn how to manage our resources better, but for now, I think it needs to be scaled way back.

You can bet your ass that if producing some vegetable like rice used as many resources as beef did, it would be gone in a heartbeat!

I suppose in the very distant future there could be a day where we have to choose between potatoes and tomatoes... I hope that day never comes.
Isn't that one of those history of education things:

60s - write a 5000 word essay on the causes of the civil war

70s - write a 500 word essay on why the civil war was bad

80s - write a poem about how you feel about the civil war

90 - draw a picture about how the civil war was bad

00s - Copy the PowerPoint slide, make CIVIL WAR bold.
12 seconds in you can clearly see two pedals.
Most people are actually really helpful if they sense that you're trying to learn their language and make an effort.

But as everything else in life you have to be determined if you want to succeed. Talk to the storeowner when you go shopping, find a coffee shop you like become a regular and start chatting to people and become known as that guy that's learning to speak Spanish, get a native girlfriend, get a job where you have to speak the language, etc.
> what are your reasons for that viewpoint?

I don't know his reasons, but I note that the financial arm of most organizations with both a financial arm and another arm makes a huge fraction of the total income.

Examples include GE Financial and GMAC, GM's finance arm (which was sold off a couple of years ago to keep the auto arm alive).
I'm not sure if I'll be trying that. ;)
Almost all AI these days (even academic research) is a "solution for a single domain," unfortuantely.
Or write the whole thing in Clojure and drop to Java / Scala when you find bottlenecks. (In the same spirit of Python & Ruby people 'dropping to C' for performance when needed.)

It seems to me that Scala is becoming the de facto Java replacement; which strikes me as nothing but a good thing.
I took my laptop to Mexico and visited Facebook once; it's been entirely in Spanish ever since. The hundreds of visits from the US before and after make no difference.

I'm sure it's possible to change, but it's sort of amusing to get all my FB email in Spanish. Even if you don't speak the language, FB does like two things anyway, it's not confusing.