skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language means blocking off nights and weekends for the next several years of your life because you'll have BLOODY HARD WORK to do. And make no mistake, it is going to be work."

Great answer, thanks!

Just for some context, I speak read and write about 7 languages (4 Indian languages - 3 contemporary, one ancient - Sanskrit) and 3 European languages (English, French and German) fluently, (fluently == I can read and write classical works, can be airdropped into a country speaking the language and be fine, but no one really speaks Sanskrit anymore of course :-D ) and can speak (but not read and write) a couple more Indian languages.

From my experience of learning all the languages I do know, I know that they are "work" to learn and don't have any illusions of learning Japanese being "easy".

I took 3 plus years of classes in both French and German for example, but I can imagine someone who puts in serious self directed effort (and knows a language in the "family" already - Sanskrit grammatical structures are close to the the ones in German, for example with the verb coming at the end of a long sentence,and several word "running together" and so on) learning either of these from instructional material (books + cds), listening to radio/mp3/videoclips/ newspapers + dictionary +grammar book + Internet discussion and so on, to the point where they may have strong accents, but they can read, write and listen to radio broadcasts etc.

Now I've learned only languages within the Indo European (English, French and German) and "Indian" langauges (though the South Indian languages belong to a different family than Sanskrit and Hindi which are "North Indian").

I enjoy learning languages and was considering learning a non-European, non-Indian language "just for fun". So yes, the motivation was "for fun" but without the illusion of learning languages being easy, or with an anticipated "giving up" before a few years of effort.

So anyway I was considering Arabic or Hebrew or one of Chinese/Japanese.

Unfortunately I don't have teachers/classes nearby and I think Japanese/Chinese etc may have additional difficulties than say, French or German due to their scripts and tonality and general mind-bendingness(at least I think they are mind bending!).

I was just asking you whether you think the combination of all other possible resources (books, cd, dvd, internet discussion, video clips etc) could get one to a point of reasonable, non-perfect-pronounciation-but-can-read-and-write-and-understand fluency in Japanese, effort over a few years being a given, for someone gifted at languages.

I take it you are saying "no, not likely".

Fair Enough!

Thanks again! The great thing about HN is that it is so easy to tap into so many knowledgeable people.
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I use Linode for some of my lower end services

But what happens when your application requirements don't scale as a power of 2 ??

I need a low powered box but with 1TB of storage. 1TB storage is not even a possibility with any of the King Sizes. Amazon S3 at 1TB would be to slow, as there are many many documents all being randomly fetched.

I guess I have to go with Colo/Softlayer unless HN friends have some better suggestions??
A friend of mine posted about her MBP overheating in the Apple forums and was promptly banned.

I understand not wanting negative press, but surely covering it up is only going to cause bigger controversy in the long run?
I completely agree with you. In addition, Biotech and gene modification cause as much damage to our ecosystem just like factory farming. In fact factory farming in most of the cases is about genetically modified cattle & poultry.
Apart from the ethical issue of whether we can let someone patent seeds and genes, we also face the issue where we facilitate the transmission of disease causing genes from one species to another.
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Actually, that's very similar to my experiences with Radio Shack. I was always treated very well by the Radio Shack folks, including when I was really young (like 10, or so) and would ride my bike over to browse around; a friend and I once went in with our allowance to buy parts to build a robot. They were very helpful with LEDs, batteries, and other such things.

My negative experience was one specific incident, but it was particularly galling because I had always felt comfortable at Radio Shack, and like the folks working their weren't being condescending even when I didn't know anything. I think Radio Shack started fading for me as a positive brand on that day. The TRS-80 was already moribund by then (the Tandy 1000, fat keyboard model, was probably on display at that point), and I think the writing was already on the wall for Radio Shack...but the cell phones hadn't started showing up yet.

I thought it was interesting enough to bring up, because I'd never really thought about why I have such a low opinion of Radio Shack, and that one employee ~20 years ago is a big part of the story. Sure, the phone sales guys are useless idiots, but I don't remember them vividly...they're just a wash of "Oh, yeah, Radio Shack was a waste of time, and I ended up finding it at Fry's." experiences. It was the guy who treated me like a dumb kid that stands out. It's also hard for me to recall any occasion after that on which I got useful assistance from a sales person at any Radio Shack.
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I'm not arguing that it isn't complex, I'm arguing that the feature-set of Word has nothing to do with the complexity of the file format by necessity. His assertion that the feature-set of Word is what makes it complex is simply foolish.
From what I saw, the author was saying that the two functions of college should be separated. Part of college is classes and academic preparation. Part of it is social, meeting like minded and intelligent people.

He made the point that the social aspect of college is primarily a function of economic background...people who are middle class or above go to college to meet people and be exposed to new ideas, while lower income people have to work and make great sacrifices just to get a degree and the opportunities that come with it.

It would be nice if the two were separated so that more people could afford to get the piece of paper without paying so much money for the social experience.
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It's true that any arbitrary file format's complexity doesn't necessarily have to be tied to the feature set of the authoring tool (e.g. LaTeX), but in this case much of the extraneous complexity of OOXML is tied to Word's feature set. In particular, the need for backward compatibility with features from previous versions of Word make this format more complex than it needs to be, given the current feature set.
This is a fantastic point. "Lite" news is very popular - it's just a factor of attention span and the time people have to read an article. I guess that many of the people who read the Gawker story would not have been willing to invest the time to read the original article in depth. What value has Gawker added? They've sensationalized it slightly, and summarized the juicy bits. The originator of the story is actually in a perfect position to do the same and appeal to a different market - if they can stomach it.
this makes little sense. as far as I can make out he's pasted some words in and is suggesting the AP has copyrighted it.....

That sounds like he isnt using the system as intended and is trying to use it to unfairly add to the evilness of the AP's new ideas.

No dice matey.
"Click here" all over the place is very much not the same as "see figure X".
Well that's what blog means, "web log", i.e. a journal of things its owner has found on the web and finds interesting. No interesting articles on the web -> no blogs.
Radio shack was a company in search of a problem to solve, hobby electronics were fading out, their computers had a head start for a little while and then got passed on all sides by other companies (maybe with the exception of the 6809 based color computer).

The product quality degraded, and so did the quality of the people working there. They destroyed each and every bit of goodwill they ever had. I remember the kits they sold that taught kids the basics of electronics, all the 'notebooks' with simple circuits that you could build. I think plenty of people of a certain generation gained a lot from their interaction with that company, I also don't doubt that they all ended up being disillusioned by them.

Cost cutting and bad manufacturing + rude and pushy sales people will not make you friends in any industry.
Old-media veterans may have solved the future of news with the Politico Web site
There's IE languages and IE languages. I think that, for example, a highly inflected free-word-order Slavic language may be more difficult to learn for an English speaker, and more revealing in the sense that you're referring to, than many non-IE languages.

(I know you know that, but many people here might not).
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I'm happy with Latex & Google docs.

Anyway, well done MS Office.
I have very fond memories of Radio Shack also. It's where my dad bought the first family computer, a Tandy 486, when I was in elementary school. The guy who sold it to us was friendly and knowledgeable. I remember asking him how I might program the computer myself. He said "Try QuickBASIC, and make an effort to learn how to touch type. It will pay off." It was some of the best programming advice I've ever gotten.

It seems like the "hacker" side of Radio Shack has fallen victim to the age of comparison shopping and online communication. For me growing up in a small town, Radio Shack was the place to go for technical advice from very smart people. And really, it was; Radio Shack was one of the few places where tech-savvy people could make money at a 9-5 with their skills and knowledge in just about every town in America. It was an ubiquitous bastion of DIY and technological enlightenment.

The few times I've been to a store since childhood I've been less than impressed with both the salespeople and products. It seemed like each time I was there, another drawer had disappeared from the electronic component rack.

So, whether they're changing the name or not, the real Radio Shack was gone a long time ago.
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I tried submitting that again.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=738925
You should add an authorization key that is generated for each page uniquely so that the ballot box can not be stuffed by calling the ajax url from pages elsewhere.

It's very gameable right now.
You just don't know you need one. You'll soon come around. They all do. :-)
Agreed. If I want to read trolls and mindless comments I'll go to Reddit/Digg.
Ironically this discussion is uninteresting and a waste of space.
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Why do we see IT people telling farmers how to farm, and not for example farmers teaching programmers to program?
Wow, talk about missing the point. The point of university (or used to be before they turned into high priced vocational schools) is to teach you how to learn. If you didn't learn AI or computer music in school then what's stopping you from learning on your own. In fact, you could enroll at any university right now and take those electives as audits.

And the 14 credits you took to learn another language barely cover what is required to speak that language. So congratulations you have the same vocabulary as a 7 year old native speaker. The school did their part. They got you in the game. How you go about the rest is entirely up to you.
There is longer post on Mojolicious::Lite here:

http://labs.kraih.com/blog/2009/07/perl-is-awesome.html
RadioShack already changed names in Canada to "The Source", after InterTan got bought by Circuit City, and lost the rights to the name.
On the contrary, more page views do lead to higher ad revenues. If Gawker is the second highest referrer, that means it's actually contributing to the revenue The Post earns by way of its website.
#2... Is that because of how much Corn is grown to feed livestock? Because as I understood it, the largest direct consumer of Nitrogen is Corn?
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But the reason the "family farm" you describe went extinct isn't because we all need so much more food than we used to. While that's true, looking at the history, there's no reason to think the move away from multi-crop rotations to corn on corn on corn was done for any reason aside from short-term financial interests of farmers decades ago, and then a shit load of direct farm welfare since.

I haven't read Omnivores Dilemma tho I have read In Defense of Food. Thinking I'll pick up the former this week. Sounds like a good read.
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Government run implies inefficiency and waste

Not always. In fact, existing government-run healthcare systems are much more efficient than the present US system.
I just think it's the culture at Apple. They're control freaks.
Hyperlinking "click here" is terrible form. Just work the link into a sentence by putting it over a descriptive phrase like "our revenue last quarter", or even (more explicitly) "the graph of our revenue last quarter".
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Your life is.

For most people, it IS about having what they need.

The iPhone is a wholly insignificant creation, as is my Sony W880i which had cut and paste the day I bought it and allows me to run any apps I damn well like ;-)
There's a Joel on Software article that discusses this. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

Historically Office file formats have grown from in-memory structures serialized to disk which helps in part to explain the complexity of them.
No, he's right. I've experienced this first hand during my undergraduate and second hand through friends at different Universities.

It's the sad truth of (the majority*) of British CS education...

I'm led to believe Cambridge, Oxford, York and probably a few others still teach good CS courses to strong students, but on the whole ...
I think this is a critical flaw, in this day of HIPAA and SarbOx. Any business that allows someone else to store their data (or even process it) risks personal responsibility for their officers -- and what corporate CTO is going to risk that?
Still using java? Lombok can make you more productive
Use annotations to automatically generate code at compile time. This greatly reduces java's verbosity, while maintaining tools like code completion & type safety.
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Learning a second language as an adult, while difficult, is definitely worthwhile.

As an American in Norway, I'm struggling to learn Norwegian for many reasons, not the least of which being that pretty much everyone here speaks English very well and doesn't mind switching to English. Still, I'm continuing to work on it and hopefully will be fairly fluent within a couple of years.
And that works when you print it how?

(If you're thinking "it doesn't matter" then you've not understood why Google Docs isn't ready for the typical business)
Office 2007 just got installed on my box at work, and the first thing I saw was a blue haze of controls and tabs that just confused me to no end.

When the feature set is as mature as what Office has, replacing the UI makes for more "look how old my current version is!" fodder for upgrades, but doesn't do much for making people on the fence want to stay with the product.

Then again, I am curious to know what the penetration levels are for various wiki products vs Word in the business market. I just can't imagine large non-computer companies embracing wikis terribly quickly. Word documents as data transfer still provide a simple and easy-to-understand model for how to write and share, even if it's a pain-in-the-ass in actual use.

If wikis want to replace word effectively, they'll need something like an Adobe AIR client. Web browsers are nice for lots of things, but I've nearly pulled my disks out and punted them across the room when an extra tab/backspace causes the browser to go back a page.
I'm studying French as a hobby and I'm at the stage (after six months) where I can read a newspaper now. I'm not fluent in conversation and still have a long way to go, but (I keep telling myself) it's my journey and I'm doing it for myself. French is, undoubtedly, easier than Japanese so I appreciate that you're commenting about that language specifically, but I do react against this notion that learning something new (esp. a language) is all blood, sweat and tears. I'm really enjoying the study: each new word I can recognise feels like an achievement. It might take me years to become proficient but the alternative is to spend those years in ignorance; it's a no-brainer. I would recommend anyone with a hacker mindset (but, basically, anyone) to find a way to learn a language or two.

The thing that got me started was this article:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/29/15258/287

And this article pointed me to a set of open source products (Mnemosyne particularly) which have helped immensely with memorisation:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
It bothers me because of the associations it brings to mind. This style of advertising is indicative of the kind of product development that google is supposed to stand against. When I see such an ad, my first reaction is to think "if you have to advertise like this..."

Of course there are all kinds of good reasons and places to talk about features. This way of doing it just feels tacky.
Quick question: are the German radicals German? Germany has a storied history with its immigrant Muslim population, as does much of Europe. In other European countries, for example France, burning cars is a crime which is largely the province for "disaffected youths" who are nearly universally Muslim immigrants or the children thereof, a very uncomfortable fact which is sometimes elided from the reports.

Back during the French civil unrest a few years back there were numerous reports which put the number of car arsons as in excess of a hundred. Per night.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article60...
* There's no reason middlish class people need to have things like physicians' visits and normal prescription drugs filtered through an insurance company or the government, they're completely affordable and expectable on their own.*

There is a good reason for this: tax avoidance.

"Insurance" (against everything) is paid for with pre-tax dollars. Doctor visits are paid for with post-tax dollars (ignoring HSA's, etc).

If car insurance got the same tax benefits, then car insurance which pays for gas would probably be available.
See here for a critical review of the book: http://www.firstthings.com/print/article/2007/09/001-economi...
Livestock feeding isn't the only consumer of large amounts of corn. Consider that just about every processed food there is has some measure of corn products in them. Then there's the ethanol industry, too....
Condoms don't protect you from missiles or even a (prehistoric) knife.
I'd second the recommendation for Farber's book. It doesn't try to hide that you will need to work, but the work can be enjoyable and productive - that's the sense of the word "easy" in this context, rather than "work-free". It also recommends some techniques for memorisation and has some great anecdotes from Farber's own language-learning experiences.
Actually, they both spend money on AdWords:

http://www.google.com/search?q=word+processor
It's a cute idea, to use annotations to generate getters/setters etc, instead of generating source code (IDE style). A good strategy for any boilerplate that a particular project requires.

Will other tools find this code? E.g. I think javadoc is source-based, and I don't know if it will invoke such annotations. I would expect the annotation spec to require it, for annotations that can create methods etc, but I'm just not that familiar with the spec.

BTW: great presentation video: showing the problem, showing the solution, showing how to get started. It might seem like overkill, but that's the way to sell stuff (though this one seems to be under the MIT license, ie free).
Typically when they start shooting at you from a crowd of civilians.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=738289 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=738269
If there were programmer companies that would be putting those farmers into bad situation by using there monopolies in order to tax them or to misuse their data or to put chips in there heads, they would ;-)

We hopefully not always listen to "experts" and we care about what happens around us.
During the peaks of the riots as much as 500 cars were burned every night.

The reason why the fact that the youths that commit these crimes are predominantly muslims is edited out because there are some risks associated with that becoming the focal point.

First of there is a resurgence in Europe of extreme right parties, almost every country has at least one of these and they are flourishing enough without being able to tap into more fear based populism. (Wilders, Le Pen, Dati, Griffin and a whole bunch of others are gathering wool with every news item that so much as mentions islam).

Secondly, the French government has actively foisted the conditions that have led to these riots by turning a blind eye to the festering problems of discrimination and class justice prevalent in France (and again, similar situations exist in other european countries, most notably the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, the UK and Belgium).

To put the spotlight on this fact would have risked further escalation, by downplaying it the risks of escalation were diminished, but so was the opportunity to really look at what causes these youths to be so dissatisfied with their lot in life.

Being born the son of a dark skinned immigrant in Europe is - in spite of all the politically correct mumblings - not the same as being born 'white'. It's very unfortunate that these issues are still so large in what are supposed to be democratic societies where everybody is equal.
It would be interesting to see the numbers for 2009; this article is dated 2007.
I don't buy this. I'm not an expert on S.O. but I'm close to one in regards to HIPAA. As far as HIPAA is concerned as long as you have a Business Associate Agreement that clearly spells out the privacy level expected from the other party you aren't going to get in trouble for a HIPAA violation.
How do you design object oriented projects?
Bad analogy. The right analogy would be computer manufacturers and farmers saying they want to buy computers that are manufactured in a sustainable manner and aren't causing significant environmental damage. I'm down with that.