skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Emphatically: NO. I'm definitely not the best developer in the world, I've met 18 year old kids that could literally run rings around me.

But being 'best' in anything is not the criterium. Only one person can be 'best' at anything. But to put the whole workload of the world on the shoulders of that 'best' person is not feasible. So everybody contributes to their ability. And we try to learn as much as we can from the best.
I'm not sure why this sort of fluff is on the front page. Self-affirming and relatable? probably. Interesting? Not at all. I learned nothing going 30 pages in.
I don't know, but this sounds like a hell of a lot of fun. Perhaps it's just the reporter pumping up the story, dunno, but it really conveyed the image of a meeting of passionate people that enjoy what they do.
Gah, the internet ate my thoughtful response: PD doesn't protect your right to be named as author, IMO that moral right should be protected as it is in the Berne Convention.

Copyright [supposedly] ensures that works move into the public domain. The problem with copyright is that the terms should be of the order of 15 years, not life + 70.

Without copyright books would simply not be edited - editorial staff couldn't be paid as on release an opposing publisher (lulu?) would simply grab the book and publish an identical but lower cost copy. The first copy sold would have to assume the costs of the entire production, authors, publishing staff, printers, machinery.

Bands would probably still fill venues. But songwriters would be working for free as they could never demo a piece without "spread[ing] it".

DRM and contract law would fill the void and IMO less pieces would ever eventually enter the public domain and the arts would no longer provide most of the careers it does now.

A painter may still sell pictures, but a photographer could only sell each one once. Any advertiser could use your personal picture if you published it online. Anybody could claim your programming library, not only for free, but as their own if they could access the code in any way.

Copyright is not _all_ bad.
Ironically, the head of the CS department at my University used to say: "unfortunately, positioning is more important than knowledge".

This means that Microsoft would probably not have happened if Bill Gates' mother hadn't been connected to IBM's chairman at the moment. Microsoft didn't even write the first DOS they sold to IBM!
Subjectively, I'd wager.
True. I remember when Pirate Bay implemented it and changed the language to Malay for me and I have to manually change it back to English. The internet, especially an international torrent site where 99% of the stuff posted are in English, is better read in English. Making it in another language is just plain annoying. If you want your audience to know that an option to change languages is available, just makes it more visible. Larger icons or a more prominent placing. Let the user choose, don't make the decision for them. If you make the decision for them, you are just insulting the user's intelligence and at the same making yourself look stupid.
Until this someone who shares your load is found, it's only a hypothesis that could be rejected.
you mean you weren't 19 in 1993, spending your daylight hours wandering around campus like a zombie, hoping you might pass maths this time and your evenings going home from a nightclub called cybersomething (to which you had a laminated! membership card!) to stay up till dawn on a 9600 baud modem, digging rooms in a MUSH, chatting to marines in Palo Alto, wondering what exactly that girl earlier meant by that comment about Tantric sex?
Well, VIMScript was not "designed". It kind of grew all over the place.
Make sure your VC isn't a jerk
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I just wish the "Next" arrow would stay in the same place..
onclick=confirm('Are you up-modding because you feel the comment added value to the discussion?')
He's always going to grind that ax.
I had a Strida in London. It seemed like one of the best-designed folding bikes around: kevlar belt (instead of a greasy chain), folding and unfolding an A-frame bike took literally 10 seconds.

But here's the catch: the tires are all really small, so it's much trickier to balance, and it's much less comfortable than a full-size bike.
Surprisingly simple question that is very hard to answer well I think....

If you only test one variable at the time then you simplify your tests to the point where you can extract some metric to determine whether you've improved or not compared to the old situation.

Nothing stops you from then doing more ab testing with other combinations relative to your 'new best'. This may include going back to the original setting with some other variable changed, that way you avoid the local maximum problem.

So say we have a site in position 'A', we make version 'B' and we test them against each other. If we find out according to our chosen metric that 'B' performs better we now have several choices:

We can do another A/B test starting from 'B' changing some value to see if we can improve on 'B' directly, or alternatively we can go back to 'B' versus 'A' + some new modification that is not 'B'.

I hope that's clear....
The rebuttal paper is discussed in the article.
I also use omnifocus on all my computers and a big moleskine to doodle and dump lists. I got a HTC Magic last week so I'm making a omnifocus version for android (web based so can be used with other phones)
Agreed, but also we not only try to learn from the best, but also try to teach what we know to those who know less.
This seems to be the main sticking point for people I know - Android Phones are nice, but thay aren't iPhones. It's the hardware that is holding up Android rather than the OS, as far as I can see.

If there was a phone as well made as the iPhone that runs Android, I'm sure many developers would switch to an open platform rather than continue to jump through obfuscated hoops for Apple.
One of the better ways I think is to look at the localization settings as reported by the browser, use those as a default and allow the user to override this in an easy way.

The header that contains this information is:

Accept-Language:

If you're into php this is the variable you'll need:

$_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]

Other platforms will have their own mechanisms to reach the headers as sent by the users browser.

Make sure that it is easy to change because your user may be more comfortable with a different language than the one that the browser reports, for instance the user could be a Spanish tourist visiting Sweden and using an internet cafe in Stockholm.
Why break 1 when you can have 2 at twice the price?

[John Hurt in Contact]
Exactly the point I was trying to make
I disagree with your statement that choice of language "doesn't matter one bit." Some languages are better at some tasks than others. Appealing to functional equivalence ignores the relative cost (in time and characters typed) of expressing the same idea in different languages.

See PG's essay where he talks about the Blub Paradox: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Note that I think this point is different than how this thread started, which was about teaching.
More likely: because repeating the first line of the article doesn't add much to the conversation.
Paypal - a bit awkward
Often when I find a bug in docs I don't bother reporting it, but...

If there was a website that showed the documentation for libraries and allowed you to edit the docs for functions / classes /etc wiki style, would you use it?
Oh hell yes! To put it another way: Have you heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons.

(cough...)
As someone who's been at the receiving end of attempted teaching sessions (which occured because the self-appointed teachers overestimated their own knowledge, underestimated mine and never bothered finding out what I knew), I can only say that the best programmers do not try to teach, but will gladly share what they know when asked.
But, if you've published that work once, eg on the internet then you can re-publish the same work when another party comes up with their own version (AFAICT). So when AP publish their equivalent of your prior published phrase you simply re-publish that identical excerpt - you've haven't copied from them you've simply taken a timing queue.

You need a good date on your copy, I believe you are still allowed to register a work with the US government, so that would do, or get someone like archive.org to take a copy for you.

What could AP do?

You might also try for prominent publication of your word lists so that you can argue that AP copied you based on them having the opportunity, but I don't think you'd swing that one by a long shot.

This is absolutely not legal advice by any stretch of the imagination!
I find it somehow disappointing how many people confuse marketing with sales or promotion.

In the low-brow definition marketing is the set of all decisions regarding product, price, distribution and promotion. As soon as you start a company, you will do marketing. It's either bad or good or something in-between but it's marketing.

Promotion is something different. You can forget promotion, sometimes. Provide a working cure for AIDS or cancer and you need no (active) promotion.

But in today's crowded markets, the possibility of making a software that solves problems no one else addressed yet, is rather low. Then, promotion becomes as important as the product. They interact.

Promote your product badly and you'd be wasting money when you're making a good product. For in most cases, you don't need to make your software scale or easy to enhance, if just a few people know about it and use it.

Make a bad product (with no intend to improve it later) and you'd be wasting money when you're spending lots of it on promotion. For sooner or later, your customers will turn to your competitors and there will be no way to get back the money you spend on promotion.

In other words: All your marketing decisions, including how much money you spend on the product and promotion, affect your profit.
That's very true, consider that a beta release bug ;)

So how about: "And we try to learn as much as we can from the best and from each other." ?
This is what I come to HN for.

Awesome, well done. Don't listen to all the folks here so quick to rain on everybody's parade. I get a huge kick out of seeing people build things like this, and seeing them start and develop over time.

It's beautiful and I love it and I can immediately thing of a number of scenarios where it will be very useful.
Ratings agencies threaten to downgrade country ratings
The Postmark Experiment
Harvard attempts to trademark phrases like "Lessons learned"
Or assume a default language and then have a clear option to change to something else. That's the same number of clicks in the worst case, but less in the average case.

If you use the user agent string in combination with geo-location (and maybe a few other factors such as Facebook API or twitter API heuristics), you could lower the number of wrong languages using a sort of learning algorithm too.
Nobody cares - a fundamental principle for startup socialites
A faster Ruby on Windows is possible (benchmarks for 4 implementations inside)
I know from experience that there are a few issues with that too. First, how do you ask?

One way is to prominently display links to the other languages. You could put them in the top right corner of every page. You'd be surprised at how many users can't figure this out.

Ok, so maybe you give first time visitors some kind of popup, interstitial page or overlay thing asking what their preference is and save it for future use. So what language do you ask in? Besides, a very large majority of your users will be using one language- let's say English- so this is totally pointless for them. Imagine if Google or HN asked you for your language preference every time you cleared your cache. It gets annoying quickly and you could risk increasing your bounce rate.

A better way is to use a combination of detection, asking and then prominently displaying alternate language links. Identify some markers that may suggest a user wants a language other than the primary one. User agent string, IP geolocation, referred from a search engine where they did a search in another language, etc. Ask those users what language they would prefer; don't bother the others. The alternate language links are still available to the ones that slip through the cracks.

Best Buy does something like this on their site. Set your language preference to Spanish in your browser and visit the home page to see it in action.
Even if you were to open up the Google home page in Maltese or Welsh or some such language, I don't think it'd be too much of a challenge to work out what to do with it.

In the UK, it redirects me to google.co.uk (which, as a UK resident, is the site I want) if I request google.com. If I type in (say) google.de it takes me to the localised version. Incidentally, the German Google home page has an option to go to "Google.com in English" in the footer.
"But America speaks to the whole of humanity because the whole of humanity is represented here; our possibilities and our propensities."

Sounds a bit Nazi, a nation over all others ...

God bless America, we, the people of the Earth are proud of seeing it, understanding it and learning from. And (now as the world order is changing) we are inviting Americans to see us, understand us and learn from us.

And God bless we are living fast times. Our grandchilds won't ever think in terms of nations, borders and states
"assume makes an ass out of u and me"

I cant recall the number of times I have been cursing at a website, in particular Google, when I get the whole site presented in Thai characters. Wtf?! I can't read this stuff. Give me an English button and for once, please remember my selection.
In Norway, "mvh", an abbreviation for "med vennlig hilsen" (literally, "with friendly regards") is standard. I'm often asked how to translate that into business English, and I'm as stumped as everyone else. There doesn't seem to be an obvious choice.
That's what I meant, (I guess I didn't express myself very well)
LOL. Like I have antimatter weapons made in Switzerland or something? Just look up when the LHC went down and when it was reported. Just because you can't use Google doesn't mean it's not "true".

CERN and antimatter weapons:
http://cui.unige.ch/isi/sscr/phys/antim-BPP.html
Btw. the Air Force is working on antimatter weapons as well
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/...
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Mobile, Broadband, iPhone & Innovation
Stack overflow got exposure to thousands of developers from day one thanks to Joel/Jeff. If they'd stuck the site up anonymously it would be nowhere near as well used now, and might even have never got anywhere without an initial critical mass of users and questions/answers.

The UI might keep users interested once they're there, but it's not going to get them there in the first place.
Usually, when I use google I look for english content, even though I live in a spanish-speaking country. It really bugs me when I go to google.com and get redirected to the local version. It bothers me not only because I'm looking for english content, but because Google localizes search results yielding a lot of unrelated or not so relevant stuff.
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I'm not talking your fantasy book I'm talking about the actual antimatter experiments at CERN. Read this: http://cui.unige.ch/isi/sscr/phys/antim-BPP.html
It's not so bad with Google; I know about google.com/ncr and I know how to get to the preferences even if I can't read any of the text. I chose Google because it's a very visible company, and one that should know better.
Archivd: Simplify Your Online Research (useful tools review)
Augmented Reality Twitter is the Coolest Thing Ever
That's exactly what I mean with dealing with critics. There is no place on the Web where you can dare to criticize the LHC without being voted down, ridiculed or insulted.

The LHC is the holy grail of the voodoo science. Too many billions spend on it. It feeds an army of people so wherever you say something they'll fight you fearing for their livelihoods.

I won't worship your God particle, sorry.
I do the same as well. Saves quite a bit of thinking.
I always say "Rock out with your cock out," but only in formal contexts.
Awesome! Every bit of pressure helps the world leave behind IE6. Hopefully this effort will increase pressure for corporate installations to upgrade too.
As the web (html, js) is the future any tool porting it into proprietary platforms (desktop, phone, multi-touch) is more than welcome!

It's better to focus on a business domain than learning proprietary technologies.
Make sure to check out
"Massive miscalculation makes LHC safety assurances invalid"
http://arxivblog.com/?p=1150

based on a New Scientist story

"How do we know the LHC really is safe?"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126926.800-how-do-we...
Building an 'original' OS when you don't know how to build an OS is like asking a kindergartener to design a car.

As for the x86/x64 differences, they're by no means insurmountable once you have the concepts down, which is exactly what this tutorial provides.
Really slick... I especially like that you can wheel the whole package around while it's folded up. It looks like the chain is somehow internal to the frame?
I read a quote somewhere by Golda Meir, it went 'don't be humble, you're not that great'.

There is a lot of meaning in there, for one, to be truly humble you first have to ascend to greatness.

So for the majority of us ordinary mortals it's fine to be proud of our achievements. But to descend into arrogance is one step too far.
I could build their example twitter client in Cocoa in roughly the same time and with roughly the same LoC metrics. I'm not saying that because I have a big penis, I'm just wondering what the true value of these cross platform tools are...

Well... you just said it. Cross. Platform. Sure, you could write it in Cocoa. But then you'd have to write it again on GTK+. And again on whatever the Windows kit is called (I don't know).

If you're lucky enough to be familiar coding for all three platforms, that's great for you. The last question remains: Do you want to be maintaining three separate codebases for the same product?
I think his point is that the only thing new here is drones. The numbers themselves are old and that is what we should be correctly outraged about. The exact type of weapon used is not relevant. (Except for things like white phosphorus, obviously.)
I've ranted about this exact same problem a year ago and IMHO it goes even further than just geolocation for websites, but it's also a problem with desktop applications that use the locale to determine UI language which is inconvenient and in some times even confusing as it mixes the application's UI that's in one language with UI from the OS that's in another language - sometimes even in the same dialog.

My old rant is here for those interested: http://www.gnegg.ch/2008/09/automatic-language-detection/
And I really wonder if these guys think they can do what Sun, Microsoft and - to a lesser extent - Adobe, have failed to do: build a cross platform UI toolkit without the aforementioned deficits. And then the filesystem abstractions and socket abstractions and the list goes on and on.

The Tcl/Tk guys did this. Check out StarKit. Only it turns out that not many people really need to do this - but the tools to do it have been available for years and years.
Wow. The entire series is worth reading. surround and matchit are awesome as well.

The only other plugins I'm using are rails.vim, and git-vim. Tried fuzzyfinder but couldn't get it to work.

What are your favorite plugins?
Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes
Interface Zen: Zenning out while writing code (1999)
I do exactly the same. My reason is simple, most of the information that I use on a daily basis is simply not available in my native language. So why bother with it at all, simply search in English, 99% chance to score in one or two searches. If those really don't work the chances of finding it in my native language are practically nil.

The only exceptions for this are local news and information about hardware that has been customized on a per country basis (HP does a lot of this).
Lamson Advertising Marketing Email Synergy
Lamson AMES
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You can probably get around this by going to google.us instead of google.com. Assuming, of course, that you want US-specific content.
Looks like it has too many points of failure i.e. the design ultimately sacrifcies rigidity and strength for convenience. Bicycles have to be extremely strong, or this happens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe6KqdJndcU

I'll stick to my dawes 531 tourer and the train nazis thank you :)
What the F**k Is Social Media? Here’s an Answer
When your manager was in France last week, how come when he pulled up the site on his Vaio, he was not getting the French language version? He even cleared his browser cache and still got English!

Engineering can explain there is a standard way to know an HTTP client's preferred language: the Accept-Language header, and that your server already supports it: Apache had mod_negotiation activated when you first installed it, but it doesn't matter. You now have a high-priority IP geolocation/geotargeting project to do.

This sounds like the same disease that made MSIE disregard MIME type headers.
I'm surprised this isn't more common. If i have to have an item of really high value in the house, it goes in the space next to a light switch box.
Interesting that the fake ATMs might have been placed independent of the conference... That means that everyone else at the casino was not sufficiently paranoid, and it took a hacker conference to reveal the deception.
I think drones are a major game changer. They increase the distance between the humans on the receiving end and the humans on the 'giving' end to such an extent that there is now a major disconnect. Regular fighter jocks at least put their own lives on the line as well, drone pilots could literally do their jobs from the other side of the planet while eating donuts.

It doesn't matter much to a victim what weapon they get killed by, dead is dead. That doesn't mean we should not outlaw certain types of weapon (white phosphorous is an excellent sample for that, but drones would qualify as well imo).

My guess is the parties that 'have' the drones would never agree to give them up on the insistence of the 'have nots', it's too much of an advantage. War becomes a simple decision, none of those pesky losses to explain to the homefront. Only some energy and steel lost, there's plenty of that to go around before the homefront will realize there is a cost to war.
This was an awesome presentation, it really was, and it ended up causing some good post-presentation debate in person and on the 'tubes. If you search for #futureruby in google and/or twitter you'll find some lively discussions of Jesse's talk.