skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Link to previous HN submission of news article about conlangs:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=54474

Some good websites with lots of information about conlangs:

http://www.zompist.com/kit.html

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/9219/conlangfaq.ht...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language

with links to more from those.
>Mike has been taking shots at Sam with numerous character >assassinations - he even published Sam’s legal proceedings >against him on TechCrunch.

I know nothing at all of this matter, but since when has it been considered a "character assassination" to publish a document that is public record? Particularly those that make claims AGAINST the publisher!
The Agony of Grad School
I didn't mean to imply that you weren't. I think there are people living today who would get along fine living in the year 2189. But even a progressive in today's society usually wants a specific set of changes that are orthogonal or even opposed to changes that may come in the future. The comeback of polygamy (now billed as "polyamory") in some circles would have come as a shock to the generations that abolished polygamy.
A jpeg? ("I can tell from the pixels...")
Don't you get it? He's saving us all with his superior sense of what's right and wrong!
Text is the universal interface. It's the Way of Unix. As far as showing/hiding this kind of thing, vim at least can collapse function definitions, I'd be suprised if other editors could not.
I obviously agree with the basic issue that Congress has no power to override a due process protection. I just don't think this approach to the problem is going anywhere.

Mea culpa (and apologies), however, for overstating my point. There are two sides to this.
The real question here is, of those .5% who had their policy cancelled, how many of them actually lied about a preexisting condition that they then filed a claim for? Because if there's even ONE person who had their policy cancelled unjustly, then that is one person too many.
And property-esqe syntax would be even nicer:

mountain.latitude
Percentage of chart which resembles Mr T.
Many apparently wondering where the lit reference was from.

It is the farmer in a book called Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
You've probably already read this book, if not, yeah, check it out!
Right now college still has too much residual cachet. New MBAs realize they just got hosed, but high school juniors still obsess over what school they will get into. It will take some time before you have a significant number of people looking for alternatives that they are willing to fund. It's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem.

We probably have to eliminate lectures. It's terribly inefficient. Course content needs to be converted into video clips / scannable web content. Get the best teachers in each field and have them create the course content. Everyone else should just be DIALOGUING with students. Answering their questions, listening to understand when they don't understand something, etc.

In terms of business models, you're lucky you are in CS where degrees don't matter. Medicine and law are in bed with the government so the status quo won't change for a long time.

My Dad was a college president for awhile but didn't like how slow things moved or the pain-in-the-ass faculty. One of the things he is doing now is one-on-one mentoring and it works-- much fewer people, but they tend to really excel in their fields.

You can also think about it this way. If I spend 15k/yr in tuition the bureaucracy takes that vast majority of that. The bureaucracy that provides almost no real value! So imagine if you had 10 students that you mentored for 10k/yr with zero overheard... That would be a great deal for both of you! You send them articles and books to read and then dialogue with them individually or in small groups. This does work but you have to really sell the idea to people of an alternative education.

The problem is that as higher education has become disconnected from reality many teachers simply don't know how to function outside of the bubble, who knows how to solve that one...
Obviously, you shouldn't "trust" my "opinion" at all. It's just an opinion on the internet from someone you never met.

You should, however, think about the underlying issues. Fact is, the plaintiff proved only $0.99 in actual damages per song from Tenenbaum's use and apparently (I write "apparently" because I have not seen the transcripts, just the report I linked to in the post) chose not to present any evidence of actual damages arising from distribution. It's in the court order, but the actual damages (which is the relevant issue for a 'Campbell' due process analysis) proven were solely from his personal use.

Your "hard to measure" argument is a good one, and the one that the RIAA will raise on appeal. Yet, damages in every case are "hard to measure" and that doesn't stop courts from routinely limiting those damages on constitutional grounds. Can Congress grant copyright holders a presumption in court -- without proving anything at all -- that, for each song made available online for any amount of time in any capacity, the defendant suffered up to $15,000 in actual damages? That's not so clear to me. And you haven't said why it's clear to you.

(I chose "$15,000" because it's the only way the statutory $150,000 could be constitutional under the Campbell case's "single-digit" punitive ratio.)
I doubt he'd have much luck elsewhere. By his own graphic he had no objection to 50% of the articles and honestly that's a pretty good return rate all-in-all. No community is ever going to exactly reflect any one person's likes and dislikes. Especially a community as large as HN.

Any site that can produce 15+ interesting articles a day in exchange for the roughly minute and a half it takes to skim the HN headlines is doing great in my book.
Cartagen: a framework for dynamic mapping
Not according to the book mentioned, they are actual portable electric fences designed to be very light and trivially easy to set up.
It's something out of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Joel Salatin pens his cows with a mobile electric fence that's basically a wire, a bunch of stakes, and a car battery. Michael Pollan notes that it took him and Salatin ten minutes to set it up or tear it down.
He's having way too much fun with this..
See my response to you below. You're confusing multiple issues. For purposes of my discussion about the constitutionally-permissible compensatory-to-punitive ratio, the sole question is what actual damages were proven. At trial, the defendants only proved $0.99 actual damages for each song.

Your argument about other unproven damages has already been rejected by the 'Philip Morris' Supreme Court case, which explicitly said jurors could only consider, when deciding on punitive damages, actual damages proven in court. (In that case, the jurors had considered damage to other smokers in the state who weren't plaintiffs in the actual case.)
I still use word for some things, but taking quick notes is not one of them. Pure text is the best way to take quick notes, because you don't have to worry about formatting (and using the mouse to do formatting). If you learn how wikimedia works, it is probably easier than writing in word...
Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. Blogs work very well for things that you can glean from Press Releases, conferences, and others, hence Engadget and Gizmodo work well.

But local news or even sports requires a lot of elbow grease and footwork. One of my favorite sports blogs is Deadspin. But the only time I can remember them digging for a story is when they were almost able to break the Manny Ramirez steroid story, but their evidence ended up pointed to an average guy who happened to be named Manny Ramirez (not the baseball player). http://deadspin.com/5244230/the-case-of-manny-not-being-mann...

They've been making small inroads into this kind of journalism, but it is far and away the minority.
Radio Shack rebranded "The Shack"
That was surprisingly good. Thanks.
The way I read it is that you should have done a lot more research on what school to pick in the first place.

There are plenty of schools that offer things that are of no value to me, if I go and enroll in one I'll make damn sure that I'm going to spend my time and money wisely.

I look at some of my friends who went to college and got stuck in fairly low paying jobs and I wonder if the only thing that made it work for me was a 5 year head start at a time when personal computing was just becoming big business.

Maybe in another time and place the college degree would have been the way to go. All I know is that it is 50% luck and timing, all the rest is hard work.

Congratulations on making it this far! Keep moving (and keep learning) and who knows what is in your future.
LaTeX has limitations?
I can't speak for everyone, but in regard to CS, I, and many of my colleagues, learned most of our trade from books, experience, and each other.

I never really found much utility for lecturers in CS classes in college. I learned just as well--if not better--from a good book.
The Spence Signaling Model
I don't approve of it. Like most politically motivated destructive acts, there's a context involved. This article is just not good investigative reporting. It's kind of like reading about terrorists that do what they do "because they hate freedom". Reality is more complicated. Good journalism brings out those nuances.

The issue of what amount of social disruption should be tolerated in protest within a democracy is a delicate one and one that I don't have a firm stand on, but it's short of burning cars.
All schools promise job placement assistance and in general it's very poor. The real issue is they can't put you in a job that doesn't exist.
Twitter Makes It Safe To Click on Short URLs Again | My Philly Network
Ignoring your opinion per se for a minute, I feel you could have chosen a less snide way of expressing it.
Exactly. So the question in the title is moot for most people.
I'm not going as far as to claim that aggregators should quote whole works entire. Far from it. I'm merely claiming that a compilation (of links, or quotes, or what have you) is editorial in nature in-and-of-itself.

And I am certainly not claiming that doing any of this sans attribution should be permissible. Proper attribution is crucial and hyperlinks make it so easy that there is no excuse for e-plagiarism.
I've been frustrated by the consistent lack of mention the Spence Signaling Model gets in the HN discussions on higher education. Hopefully this helps a bit.
You seem to think the only value in HN is providing you links to click on. What about giving you a chance to discuss the issues of the day with fellow entrepreneurs?
BumBunnies - the curious effect of Apple's App Store adult restrictions
I don't know. It kind of bothers me when people says that - it usually comes up when discussing programming languages.

Yes, of course you should use the right tool. You could also say that it boils down even further to something like "don't be stupid". The fact that some abstraction covers a point doesn't mean that said point has no value in and of itself.
> knowing who calls who is the ultimate social graph.

Reading HN today has paid off I see. That's a brilliant insight.
World-Class Performers Don't Work - They Enjoy High Performance
Most of what he says is right on, but that reworked Paint.NET menu is just insane. There is nothing even remotely usable about it. It looks like someone threw dynamite in a widget factory.
an ironic complaint when you inspect the submitter's own submissions, which is only 25% HN-topical.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dag
Trust the Japanese salaryman on this: public transportation is not a panacea for avoiding accidents caused by drowsiness. You have to be able to get to the train station and from the train station to your house, all without killing yourself.

I have become a frequent face at a local hotel because I was so tired I did not trust myself to do that. (The project at issue is mostly done. Thank God.)

(Quick sidenote: Five minutes before checking into the hotel to avoid killing myself walking down the street, I was being paid time-and-a-half because my workplace apparently thought that my presence was adding value. Some of you people reading this will eventually be engineering managers. If you ever are, prior to ordering Heroic Efforts (TM), please consider whether you really want me working on a production system in that state.)
"The Shack" is also what we Amateur Radio operators call the room or area where we have all out radios. Ironically, Radio Shack was a huge Amateur Radio supplier, but shuttered that portion of their business a few years ago.

73 de N1JER
I am not colorblind, I just couldn't be bothered with that graph. The gradients look cool for sure, but combined with the similar colors, they make it close to impossible to decipher.
It's not that I like 50% and don't like 50%, rather I think that one or two years ago 50% of these would never have been submitted to HN.
California's struggles don't implicate the blue-state model
Seeing as I'm on a plane every few years I'll defiantly try this out.

On a side note, did anyone else find this amusing?

Here's a quick summary of Saper's research findings:

"For a small mammal, finding food on a daily basis is a critical mission. Even a few days of starvation, a common threat in natural environments, may result in death," the study said.

I would never have guessed!
I worked my way through college at Johnson Space Center. Most people there are paid significantly less than if they were working in the private sector. Most people there have no secretaries or admin assistants, the really important people have an admin assistant that they share with 3-5 other important people.

And I've worked in Houston most of my life and never had anything to do with the oil industry, even peripherally. It's a big city; your experience there isn't general.
I have a feeling that the "Under 50 cent" result are from Adsense(mine is), and I wonder how much the larger sites are still able to bring in.
The way the Java annotations are defined, it is almost always necessary to understand all annotations before modifying the code. It doesn't have to be this way, but the annotation processor has sufficient power to force it to be this way in practice.
Really anywhere and not just php mailing list. Well, I would like to think that is the case but sadly it is not.
Note that most of the links you clicked on were not ones that I marked.
Apple tried to silence owner of exploding iPod with gagging order
There's a shock that comes when a lower or middle class person spends time with or becomes wealthy, and they discover that their group biases are wrong. They like to imagine rich being obnoxious, arrogant, cold-hearted, etc.

The truth is that some are exactly that, but proportionally they are not exceptional. Show me an obnoxious and arrogant rich person, and I'll show you 10 middle class people are just as bad, just because there are so many more of them.
As the awesome skunk anansie song goes:

Yes it's f*cking political! Everything's POLITICAL!!!!!!
How To Make Hair Shiny Healthy
Jakob Nielsen: Social Networking on Intranets
I started out thinking this would be kinda silly, but I really enjoyed it. I think there is definitely something to be said for having fun at work.
AT&T claims high and low that they were not involved.

Either that's the truth or shredders are running, the FCC has asked that question explicitly and that was AT&Ts answer: "AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store"

Which pretty much leaves Apple to talk their way out of this on their own. Nice to have partners.
I never ceases to fascinate me how taboo meta discussions of HN are. We tolerate all kinds of topics, but this one almost everyone viscerally hates. It is as if everyone takes it as a personal insult on their tastes. Odd.
This seems to be inevitable as the number of users grows. See: daypop, del.icio.us/popular, reddit. All of these were wonderful when they were small, and then converged onto a mix of top 10 lists / funny photos / outrage of the day links as they got big. I predict if HN keeps growing, it will experience the same fate.
Apple Tried to Silence Exploding iPod Victim with Gagging Order
I learned most on my own too. But that's not for everyone I believe. Some are better off guided.
Then there are lecturers and there are lecturers. What I mean is that the scale of performance in lectures varies extremely wildly. And how could it be different. As a lecturer you are often very much on your own. You (hopefully) have good subject credentials and that is what you are hired on. But no one really cares for how you perform pedagogically.
It seems like this author is taking four classes and teaching an additional one. So, he complains that he needs to task switch too often. (How is this different from undergrad?)

He should just wait a year or two for classes to be over with so that he can concentrate more on research ...
"Kaiser Permanente" is technically three separate companies that share (some) infrastructure and (some) employees.

Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. is non-profit.
Kaiser Foundation Hospitals is non-profit.
Permanente Medical Group (the doctors) is for-profit.
It's even better to write a library that ensures that even the dumbest programmer doesn't fuck it up.

You'd think a web framework would abstract this common task away.
...yes, a hard nut to crack. Solutions has to come from outside the bubble as I see it.
One paragraph break does not a reformatting make.
I feel bad for the guy, but I think his problem is a bit of a personal issue. He should seek out help from a doctor on how to manage his attention disorder.

Lots of people make it through graduate school while teaching and taking multiple classes. It isn't easy, but it certainly isn't impossible.
Next up: Slashdot rebranded "the Dot".
Wrong.

My blog does not need any readers. There are no ads, and everyone that needs to know about me knows about me.

I wrote this because I think the ideas are important to share -- abstraction is critical to having secure and maintainable code, and your language choice affects how you think about problems.

I did see the Javascript article here, of course.
> just because they are not as good at you at seo?

It has nothing to do with SEO, and everything to do with convenience. Think about early /.. Since I enjoyed reading the same kinds of things as cmdrtaco, not having to Lycos (hehe...) news was a pretty big value add. I can go to one URL, get all of the tech news, and save a ton of time.

As far as determining if something 'has value' or not, we can just look at the facts. If an aggregator wasn't adding any kind of value, nobody would be going there. It's not like buying a URL and putting up some ads means you make instant cash. You still have to get visitors to come to your site somehow, and you do that by providing value to your audience.
Teach for America founder on the pointlessness of planning
We've had two separate discussions about this- one of which was an earlier TechCrunch article- appear on the front page today. TechCrunch is going to milk this cow until it's dead, spreading their running commentary and analysis over as many articles as possible. It doesn't mean we need to keep promoting it over and over again.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739070
This is a good lesson as to why it's a good idea to spend a little time doing some quick trademark searches on uspto.gov
From OP's profile:

user: dag
created: 593 days ago
karma: 305
about:

Then drilling down the "submissions" link:

1. Why I don't find HN useful anymore (imgur.com)
76 points by dag 1 hour ago | 37 comments
2. Hack Your Own CNC Machine (buildyourcnc.com)
27 points by dag 77 days ago | 3 comments
3. Fashion for Geeks: Why bother? (urbanmonarch.com)
27 points by dag 508 days ago | 26 comments
4. The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville (classic Warren Buffett article) (scribd.com)
3 points by dag 550 days ago | 2 comments

So you've been here for 593 days and have only made 4 submissions. Yet you complain about the submissions of others. Want a more useful hn? Stop complaining and start contributing.
As far as searching menus is concerned, OS X already has this. Hit Command + ? (that's Command + Shift + /) to bring up the search field in the Help menu and start searching.
For everyone that's intent on doing this, I've tried it before and it didn't work. I fly quite often between Honolulu and the East Coast to see family, and there's a six hour time difference. The jetlag is pretty terrible. Someone told me about this research and I tried it out very excited to finally have a way to avoid the jetlag, but it absolutely didn't work — at least, for me. Furthermore, not eating for 16 hours is not very enjoyable — arguably, it was less enjoyable than a couple days of jetlag.
Bear shaving
Tests are a technique to manage programmer anxiety about code. When I feel anxious about some aspect of my code I write a test case.

Does programming language affect level of anxiety? Definitely. Does programmer skill affect level of anxiety? Absolutely.

Writing tests becomes more important when you're part of a team. Your choices affect not just your anxiety but that of your teammates. That's why it's reasonable to be more dogmatic about TDD in a team.

A lot of 'getting better at TDD' is just getting better at listening to yourself. When I started programming the little anxieties would pile up until I'd painted myself into a corner. With experience I pay more attention to the little anxieties.

After some time doing TDD I feel less anxious just knowing that I can write a test if I want. The benefit of the tests as an artifact is secondary to me; what they primarily do is keep me from getting stressed and giving up to go play poker.
Another trick I use is to check the submitter of really interesting stories and see what else they are submitting. I find many users' submission more interesting then the HN front page and even best. Like pg himself for example.
Open Source iPhone Augmented Reality Library
I get your points, thanks, but one thing we never wanted to comprise was quality. An education is often once in a lifetime, so I think one deserves the best possible.
Microsoft Word 1983-2009 Rest-in-peace
How to Make an Electronic Display With Paper and Mood-Ring Ink
I would have to agree, Launchy is a great tool and I can't live without it. Add in the putty-launchy plugin and your ssh life just got easier.

http://code.google.com/p/putty-launchy-plugin/
you just added to the noise
An almost perfect real-world hack
I agree that it's pretty easy to transform the code. You could also take the code block in the loop, make it a separate function, and return instead of break. It's no harder to understand a block with break statements than it is to understand a function with multiple returns, although maybe Dijkstra wasn't a big fan of multiple returns, either.