skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I took the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude Battery) along with all of the other military students who went to DLI (Defense Language Institute). DLI is without a doubt the most intense language school in the world, where you have to go from learning the alphabet to reading, speaking, and writing at a college level, and have at most 1 and a half years to do it. In the class that came after us, 2 people passed the arabic course out of 30.

As far as the predictability of someone's aptitude, the DLAB was a good baseline to show that a person had better language acquisition than the average student. When students barely met the baseline of 100 points on the test, they had an incredibly tough time in the beginning with a language as different from english as arabic. What the test didn't measure, however, is a person's will to persevere through the slow progress, constant mistakes, and utter frustration. Although the low scoring students had a tough time in the beginning, most of them passed in the end. The student's that ended up failing out of our class were, ironically, the students that did exceptionally well in the beginning. I mostly attribute this to them relying on the ease of understanding in the beginning, rather than studying at the level that the lower scoring students had had to learn how to do when they had started out.

Language learning is not a linear path where you can acquire x amount of words per day. Your language learning is affected by so many factors such as sleep, healthy living, happiness, motivation, among others. There also seems to be a point for almost everyone I was with where constant study results in a moment of clarity, where you start to believe in your skill in the language and lose the fear of failing in conversation.

All in all, I would say that learning a language is almost exactly like learning programming. The material to learn either is readily available on the internet, and each purely depend on your desire to learn them. There will always be those that just can't quite jump high enough to get past the initial hurdles, and that's what these tests are there to provide -- a way for them to get filtered out before money is invested in their ability. In that, it's similar in a way to giving someone a fizzbang test. It won't tell you that you have a great programmer, it will just give you a baseline assessment that you don't have someone that shouldn't be a programmer.
Awesome writer.

Nothing truer then the 911 handicapped columns he was writing back in the day.

He's the kind of writer that makes Democrats rethink free speech.
It's interesting. Obviously, it's in your best interest to depend only on commodity products, both as a business and as a consumer. If you depend on a differentiated service, one that is expensive to move to another vendor, a rational, profit-maximizing vendor is going to take advantage of that.

But, when you want to run a business? If you ever want advice from a business person, If you say that your market is at all commodity, they tell you to quit straight-out.

It bothers me, because I have a really hard time honestly selling another person a differentiated product. Obviously, it's not in your best interest to depend on a product or service you can only get from one place, so obviously, if I am trying to sell you such a product, I am asking you to act against your own best interest, and that is not easy for me.
Show HN: Shoutium – Talk with those around you.
Of course, as our host points out in Beating the Averages (http://paulgraham.com/avg.html), "If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business."

Which, if you're one of these "overachievers", increases the chance the start up that hires you, at least early enough that stock options might even vaguely maybe be worth something someday, will fail. This has happened at several that I've worked for, they died hard after I was purged.
Great Firefox addon make tracked links work as plain links
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clean-links/
Ask HN: What technologies should I be learning with my 20% time?
So I'm a student, and this summer at my internship I'm being given some form of "20% time". Ideally, I'd like to use this time to make myself more work-ready for when I go on a 16-month internship next year. What technologies would you recommend learning for a still-learning student interested in embedded systems and back-end development?

Thanks!
You know, I had no idea I could scroll down on your homepage. It just looked like a simple landing page for me, so I closed the tab.

I find this a problem with all the newfangled webpage designs... but on others, there's an indicator that there is more content below.
As a % of GDP it's not actually that high.

US ranks #21 in Foreign aid and is 1/5 Sweden.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-that-give-the-most-i...

Welfare # GDP US: 14.8
Sweden: 28.9

Giving we are #1 in monitary donations but it's only 1.85% of GDP in the US. http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/24/america-philanthropy-income... "Based on volunteerism alone, the Netherlands comes first, followed by Sweden and then the U.S."
Defeat Ask has been around for a bit. Doesn't really look like it's catching on. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/defeat-task/id674002993?mt=8

By far my fav gasified task list is Carrot to do. Love the story, slick interface. Uber geeky yet awesome. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carrot-to-do/id591840203?mt=...
LOL I'm not even in the same league as a designer... Template fail :)
As a founder I looked into paying vendors/employees with options, but have found they are too brittle. Because option deals are created at the start of employment they require a lot of faith on the part of the founder, who does not know the employee's abilities or temperament. Options do not track well with performance and cannot be adjusted easily. I also do not want to be in the position of considering terminating an employee because they have more options than what I think they are worth, and employees should not have that fear either.

Instead I am working on giving vendors and employees a convertible note that is based on their performance month-by-month. Let's say an employee or vendor is taking $5000/month less than they should be because it's a startup. The company credits them $5000 to their note each month (this can be more if there's a risk premium), and adds any performance bonuses as well as they come up. This lets management clearly track performance against the shares they are giving, and lets the employee know that if they work more they can get more. As time goes on the value of the note increases and the employee can converts their note to shares at the current valuation (or a discounted valuation).

This seems a lot more flexible to me than options, and is less stressful for the founder and the employee. Am I missing something?
A useful rule: "What the eye doesn't see, the chef gets away with." -- from Fawlty Towers
Clickable http://taxcompactor.com
> Yes I am. The property that they share is they will not be changed or avoided in the near future.

You vastly overestimate the effort it takes to change your tools. When I was talking of a few days to add a feature to a language, that was a conservative estimate. With proper knowledge it's more like hours. And I'm not even assuming access to the implementation of the language. Source-to-source transformations are generally more than enough.

Heck, I have done it to Haskell and Lua. And it wasn't a simple language feature, it was Parsing Expression Grammars (the full business). I used no special tools. I just bootstrapped from MetaII (I wrote the first version by hand, then wrote about 30 compilers to the nearly final version). (For Haskell, I took a more direct route by using the Parsec library.)

Granted, writing a full compiler to asm.js is a fairly large undertaking. But fixing bits and pieces of the language is easy. Real easy.

> Not in all cases. Physics is just a model of our understanding of physical existence.

Oh, come on, don't play dumb. You know I was talking about the way the universe really works, not the way we think it works.

> I choose to focus on that and progress in mastery of my craft. If you want to complain and/or change your tools, go ahead. I don't judge you.

I'm not sure what you're saying. It sounds like you want to focus on particular programming languages. This would be a mistake, pure and simple. You want to master the underlying principles of programming languages. It can let you pick up the next big thing in a few days. It can let you perceive design flaws (such as dynamic scoping). It can let you manipulate your tools, instead of just using them.

Your way leads to obsolescence.

---

My advice to you: if you haven't already, go learn a language from a paradigm you don't know. I suggest Haskell. Also write an interpreter for a toy language. Trust me, that's time well spent. For instance, knowing Ocaml made me a better C++ programmer.
> This is particularly evident in very young immigrants who exhibit "receptive" skill in their mother tongue even though they may have had fluency in earlier years. Immerse them in the native language, and they'll often pick up much much faster.

Do you have any cites for this?

I suspected it might be true, and tried actually putting together a paper on this for a class in the early 90's, but pretty much ran into a dead end looking for literature to review at the time.
The IRS is easier to deal with. They're more efficient but all require an acceptance process to transmit. The states are in priority order starting with CA just purely based on # of returns and then NY, Illinois, Penn, etc. Trying to do as many as possible.
I can't believe we wasted time on this. Never underestimate the power of trying to correct someone on the internet chuckle
If we are going to legalize pot, I would prefer that it be legal to send via post.

I'd support a method where any individual address could subscribe to a certain amount of pot delivered via mail per month.

I can already do this with a wine club... Why not a pot club.
To some extent, this is what Hired.com (formerly Developer Auction) is trying to resolve. I think they're able to coax salaries upfront from companies because they filter and curate the applicants.
This is pure speculation, but I think the fee could be a result of this scenario: By now they've got teams of lawyers going through all common and city specific laws regarding transportation. Those teams are supposed to flag anything that opponents can use to either stop or fine the service. As a result they found in some of the cities they operate in, that the service operator rather than the driver is supposed to explicitly give money towards insurance and safety check of all vehicles they manage.

They solved the potential future issue by adding a small charge that's explicitly labeled "for insurance, safety checks, etc." With all the legal issues they run against right now, preventing potential future trouble seems to make more sense than ignoring the environment.
You're right - I should have phrased it "perceived self-interest mixed with doses of human volatility/irrationality"
They probably had an "appliance" that if they chose to update manually would fall out of support terms and then would be stuck with an unsupported instance of a device they likely paid tens of thousands to the vendor for the appliance, software, and support; and the vendor probably had not yet released a supported update to fix the problem.
Why would you want F@H in a browser instead of as an app?
Show HN: Hummingbird - Preview Mockups on Devices in Realtime
In other words, there's actually a 14 month that either contains 1 or 2 days, both of which have no weekday associated with them?

I don't see how it would make things much easier, especially for timestamps in various date formats and date-input fields.
I'm not familiar with Euro tax codes. But I don't think it would be hard to adapt using the proper rules engine. We'll take a look but too soon to promise anything.
I really like the 7date notation with the base-7 notation counting the weeks down, but the 7month with the remaining 22/23 days of the year are still a kludge. With a 13 month calendar those remaining 1/2 days are neatly packaged and disposed of as "festival days". Harder to deal with 22/23 tailing days.
If you throw out the barometer for the best mobile platform being the platform with the most robust selection of Apps, Windows Phone is the clear winner in every other category. It really does deliver the best user experience, a feature which was lauded on the original iPhone, but now ignored by critics and fanboys.
You're not wrong and that view represents the normal thinking I suppose. But don't you think it feels weird to say, "We're going to pay you next year in equity at this years valuation"? if you choose to stay in the company for year 2, it's strange to think that your risk goes down while value per share goes up. Your effective cash+stock compensation for year 2/3/4 goes way way up if you think in those terms. Then drops sharply at year 5!

I don't know, I suppose in a fair world you would be given more equity on yr1, less y2, etc. But that doesn't motivate people to stick around like the existing structure.
In case anyone hasn't read it, it's my LOTR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mars
So the best approach for the given problem (just send the request, fetch the response, without too much overhead) seems to be using something a bit lower level:

http://at2.php.net/stream_socket_client
I take your point. It's just that if those four loans default, you will be down 16%. If that happens, you will lose your principal and also not earn interest on those defaulted loans. So even though you charged an 8.4% APR, you will only earn interest on 84% of your loan balance. So unless a miracle happens, it doesn't seem likely that you will break even.

Here are some details on those four loans:

* Alex made one late partial payment ($1.17) on his $100 loan and is 108 days late on his second payment: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/Macbul/3583.html

* Margret hasn't "rescheduled" her loan even though she hasn't made a payment for four months: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/margret-muthoni/34...

* Cynthia missed her first four payments, rescheduled her loan, and is now two months behind: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/cynthia1988/3090.h...

* Soknya missed three months of payments, rescheduled, and is now 67 days late: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/sdndiaye/1908.html
With something other than a drone, one hopes.
SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage appears to have executed a successful water landing
indeed, having any deal flow in consulting requires A LOT of work building up a reputation of trust and quality with clients (and choosing clients well!)
You should probably watch the video.
With Marissa Mayer. Don't think this has anything to do with the little people of the valley.
Any one know a good iOS youtube channel?

I only have http://www.youtube.com/user/rwenderlich
3 Million Credit and Debit Cards Stolen in Michaels, Aaron Brothers Breaches
I am sure I am the only one who thought "Gee, why is Broadcom selling a sonic screwdriver?" :-)

That said, I'm curious how they expect this to work, although I expect in typical Broadcom fashion there will be no way to get information on it :-(
Ugh. A bunch of wealthy people talking about what they are "going to do", but never doing anything tangible outside their narrow self-interest? All you have to do is give politicians more money and go home to pat yourself on the back for not giving it to the Republicans. Stop the presses, you're a real progressive!

Marissa Mayer's "cozy" home could only accommodate 200 people for a presidential visit to her "upscale Palo Alto home"?

Sounds awful.
Revisiting Mac OS X kernel rootkits
First a Super Bowl ring, next the first stage of a used rocket.
Woooooooo!

I was probably unnecessarily optimistic, but I'm so glad they are making this much progress so quickly!
Since this is over the ocean, I interpreted this to mean reaching a state of stable hover.
atwoods law
Wow. I clicked through solely to make this joke. I hate you for beating me to it.
There is also the slightly more modern International Fixed Calendar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

It's essentially the same as the positivist calendar except:

* gregorian names are kept

* the extra month is inserted before july and is called Sol

* the extra day on leap years is inserted before the 1st of Sol

* was in actual use by Kodak until 1989 (amazing!)
A fine of 250 euros is actually pretty lacks given that they are unlikely to enforce this heavily.

I would think that I and many other people would be quite happy to risk that. What do other people think?
> Marissa Mayer's "cozy" home could only accommodate 200 people for a presidential visit to her "upscale Palo Alto home"?

I imagine she has a backyard.
For better or for worse, those chances actually are related, because the #1 source of >$1BB exits is being acquired by other billion dollar tech companies, most of which are heavily networked in SV.
Every time he comes to the area they put a huge [30-mile-radius, 18,000 foot tall] no-fly zone for all but commercial air traffic around him. Why inconvenience so many pilots? Is he that afraid of his people?
Do you remember 2001? One moment everything was brilliant. a year later and I had people who were working alongside me... people who were better than me in the late '90s... working for me, because their other option was retail. "I can't pay you what you are worth," I said to an ex-coworker I found working in a sandwich shop in the mid-aughts, "But I can pay you more than this place does." The guy really was pretty good, and he ended up working for me for many years.

Now, maybe we are in a bubble and maybe we are not, but the tech sector has a history of very sharp ups and downs, and in the downs? my experience is that a lot of pretty good people end up un[der]employed.

The other interesting thing is that from what I've seen? Layoffs at big companies (and if the sector takes a dump, there will be layoffs) are generally more "fair" than interviews at the same places. By that, I mean that those people who are shy but good are often the last to get laid off, but beyond a certain level, when interviewing, the "shy" part hurts you more than the "good" part helps you.
I'm curious why you see these 2 things as different.

Situation #1. 2 founders, one investor. 2 founders quit their jobs, have no money in the back. Investor invests $1 million. Money is used to buy equipment, rent office space, play living wages, hire contractors.

Situation #2. 2 founders, one has $1 million, the other has nothing. Money is used similarly.

It seems like the founder contributing $1 million in the 2nd case should get all the same considerations as the investor in the 1st case.

In other words.

2 founders
founder #1 1/2
founder #2 1/2

2 founders, 1 investor
founder #1 1/3
founder #2 1/3
investor 1/3

which seems like it should lead to

2 founders only one of which investing

non-investing founder 1/3
investing founder 2/3s (1/3 for being a founder, 1/3 for investing)

I know it's not that easy but I can't see any reasonable way to resolve this. The founder who contributes no cash will likely feel like a 2nd class founder because there's no reasonable way they can own half the company. They can agree they both get the same number of shares but then that makes the founder who contributed the money feel like he took all the risk and got nothing for it.

Off the top of my head, one possible way to resolve it might be to let the founder contributing cash to vest quicker. So day one 25% of his shares have vested and he starts vest 2% a month immediately. That means in 3 years he'll have 100% of his shares where as the founder contributing no cash will require 4 years to vest at which point they'll be equal 50/50?

Of course arguably that's still not quite fair to the founder that contributed cash because his deal is not as good as if he was split into 2 people, founder and investor.
My startup does not fit well with Joel's model of employee layered risk. I've bootstrapped early and every layer the last 3 years got payed a normal, market salary, and on time every month. We also payed bonuses and the CTO even drives a company car from day one. Almost everyone was hired either straight out of college or was unemployed, although that was not intentional but probably my subconscious deflecting the extra pressure of being responsible for screwing up someone's career. Now I'm boarding our first investor and we're planning what our option pool will look like. I feel nobody but myself took any considerable risk coming to work here, and whenever there were troubled waters, my compensation was the only one that suffered.

I finally decided I favor giving stock as bonuses based on individual merit, as a payback for any extra effort and dedication in the past and as a motivational tool in the future. Unlike Joel, I'm reluctant to see employee risk-taking as relevant or even measurable or fair, and I wonder if that is really the case at other startups. I mean, can one say their new hires are actually assuming uncompensated risk, beyond the reasonable risk anyone assumes switching jobs, as to be entitled to equity mainly for that reason.

Employee risk seems like an oxymoron to me.
As of about an hour ago, this flight has also shown that they can successfully do a powered landing of the first stage. This has been one hell of a good day.
Will someone please ask him about the Princeton "The US is an Oligarchy" study and get his response on tape? Preferably while surrounded by Marissa and any other techno oligarchs that are present.

I know I'm going to be disappointed with his response, but I still want to see it.
Every once in a while I'll get it in my head to make a 3D game, rather than a 2D one. But I don't want to spend the time building any assets - not only am I bad at that, but I also don't know if my idea is good until people try it and give me feedback... which requires a working prototype.

What I'm looking for is a game engine (asset library?) that lets me build my town by placing buildings, and dropping in my main character - and then I can just run around the town, opening doors and talking to people. Tons of tons of game have dialogue, medieval fighting, assassinations, kill moves - I don't want to have to spend time making any of that. I want to test my game ideas and see if they are fun. I want to write the parts that are unique to my game, the story and the decisions you make. Then, later, I can go back and iterate on assets.

Both game engines now have Asset stores, but I'm not sure the level designer is to the point where I can quickly iterate over my ideas.
The same way that small roasters and microbrewries have nothing to do with coffee or beer.
If the last Obama fundraiser visits are any guide, that'll do wonders for traffic that day.

Making a note in the calendar to WFH on May 8...
Great news. Hopefully they don't have too much problem with the retrieval as it is apparently pretty rough out there.

Now we need to look forward to the first landing on land. I would love to see this in person.