skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This doesn't just apply to academia. You can always see it in the workforce. And, more visibly, in the primary, secondary schools. Good hackers rarely make good managers, and good managers get promoted not because they are good at hacking code.

My mother told me a story about giving a glowing review to her colleague, not because she was a good worker, but because she wanted her out of her hair. She wasn't fireable, so the only option was to send her somewhere else.

And most people will first encounter this in school. Where the best teachers don't always have the best titles. And the worst are always promoted. Teachers have strong unions so if you can't fire them then you can promote them. Some of the worst human beings I've ever met were vice-principals. People who clearly have no business in education at all. But through fortune and incompetence are given titles and offices away from students.
I'll play the contrarian on this one.

1. Article from 2007, we're currently 5% (or so) above those lows.

2. Currently, there is no suitable replacement for a reserve currency.

3. The dollar is the world's largest effective long position. Countries, central banks, and individuals all have skin in the game.

I could easily play the other side, but the sentiment for a dollar "collapse" is a little strong in the short term.
>>Good documentation includes examples.
Should be: Good documentation includes good examples. Most example code out there is the worst code I have ever seen. Typically it looks like something someone slapped together in 5 min. Removing error handling to "improve clarity" just means that there are no examples of what errors the author of the library actually thinks are important or how to recover from recoverable errors.
YAGNI? http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?YouArentGonnaNeedIt
Documentation is great, but they main reason you need so much documentation to use Java is that it is a gigantic lumbering monster.

There doesn't seem to be a way to arrange Java code so that it is trivially understandable from the source itself (Mostly because of the shoehorning you have to do to fit everything into a class-based programming model).

It is surprising to me that in 60+ years of computing, we still aren't writing code that is easily interpretable by both humans and machines.

then again, call me a hypocrite, as I hack lisp...
The best remedy for hate speech is not suppression of that speech but counterpropaganda that makes the hater look both vile and ridiculous.

Im not sure I agree this is a better solution than suppression.

Where does this stop; all of the arguments for dangerous precedents he makes are just as valid in the current "solution".
Any advanced effects are prone to stuttering in the animation loop. Javascript is bad with this, but OS level stuff can stutter too.

Stuttering can be destructive to User confidence as well.

---

Also with morphing there is a problem of Mystery Meat[1] navigation. In this depicted example the Morph is an alternative to another mystery meat, yet there are many problems that could have both cause and effect permanently visible.

------------

[1] http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html
curious to know what's their business model, or will be?
These are are hypotheses, not theories, as you have not proved them.
> I'm not sure how this aspect applies to the political senario, which is the more interesting one.

That's more difficult. For in most voting systems you have to take strategic voting into account. E.g. in a winner-takes-all systems people don't want to waste their votes, and thus the system tends towards two parties.
No, I can see clearly that that's all interrelated.

I was exactly wondering whether you just learned that language a few years ago and you'd somehow mastered it to this level in a short time or if there were some circumstances that would explain your proficiency better. It's quite rare to find anybody that spends even a moderate time in Japan to know the language at that level.

A good friend has her degree in Japanese and she would not even begin to claim that she's either fluent or comfortable in the language, and that's after 5 years of studying it intensely. To her it's a 'good basis to start learning Japanese', which she says is almost impossible outside of living in Japan for an extended period. It's against that background that I'm impressed, I know a little bit of how much effort that must have been, even if plenty of it went 'as you go' by immersion.

I think that I was looking for exactly the first two words of your reply.

My own 'second mother tongue' (English) I've been learning since I was 10 years old or so and I'm still learning, there isn't a day that I find some turn of phrase that I hadn't encountered before. I've also noticed that speaking a few languages helps to make you (much) more forgiving towards others in a foreign tongue.

Do you come across many foreigners in Japan that have your level ?
Java and all the JVM languages. Is it really a language feature?
Hm, didn't find much else that I had missed, but thanks.

I must admit to one mistake, though: at one time I entered the site in some web catalogs. I guess I'll try to get it out there again, which might become difficult.
Why iPhone will be irrelevant -- agree?
I think that's precisely his point.
the ability to snatch data anywhere off of the Web — so-called cloud computing

Interesting definition of cloud computing...
How to fast track a tech business
Cloud Computing & Security | Web Technology I/O
> German, for instance, turns out to be a lot harder than Spanish, which I'd learned when I was younger

I'd guess it's the "learned when I was younger" part that made the difference.
Recipe for success: He was worth $40 million at 18
Tim proudly notes that his grasp of Japanese grammar was better than that of people who had "studied for 4-5 years." I'd say the big difference was Tim was _living in Japan._
I agree completely, and this is what I _dislike_ the most about Java libraries. Far too much Java code that I've seen has relied entirely on what Javadoc can produce automatically from a codebase that does not contain lots of hints and extra documentation. A listing of classes and their methods is not even an adequate reference guide, let alone an adequate explanation of how to use the library and why it was written the way it was.

As a counter example, I find that most perldoc documentation on CPAN is pretty good, because the standard practice for Perl module documentation is centered on the documentation sections that should be included _other than the list of methods_. NAME, SYNOPSIS, DESCRIPTION, USAGE, AUTHOR, SEE ALSO are all standard sections, and the kind of stuff that javadoc normally generates is just a subset of USAGE.
What "anti-copy-and-paste"? I copy and pasted the text of the article into notepad without any problems. I was actually expecting problems since numbered lists frequently get mangled going from HTML to plain text, but even that didn't happen.
Downvotes are not going to stop me from speaking my mind. It's almost as if people think that by downvoting someones opinion they can make that opinion less real or so. Not sure what is going on in their heads.

If they would engage in debate and downvote that would be the ideal I guess :)

On /. because people can choose to post 'anonymously' and only randomly get allotted mod points instead of having an infinite supply such frustration tends to be vented by some anonymous ad-hominem attack, here it's the downmod button.

Interesting how the technical facilities change peoples behaviour.

As for the subject, I wasn't joking either. Ballmers 'reign' has been a trainwreck, so far he has consistently failed to produce anything that has caused microsoft to gain lost terrain. Vista, the Zune, MSN Search (which three months after launch is stuck in the 3% reach territory).

And I'm fine with that. Now for someone to get up and give google a run for their money.
Seeing that play out will be interesting. I don't know how many people (like me) stick with AT&T and T-Mobile because they insist on having a phone that will work overseas, but I'd bet we're among the more profitable consumers...
HTTP Responses out of order?
A few months ago, there was a proposal posted for a new http header (something like X-Request-Id).

This could be used in HTTP Pipelining to service requests out of order, so that a long-running request wouldn't block a quick one.

I can't find a link or reference to this anymore.. does anyone have the link to the proposal?
I never saw OS X animations stutter. Sure, Expose drops frames now and then (dropping frames is the sensible approach, not displaying every frame and introducing stutter), but that's ok. That makes the animation jerky but just as quick and reduces the impression of stutter.

I think it is very plausible that seamless and low key animations can increase usability. Sure, user testing would be needed to verify that, but it seems intuitive enough to me. There are technical problems, sure, and stuttering animations should be avoided, but that's no reason to reject morphing out of hand.
Fair enough, but, on the other hand, Verizon has always been the carrier most resistant to becoming a "dumb pipe". At bottom, that's where their hostility to open devices comes from. Their involvement in developing the Droid suggests that they're looking for other ways to escape now, but I still don't trust their instincts.
The Perl module documentation seems to be modelled on man pages.
They're also hitting back with a separate "there's a map for that" ad that (directly) goes after AT&T coverage, but clearly is taking a pot-shot at Apple as well...
Hmmm... Not really. I suppose your permit for staying here("verblijfsvergunning") should allow you to work. Maybe they have a different category for starting companies.

If you want to know for sure, you should contact the Chamber of Commerce: http://kvk.nl/ That's where you should register your company, so they probably know this (or know who can tell you).
> making a list of most commonly used words, sort them and then try to memorize will lead you to know some words, but not an language.

True, but prioritizing common vocabulary _as part of_ a broader system of practice will be a lot more useful when starting a new language than picking words more or less at random.
> I could say that I saw this coming; the problem is that I’ve been seeing it coming for several years, and it keeps not arriving (and I don’t know if this is really it, even now.)

This is me as well (not that I would compare my predictive prowess to that of a Nobel prize-winning economist). I started predicting the 2008 recession in 2004 (I was right about the reasons, but obviously waaaay off on my timelines). Naturally, it wasn't until I gave up on trying to predict a time for the recession to hit that it finally hit.

Likewise, I've been predicting a permanent drop in the dollar's value since around 2005, when I started paying attention to the quiet movement to diversify oil transactions away from the petrodollar system.

I'm at the point now where I'm reduced to the unhelpful punt: it will happen if and when it happens. So of course the point at which I give up trying to predict when petrodollar hegemony fails would make a fine time for it actually to happen.
> In order to prevent global warming, we'd have to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere entirely.

There are processes that remove CO_2 from the atmosphere. Take photosynthesis as an example. Animals have exhaled CO_2 as long as they existed. We do not need to stop it.

(There may be a point that restricting the output to sensible levels is worthwhile. But the sensible level can be above zero.)
I studied German when I was younger (middle school/high school), and Italian a bit later (college), and Italian is definitely easier (though no language is easy).
Year after launch, Google's phone ambitions ring true
Are we going to see "Oslo" their new modeling language in VS2010?
That's grand, but "learn any language that has millennia of development in common with your native language in three months" doesn't have much of a ring to it.
I nearly downvoted because it reads like the standard anti-MS "troll" comment. But considering the original submission it fits the theme - so I didnt :)
JQuery Concrete; ConcreteUI programming in jQuery
Retro: My Favorite Blog Post on Raising VC
Ask HN: Finish the following sentence: GNU: GNU is not Unix. Bing: Bing is not
Google ?

Wonder if they saw that one coming when microsoft decided to launch their new search engine as "BING".

And if they did it intentionally then props to them.
Teen girls around here like full-sized BlackBerries.
A recipe is something that will work for almost anyone under any circumstance, this is an anecdote.

Selling your company to yahoo for an idiotic amount of money was a thing that happened to a few people a while ago, but it is not a thing that you could easily repeat today.

(broadcast.com ? geocities ?)

This guy got very lucky. Sure he worked hard enough and sure he made it count but that goes for any period, it gives you a slight advantage. The environment of the time was in large part the difference between a living and silly money.
It's on the back so everyone can see it.

It's a fashion statement to have an iSomething.
Even here on HN you never (or rarely) read I have booted up my Asus or Dell or whatever BUT there's always "my Macbook" or similar.

I like the underdog companies and I appreciate their effort and technology and I'm not buying into the iXXX hysteria. Apple was clever as it is being paid for being advertised. People pay sh%%loads for their products and they never ever forget to mention it in their discussions that they have one.

Geeks are a very small percentage of the market so unless the phone is not a "fashion accessory" there won't be massive commercial success with it...but it will be a great thing I hope.
Hollywood film output likely to fall by a third
Obligatory:

>What I meant [by saying Microsoft is dead] was not that Microsoft is suddenly going to stop making money, but that people at the leading edge of the software business no longer have to think about them.

http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html
Agile Testing - Simply Resources & Videos
This looks like a really cool idea. I have always thought it would be interesting to have a picture of me or other people taken each day. From day to day it probably wouldn't be that different, but it would be fun to look at long term changes. This seems like a service that will make that happen.
And to clarify, there is nothing wrong with non useful Math.

You mean: there is nothing wrong with not yet useful Math. Math is always useful for finding Truth, and only sometimes useful when scientists find phenomena which can be described by it.
Beware The BOOB Stare ?
It's all Staring .............
IT jobs on the increase
Microsoft's Sidekick restoration turns into farce
One should take it as a good sign if people are criticizing them with only snarky remarks. Especially if the snark is uninformed or misinformed!
Dollar’s Decline Brings Troubles, but an Upside for Exports
The first thing we should do before reforming college is to decide what our goals are. Then we should figure out how to achieve them.

Unfortunately, most stated reasons for college/education in general serve as justification for the existing system.
University uses nanotech chips to find cancer
There are some points in the article about how a CLI is very focused, it does one thing, and only exactly what you tell it to do, which can be nice for overcoming some sort of fear of breaking stuff and losing control.

However, research has shown again and again that GUIs are better at most tasks, but not all. One obvious example would be photo handling or sorting, I'd rather do that sort of thing in Picasa where I can see and drag and drop, than through the command-line where I'd have to move the images by remembering their filenames.

As always, what the "best" interface for something is depends enormously on what tasks you want to perform. If the task is simply to overcome your fear and having the computer do something, anything, then sure, a CLI might be a good idea.
Didn't everyone realize this six months ago?
For the longest time, after I read about MapReduce, I wondered what the big fuss was about. MPI has equivalent functionality (Broadcast/Scatter and Reduce) along with many other useful high-level communication functions. It does restrict you to a limited (and unpopular) set of languages for web programming though.
NoSQL: Distributed and Scalable Non-Relational Database Systems
Type checking is what you say when the compiler makes sure that you've used all your types correctly, and spits out an error when you don't. It's there to prevent you from trying to assign an int to a string, for example.

"Runtime type checking" is the same thing at runtime. Errors and exceptions get thrown, your program stops. So no, that's not what we're talking about.

Here is a description of type checking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system#Type_checking
Pity he doesn't show any relevant John Deere adverts.
'rally' ? :)

That's a very tough question, to which I'm afraid there are no valid short answers, unless they're in the negative.

Everybody that wants to change 'the world' has a different definition of 'world'. For some it means their personal environment, for some it means those below the poverty line. Almost always there is some 'demographic' limitation to what the world really means.

I think plenty of people genuinely want to improve the world, but because they realize their limitations they're forced to scale down their ambitions a bit and then they do their best within that framework.

And some get lucky and make a bundle, then spend it to materially improve the lives of as many others as they can manage. But that's rare.

For some people who made a lot of money in not-so-nice ways doing good is a way of atoning, or even PR. For others it is what comes most natural to them. Altruism doesn't have to come in competition with greed, it can come after it, or before, gathering money as a tool. There are all kids of scenarios here.

Over the years I've found that my teen-age idealism ("change the world for good on a large scale") has bit by bit been whittled away by reality. Right now I'd settle for my definition of 'world' to be those people that I'm in daily contact with.

And yes, I really do want to do that, but I'm not sure if I will succeed, for any definition of world.

But I'll keep trying :)
I was naming groups of people who have strong, ideological, mutually contradictory theories about finance. Anyway, it's a stretch to call inflation/deflation fearmongers, Randists, and the money-is-debt gallery "economists".

We only have vague understandings of the macroeconomics of finance, so that stuff isn't really worthwhile to people not interested in economics.
Many CLI programs are written to be used by other CLI programs, which is considerably more difficult when the the primary interface to the program is a GUI. If you keep the interface simple and textual, though, you can still write a GUI wrapper.
> That said, you only run into that problem if you're forced to switch between a QWERTY and Dvorak layout often.

I do switch often - mainly because other people's computer do not tend to have Dvorak activated on them. It's not much of a problem. Though I do get slower when I haven't used a layout for some time and have to get used to it again.
Frankly no. I just sat here and it suddenly hit me.

Congratulations on being a whole lot smarter than me :) (don't worry about it, you probably share that distinction with a large part of the population of the planet).

And is there any take on this being an oversight or was it on purpose ?
>Which other sites show such a large discrepancy between self-reported and quantcast/compete/alexa numbers?

I can expect a pretty small overlap between web users who have, say, the Alexa toolbar installed on their computers and the kinds of early adopters who would use a service like DailyBooth.
patio: great idea about avoiding spam bots.

We recently struggled with this on the design of the front page of an application. A similar issue we ran into is scaring people away with login/password boxes on the front page.

What does everyone think, is it better to have the login/password boxes visible immediately to save the user a click, or do what digg and twitter do to avoid scaring people about a sign-up form in the not so distant future and hide it behind some AJAX?
OT: Seven hours of Feynman lectures online: "The Character of Physical Law" (in case you missed the announcement several months ago, Silverlight required)

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
By the way, what does end-to-end mean in an enterprisey context?
M$ is not big on recursive acronyms so I doubt they really explored the possibilities.

Or maybe they are just starting.
Based on our usage of these services, this is the range of correctness:

Google Analytics >> Alexa >> Quantcast >> Magic 8 Ball >> Compete
I believe it's the fingerprint scanner.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bing+is+not+google&hl=e...

Sounds like a working title that stuck.

First hit of above search for me: Urban Dictionary: bing
10 Aug 2003 - BING. Best Information Not Google.
In former Soviet Union, they did the same thing, put newspapers on displays.

Not sure if they still do the same in Russia these days.
Why are there not more Spanish startups? OkuriSpaces aim to change that
Here's a good summary of options for fighting form spam:

http://www.texelate.co.uk/blog/how-to-prevent-spam-form-subm...

I prefer #2 for its unobtrusiveness (as the article suggests).
My law school friends bemoaned the fact that it is literally impossible to finish law school in anything less than 3 years because the governing board makes it unfeasible (basically milking the future lawyers for an extra year of tuition (talk about ethics), ridiculous class scheduling)
SPOILERS AHEAD:

Maybe Vonnegut is over my head but throwing a cat over a wall that scratches someone later and showing pictures of people to known paranoiacs with the intention to get them killed seem like two very different things.
I currently live in Barcelona. I began studying Spanish in January of this year (having never learned previously and it is my first foreign language). I spent 1 hour per day religiously practising basic Spanish until I moved here in March. From April to June (3 full months) I took Spanish lessons 4 hours per day 5 days per week. I participate in inter-cambios regularly. I have now been here for 8 months.

I would like to tell you that you are most certainly wrong. Although I can have a simple conversation in a social context I have a lot of trouble understanding the fluid discussions of native speakers. I have met many people who have moved here and are attempting to learn the language and can attest to the fact no one learns in 3 months. 12 months is closer to reality and even then the level will be extremely basic.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=889506
cough XNA's Not Acronymed ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA )
Analytics is off by over 100% on some of our sites compared to the logs.
If they did they didn't think very hard about it: Bing is not good.
As with fashion, maybe it's regional?
Aside from those using iPhones (and my Grandmother) every woman I know has a slide-out keyboard.
(Mostly Sidekicks, Navigators, enVs and the like)
NES On-A-Chip (FPGA NES)
Durable medical equipmemt
Fastrack Healthcare System provides software, technology and services for Home medical Equipment and Durable Medical Equipment providers, HME, DME, Home Infusion Pharmacy and Home Health Care Agencies.
bing is not gnu?
I think he would have my vote, but there are some other 'great' programmers out there.

how about this for minimalism: http://cr.yp.to/