skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to learn vernacular American English?
Hi all,

i'm from Germany and i'm 24 years old. I learned English early in school and as i started to code at the age of 12 i speak nerd-English well. As long as we talk about programming and business related topics(or stuff?) we can do smalltalk up to deep talk.

Next year we want to take the big step to move from Germany to San Francisco. I can do this easier now than tomorrow and i would regret to not have tried it.

What bothers me a bit is the fact that i don't know how to speak English as a native would. I can write and talk fluently but it will be hard to understand deeper conversations, culturual differences, sarcasm, irony, idioms/phrases, get emotions right, etc.

Also i would like to learn miscellaneous vocabulary... how do you call the border of a pizza? Pizzaborder or Pizzaedge?
It sounds not important but i want to know these things.

Last year we've been there for 1 months. The feedback to our product and also to our way how communicated it was great. But i know how it is to have friends from other countries. You understand them but they could do better.

Is there any chance to improve this upfront without living there? How would you recommend to prepare for the culture and better native understanding?

Thanks in advance.

Best
Philipp
> 9/11 was inside job http://www.ae911truth.org/

A quick glance at that website suggests it's full of inaccuracies, so it's best to avoid it.

> 9/11 was proposed and happened.

9/11 was proposed by Al-Qaeda and done by Al-Qaeda.

You can't just cognitively bias something into existence.

From a few days ago:

http://news.yahoo.com/al-qaeda-bursting-pain-over-pakistan-s...

"The guns that we have taken up against Allah's enemy America and its pet rulers and slave army should not be aimed towards children, women and our Muslim people," he added.

I guess the recently setup south Asian chapter of Al-Qaeda is also the US government as well?

Furthermore can you explain to me why Al'Qaeda wouldn't want to attack the US?
So what do you enjoy? "Implement a binary search algorithm for the following list in 10 minutes"? I find CS pop quiz-type questions to be next to worthless in assessing candidates.
The American population has been indoctrinated so thoroughly with regard to socialism and communism that beyond a small minority it seems pointless to discuss the subject with them. The mainstream political discourse is so far right to that of Europe even among young people that it's not even funny.
Does go support meta programming? I feel that this seems more like Macros replacement or build tasks that generate files which are included compile time.
The WP link includes a link to (after correcting the location) the paper at http://nebula.wsimg.com/624fc4188a1d8eb2d1ad010ca81ef8c1?Acc... which says:

> This study conclusively demonstrates that there is absolutely no evidence of an alkali-aluminosilicate-based composition in the binder phases of the casing stones, nor is there any evidence of “unusual” constituents in the pristine, bulk uncontaminated interior of the casing stones to call for a “man-made” origin. Despite the detection of a man-made “coating” on the Lauer casing stone, the stone itself is determined to be nothing but a high-quality natural limestone mineralogically, texturally, and microstructurally similar to that found in the quarries at Tura-Masara. ...

> Despite its many reported ancient routes, and unquestionable potential future applications of geopolymer technology, the Egyptian pyramids, in author’s opinion, still stand as marvels and mysteries of ancient engineering technologies exercised by the Old Kingdom (2500 BC) stone masons.

As a non-geochemist, I can say nothing about it one way or the other, and I know that I can be easily swayed by good sounding but wrong statements.

Perhaps it's like Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki. He showed that it was possible to go by balsa wood raft to Polynesia. That doesn't mean his diffusionist model of cultural development was what happened. That the Egyptians could have used geopolymer technology doesn't mean they did.
You can always emulate all autotools' shortcomings, you know, for backwards compatibility. And then add a bunch of defects of your own making on the top.
Fellow 360 owner. The way this is tied to google services is really the value here. I don't need nor want to launch a dozen apps like some mini-smartphone. I want pushed updates, voice commands that actually do stuff, etc. I don't think people yet appreciate how clever AW is. It really is more of an unobtrusive yet helpful accessory for all the things on my phone than anything else. Which is exactly what a smartwatch should be.

All this talk about how Tizen on watches will beat AW and how watches will have their own 4G connection is really off the mark. Its just more mindless 'featuritis.' People want a good experience, not a checklist of features that suck to use in the real world.

The pebble reminds me of the Treo smartphones before the iphone came out. Sure it could do stuff, but it wasn't very pleasant and you had to be something of a techie expert to really make use of it. I'm surprised the pebble people haven't made an AW watch yet. They have the branding and the know-how. AW is going to steamroll them if they don't contemporize.
I believe metadata gets stripped out, which is how I get some lossless size reduction for jpgs. In my experience, this is not something that we've been interested in preserving on our images (use case - websites).

Would you be looking at using this to compress some photos for personal use, or for a photography website? What would be your use case?
This question gets a lot simpler once you realize how they were originally implemented and many still are today: state machines. There is no history, no FIFO, the only thing that exists is the now. It's lot easier to answer, "I'm going up and am on the 3rd floor, someone is waiting on the 4th floor, do I start slowing down?" Then it is to answer, "someone pushed up on 4th and someone pushed down on 7th.... etc.".

This is also why many elevators perform very poorly under heavy load. You want to skip floors when the elevator is already full.
Statistical Analysis of NYC Christmas Trees
Old monochrome reflective LCDs used that, but smartphones and tablets are almost always using transmitive screens with backlight (sometimes transflective, like on Nokia N900, but reflective properties are only usable in very bright sunlight).

Kindle Paperwhite however has 100% reflective e-ink screen plus set of LCDs that shine through the light guide layer above the screen. Some people think that makes it better than transmissive LCDs - that's why using Kindle Paperwhite instead of iPad in this test would be much more insightful, as sleep-disturbing properties of transmissive, blue-tinted LCDs are nothing that wasn't known before.
I remember being interviewed in the DC area, where I was asked a question involving subway systems and routes. Being a mid-western lad completely unfamiliar with subways (and mass transit in general), I had a lot of trouble visualizing it. I would imagine that people who rode mass transit on a regular basis wouldn't have as much difficulty. Got a job offer anyway, though.
well,
- religious toleration: french revolution basically wants to kill off the Catholic priests. Napoleon brought back Catholicism since there were still a lot of catholics in france but stripped its privileges. He was the first to emancipate the jews.

- His military conquest speeded up the abolition of feudalism across europe. Civil code is put in place in occupied regions.
An important variable determining memory consumption is going to be the maximum bucket load factor. Does anyone know what it is as currently implemented?
Authorization Code Flow with Flask Example (Spotify API)
It is a _hypothetical_ situation intended to express some values that Larry Page has.
What “The Tipping Point” Missed About the Spread of Ideas
Vinyl subscription service (UK) launching in early 2015
It is something that apparently happened, approved or not. Does that not trouble you, that such a thing could happen, by those charged with upholding our liberty and safety, and there is nothing done to make sure it never happens again? Do the survivors, or the families of those killed, deserve some kind of apology or compensation?

We could argue about the 'approved techniques', as actually implemented, constituting torture too (I think they do, and think if they were done to you you'd agree -- I think your opinion is based on confidence that they would NEVER be done to you because they are only done to 'bad people', and the goverment would never confuse you for a 'bad person' -- you're probably right, only because you're American and white; in fat there are _numerous_ cases of 'mistaken identity' among those who were kidnapped and tortured), but really, neither of us are going to win such an argument on the internet.
>I do wish it could turn off completely, however.

You can "jailbreak" it and simply control it via standard LED sysfs interface.
Yeah, in order to create a pull request, I first need to commit to a branch on the repo. I suppose for public repos, I could fork and send the PR from there, but I don't know if there's a way that makes sense to do that for private repos.

I'll take another look at Github's permissions, but I don't think there's any other way around it right now.
An amazing new app I just downloaded that steams audio from any TV to your phone! It's like shazam for TV.
Where's the fun in the simple straightforward implementation ? How would you judge a candidate that, on the spot, decided to go with a new way to solve it just so (s)he could see if it worked out well. For example ... something like this ?

print '\n'.join(("fizz" if x % 3 == 0 else "") + ("buzz" if x % 5 == 0 else "") or str(x) for x in range(1, 100))

or even:

from __future__ import print_function
map(print, (("fizz" if x % 3 == 0 else "") + ("buzz" if x % 5 == 0 else "") or str(x) for x in range(1, 100)))

What if they come up with a solution, you have no idea why it works, but it works ?

Sadly, I expect most interviewers would react very negatively. I've already learned never to demonstrate actual programming ability, even when asked. Instead, answer every question the way you would answer physics problems in high school. You know, the problems asked by the teacher who has a bachelor in biology.

People are even justifying this with "clean code" arguments and the like. "Why aren't you using the framework ?". "Is that the best way to write such a complex thing". Worst of all : "what does that mean ?". You don't want to be asked those questions, it will not end well.

Interviewers who can't program will then start arguments about how programs should be designed/written, and the answer boils down to "design by committee, manned 90% by people who cannot pass FizzBuzz". Of course, best to leave out the second part if you point this out and instead add "ask for feedback".

And they wonder why development projects fail.
Implementing Yahoo OAuth 2.0 Authentication
Bitcore – A pure JavaScript Bitcoin API
Cut anyone out you want. I cut people out who support evil deeds, not necessarily those who vote for a particular party.
MIT Discovers Superconductor Law
Bing Developer Assistant Released
These results indicate that you can eat anything, not just foods enriched with bacteria like probiotic yogurt (which has questionable benefits in itself http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/do-probioti...), and observe a change in gut microbiota.

"Turnbaugh’s team found that switching mice to a high-sugar, high-fat diet reshaped the abundance of the community of microbes in the gut to a new, stable makeup within three days, in a reproducible manner that was largely independent of genetic differences among individual mice."
This is a good example of analogue-ness causing a very subtle and intermittent bug which remained unsolved for over 30 years: http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/ (previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5314959 )
I thought he talked about giving money not buying shares. Any gift at all can be thought as an investment in the broader sense of the word so beloved of governments spending taxpayers' money.
Ben Horowitz on why it's ok for a CEO to say “fuck” (sometimes)
We all but wiped out bedbugs in the 40's and 50's using DDT.

I find the short history of DDT fascinating - in two decades, we eliminated Typhus in Europe, went from 2.5 million cases of malaria in Ceylon, Sri Lanka in 1948 to 17 in 1963, we essentially eliminated bed bugs in the US and Canada, wiped most of Dengue fever out out the South Pacific...

Then DDT started getting banned after Silent Spring was published and the environmental movement kicked off. Malaria cases went back up to 2.8 million in Sri Lanka in 1969 and a lot of its effects were reversed. It took longer for bed bugs to come back because they don't spread as quickly as their flying counterparts.

I'm not a scientist in this field and I don't feel like I can comment on the validity of differing studies about the safety of DDT or its ecological effects. However, I think it's undoubtedly true that in many countries, malaria and dengue and typhus and all sorts of diseases were more of a concern than cancer (and still are). DDT saved millions of lives in the short span of time it was used.

To me, this makes the public health questions of the DDT ban incredibly interesting - if you have something that might cause cancer and kill some innocent people but at the same time use it to eliminate disease vectors and probably save more people in the long run, do you keep using it?
Indeed, and it's interesting to speculate what the similarities and differences would be. Since they will likely also have evolved in a Darwinian way, I think there will be more similarities than differences.

Although, like the article says, if they have evolved further and especially if they uploaded their minds into computers, it might have become something rather different.
Hey Michael, it looks like there were some errors with a few optimization jobs, including one of yours. If you want, you can try re-queuing the job by refreshing and then clicking on the button again.
Cool idea, clever roll out. How did you collect the pitches? I was surprised and flattered to see my company (Common Form) included.
Like the belief that technological progress for its own sake is more important than human welfare?
I see what you mean. But that would go against much of what we know about Evolution and Natural Selection.
Just read the new edition of C++ Programming language by Bjarne Stroustrup ;)

Some things are hard to come by in any shorter sources. And at times you have to dig into the standard.

An example of rather obscure thing in C++ which changed in C++11 (sequencing): http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/eval_order

And another thing which can be pretty confusing without carefully reading the standard. Copy elision vs move constructors...

See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2011/n324...
§ 12.8 (Copying and moving class objects), #32 - 33
It's tough to amortize a large cost if you don't have any savings to begin with. Some people may recognize that the up-front cost with the lower monthly rate is the best deal, but be flat out unable to pay it.

Arguments that they should wait and save for the next 3 years are silly, because in those 3 years they're losing out on any opportunities enabled by having the device at the higher monthly cost. It's only an irrational decision because those opportunities frequently don't have any monetary value.
I have read it. Would highly recommend it. Most other guides just go over the neat things, but this one also goes over all the potential pitfalls and things to watch out for (and it's C++ -- there's always something to watch out for :))
While I agree with you, Erlang for instance has collections as primitives (lists/tuples), but then offers more complex collections (such as gb_tree) as part of the stdlib.
Yeah I'm pretty sure the elevator, at least that old one, doesn't know if you're in it, though more modern ones will open the door as you walk up.
I generally went with a question my friend told me, "what was the last non-work, non-school program you wrote?". The theory being that a person who has used programming for something personal was probably a better candidate since they saw personal value in their profession.
They're two simple lines and they work everywhere; I'd understand "shamanic" to mean things that work as long as you sacrifice a chicken and the phase of the moon is right and your heart is pure. i.e. networkmanager.
My complaint about the Chrome extension would be that it hijacks the New Tab Page. I'd quite like to use it as a Chrome app though.
Do you know anyone working on this 'for real'? Synthetic biologists so to speak. I've looked into this before to no avail.
Docker Image Insecurity
I you think I want Patrick to do what I want him to do -- that is NOT the case.

My goal here is to disassemble Patrick's choice, learn from it whatever I can, try to make a prediction about the effect of that move on his life, see what Patrick thinks about the move to Tokyo 1-3 years later and learn again.

So far I think the move would have slightly negative impact, mostly because increased cost of living. That would force Patrick to deviate from his goals more, do more enterprise consulting (as opposing to product development) and add more stress to his life.
You may want to look at how CruiseFish.net does their revenue model... They have an up-front fee, but it is very low relative to the price for the tracked cruise reservation. That takes a lot of the sting out of the 'You have to pay up front and you might not actually hear about a lower rate'. They also use their forum to provide 'evidence' that their site works for its users.
In that case you effectively voted for the greater evil. They probably played you too, by lending support to the third party to split the vote of the good people.
I dont have a problem with this. I keep hearing about how people can't train dogs, how dogs "misbehave," etc.

Oh course they have issues, pets aren't designed to live domestic suburban human lives. I just don't believe humanity automatically and morally should have dominion of all animals. I think giving up on non-working pet ownership is a step in the right direction. And when sci-fi style robotics gets here, give up on working animals altogether.

I say this as someone who loves and has owned several dogs. They're just not cut out for our lives. I think there was a study that showed most pets have severe mental illness. Not to mention, the ones that can't play the human domestic game and heaven forbid show their natural aggression or dominance traits, well they get killed. How the hell is this moral? Why is the loss of pet ownership this horrific thing? It seems like thats the way a compassionate society should be leaning towards.
The Problem is that DDT got mich less effective very quickly due to resistance. Thus the cost/benefit ratio was foreseeably ever worsening. If eridication can not be achieved in under 10 years with DDT it will basically never happen.
I wouldn't ask you to solve it. I would've hoped for simply deferring the problem to somebody else. (I.e. OAuth)

Authentication is an incredibly hard problem. Including it in the spec encumbers it. And allowing for arbitrary challenge/response auth mechanisms gains you exactly one thing - guaranteed incompatibility as the protocol gains popularity :)
Not to be disrespectful- but I want to learn more about C++ from anybody but Stroustrup. His writing (to me at least) always has the aspect of "nothing is wrong, and every compromise was picked correctly." I'd much rather read somebody like Meyers who will actually warn you away from some mal-features. And C++ is so large you really want a useful editorial view to any teaching.
Yes, and I think I can safely say I've never used this feature (in either Ruby or PHP) for anything more serious than a code golf challenge.

This might just be me, but I don't think an ordered hash is a particularly easy data structure to reason about. Almost all the code that I've seen depend on it in either language has been too clever by half.
Those people in the article don't sound very dogmatic to me (except maybe the pope).
Show HN: My first iOS app written in Swift
Yep, if you've got something like this set up as a build step, good on you! A lot of places don't, so this was made as an easy way to reduce your image footprint. It's amazing how much can be saved sometimes.
Ask HN: Is Pentadactyl dead?
The venerable Pentadactyl Firefox extension[1] seems to have died.

The last stable build was released 9 months ago.[1] The nightly builds stopped being released two months ago.[2] There is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Pentadactyl forums.[3][4][5]

I've been applying unofficial patches like these[6] and compiling it from source to make it work with newer versions of Firefox. But I am not sure how much longer this kind of hacking will work if the lead developers have abandoned the project.

Am I wrong in my assessment? I am hoping someone can convince me there's still hope, because I don't see many alternatives.

vimperator is there, but it supposedly has far fewer features than Pentadactyl. I'll switch to it if I have to, if the only other alternative is going back to using the mouse. But I am not looking forward to it. Is there anything else?

[1] - http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/index

[2] - http://5digits.org/nightlies

[3] - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pentadactyl/87dwlnoePTw

[4] - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pentadactyl/8eC7EuNSx2I

[5] - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pentadactyl/izmZnT28bUk

[6] - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pentadactyl/izmZnT28bUk/CTfBjvYBHCIJ
This is only a change to the underlying implementation. Extension authors may need to update their code, but probably not in most cases.

There are no userland changes here.
If all bed bugs are attracted to the trap, then a mutation would have to occur.
> Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria.

The problem with this is that they are frequently wrong. Many people respond poorly to these type of probiotic diets, and holistic medicine has observed outcomes in a small portion of the population and thus encouraged us to generalize them. All we really know about the gut is that it is extremely complicated and that in terms of gut conditions' ("IBS") relationship with gut microbiota they run the gamut. Many of them are either not directly affected by microbiota population (ie: nerve damage, circadian rhythm ), or gut microbiota are part of a multi-causal problem.

We need more science like this, that reaffirms what we "know," not more holistic bullshit.

Source: IBS sufferer who has spent years talking to GI specialists and reading research papers about this stuff. It's hard, and as soon as you think you have it figured out it smacks you in the face with another factor you haven't considered.
Punk-O-Matic Music Generator
The mods have in place mechanisms to find submissions they think have slipped through the net and provide a boost for them. It's experimental and undocumented, but I saw it mentioned a while ago[0].

I think it's a good thing, even if it's somewhat arbitrary and has multiple false-positives and false-negatives. I've always been a fan of stochastic processes - they exhibit lots of good behavior, and comparatively few pathological flaws.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157698
One Nobel Recipient Accepted Her Prize Wearing a Gown Covered in Neurons
The Myths of DevOps
Why Competition Is Good News for Your Startup