skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is mostly bullshit. The guy is trying to do things in Rails the wrong way and complaining about it failing. He does have a few legitimate points, but I guess I'll go at it point by point, because it is fucking long:

-AR find works fine for me, in most cases, in those cases you can always fall back directly to SQL (has happened a total of two times for me). The guy very incorrectly states that the :group stuff will choke in Postgres. It does not. There is a separate driver for each database that will make the queries compliant with the specific DB.

-When using joins, you're supposed to use :include, or has_and_belongs_to_many. These are NOT read only, and work very very well. He's complaining that something he is doing the wrong way does not work. That is because he is doing it wrong, and it isn't SUPPOSED to work.

-I agree with his point about understanding Rails and the options hashes. At this point, I really wish that Ruby had named arguments, as the options workaround gets really annoying.

-I don't understand what he means by quality assurance. Rails has an incredibly large automated testing suite. I've been using Rails for two years and I've found one bug. I really just have no idea what he's trying to get at.

-On the last point, about the "big-picture", he is provably false. If you've written a Rails app and there is even ONE XSS injection opportunity, you've done it wrong. Spend two seconds in the API docs and you will find this function called "sanitize":: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/Saniti...

It helps if you read the fucking documentation before you criticize something.
Bill Gates' Last Day - watch the video
It will never be easier or safer for you to start a startup. In five years, you might have a family to support (not necessarily so, but odds aren't against it), and the decision becomes remarkably harder to make when your own needs aren't the only ones to think of. That "one year" of savings will last a month or two if you have kids.

There are many businesses that are recession-proof, and many that can still pay you a salary during a downturn, though your current job isn't necessarily in one of those businesses (and your startup might not be in one of those businesses either). Without a lot of experience, it may not be immediately obvious to you what businesses will weather the recession well and which will run into trouble.

Having a job now does not mean you'll have a job in six months if the recession hits hard. Don't imagine that your job is permanent if things go badly for your current employer. There are no guarantees in anything. At least with a startup, assuming you build something people want, you'll have something people want in your possession rather than just a last paycheck.

That said, I'll tell you what I wish I'd known at 23: Have fun. Do exactly what you most want to do. If that is starting a company, traveling the world, starting a band, writing a novel, getting another degree, or some combination of these things, do it. You will never be in a better position to do exactly what you want to do.

Your mother worries about you, and thinks about basic needs first. You live in a time and society in which basic needs are all but automatic: you can work two days a week at a crap job and make a subsistence living as long as you're single and live frugally. You can always get a crap job if you need it later. Since you're college educated and presumably a nerd, you're even better placed...contract work pays enough to get by on a few days a month.

As mixmax pointed out, the old saying that you won't regret the things you did but the things you didn't do is probably as true as any truism ever said. When you're 30 you'll begin to get a sense of this...I suspect that when you're 40 you'll have an absolute certainty of it (I'm not yet to 40, so I don't know for certain...but I passed 30 a few years ago, and it only seems more true each day).
When we started nearly two years ago, we had to quickly drop Windows and simultaneously learn Linux/bash, vim, Ruby, Rails, Apache, SVN plus million other things in a hostile and unknown land of old :-))) No, I have not heard of Merb back then, we compared RoR against PHP and went with Rails and so far it wasn't a bad ride. The key to NOT be disappointed is to do everything "Rails-way", i.e. treat DB as a dumb swamp where you keep your models. So far so good.
I like the RESTful Web Services book because it discussed how to design an API and why, not just the functions you'd need to wire an API together.
Are you serious? Hedge funds and investment banks do not really base their decissions on what press writes.
Crystal Methodology
Gentlemen, we have our first lady to speak up! Let's take a sample and see if the "insightful comments" thing holds up:

"I read somewhere that the blockbuster title 'Gears of War' had only about half a million lines of C++ code"

"We're starting a startup in computer vision. We're deploying across the web, but that's just because it's the cheapest distribution mechanism."

"I asked: in principle, if these black-boxes handled all the trades, where would the decision to trade or not come from."

"I asked if it was moral to play such a risky game with the economy."

"my most productive periods (in the sense of producing something) have all involved some kind of death march"

"The concept of sending electricity wirelessly has been imagined, but nobody had come up with a decent way to avoid the losses except by using an actively controlled beam method."

All of these were in the last 3 weeks. I'd say they definitely qualify as insightful. Glad to have you, DaniFong.
>don't bother with RESTful Web Services

I agree with you about AWDWR but I'm not so sure about this. RESTful Web Services is very good, and gives a much broader perspective about how & why REST works than you will get from just using Rails 2.
I'd say wait until you're 40, then you'll have 17 years worth saved up.
Driving New York to San Francisco
There was a study done some time ago that showed that people who negatively review something appear to be more intelligent than those who positively review the same thing.

This is probably the case here even though I don't know who Maciej is or what Rails app he's actually written. I think you should use a tool you're reviewing for a project before making up your mind about it.
OMG a woman on the internet. Pix plzzz!!!
>He characterized PG as treating investors like the devil in the early stage. They think otherwise, bringing more mentors from the investment arena.

PG has said on this forum that it is big negative that TS is so intimately connected to venture capitalists. TS, of course, sees it as exactly the opposite.
p.s. before you mod me down: http://xkcd.com/322/
First lang i learned was TRUCK , when I was the ripe old age of 13. It was on a CD and you basically used the statements GOTO, LOAD, and UNLOAD to get a truck to drive around and pick up barrels... it was fun stuff.
Hating on the latest and greatest thing is a good way to get hits and links if you can't get them any other way. Many comedians have made careers of this by adding humor.

People like it when you appear to have no sacred cows and call out things which might otherwise be thought hip or something.
A Chemical That Improves Memory (and Cures Loneliness)
Although the trip was from New York to San Francisco, I ended up buying the camera and started taking pictures in State College, PA. I used 3 circle stickers on the roof of my car to mark the position for a tripod, and kept the camera attached to the tripod the whole way. I also ended up getting very good at pacing out the same spot in the front of the car :)

I ended up stopping about once every 40 miles or so, although I did some night driving and there was a fair bit of rain, so I wasn't able to get 100% of the pictures taken.

The parts where I took pictures of me jumping were in Nevada, absolutely gorgeous setting.
Come on, it has a pretty obvious design. So obvious in fact that Microsoft is copying it for "asp.net" v-next. There is a lot of magic to rails, but let's call it "configurable magic" since __it seems__ most of the magic can be overridden (i'm not a pro). But to say it doesn't have a design? Come on...

http://www.asp.net/downloads/3.5-extensions/
Cool, on my drive from Seattle to San Diego last summer I had just gotten an auto power cord for my laptop, so I decided to make use of it. I recorded one frame every 30 seconds of the entire drive:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=r4W7ZNmZ9VY
Venture Fundings Hit $29.4 Billion in 2007
Thanks, I hadn't seen that before. Shame on me.
It still has the downside of not having the same level of client-support that NNTP does, but given that it doesn't require server support, I can see the appeal.

There's a couple of things in the Atom spec that seems underutilized, such as AtomPub. When combined with the threading, that could be a viable alternative. I wonder why So few sites support it? Momentum?

If I had the spare time (or capital to hire someone else), I'd love to see plugins added for the popular Blog packages and forums.

I suppose I shall have to wait and see.
Self-referencing posts are giving addresses such as-

http://news.ycombinator.comitem/?id=101708
+1 for sex with a porn model
SlickEdit 2008 Review
history tells us that recession is a time when creativity is at a all time high and you have a lot less competition. go for it.
So instead of having highly rewarding and productive computing careers, these socially retarded men should do what instead? Become criminals perhaps?
I wouldn't want to accuse Feld of having knowingly said anything as false as (1) and (3) unless I was sure he actually did, but they are in fact way off.

We're very closely connected to follow-on investors.
As anyone who's been funded by YC can tell you, I'm thinking from the beginning about how to pitch them to later stage investors. Often this starts in the interview. There is a stream of investors coming through here. We just don't advertise it, because we don't need to.

As for (3), he picked a really bad example. I hesitate to drag Joe Kraus into this by name, because the help he gives the startups is something he does voluntarily. But the fact is that he is extremely generous with his time. He is meeting with 2 YC startups this week. This is the rule with the speakers, not the exception.

This isn't the first time I've noticed TS trying to portray YC as just us, while TS is some magical stone soup of mentors. It's complete crap, as anyone who has been funded by YC can attest.

They should stick to (2). In the being-in-Boulder department they do actually have us beat.
I have a lot of respect for women who like the idea of building novel applications but don't want to get their hands dirty with the programming/computer science involved.

This is kind of like architects who want to design buildings but would rather leave implementation details to engineers.

That's the way it should be.
Is it impolite to talk about dating and getting laid?
I'm pretty sure Merb didn't exist two years ago, so I wouldn't be too ashamed that you didn't hear of it back then. :)
I remain skeptic. Sure, there are cultural signals we learn to interpret (short dresses, suits, marriage rings,...), but on a basic level, for the most part, women will be attracted to men and vice versa? Diseases will be repellent, as will other attributes of unfitness? You think you can raise men to be gay? (I don't know). Surely there is a lot of research on that, but the final word is perhaps not out yet?
Mobiles linked to disturbed sleep
Most People Are Depressed For a Very Good Reason
Does it really matter? (See if you can infer my gender from this question alone.)

There are 5 females in my company's R&D, comparing to about 30 males. That was way better than at my previous employer, where I was the only female in the 25-person team.
The Call of Solitude
Who wants to be a cognitive neuroscientist millonaire?
Life Size R2D2 Mod
Marriage was also mentioned, but I guess it won't appear in the list.
This came up recently. The answer is that you shouldn't worry about it, because you can't time the market. If you were really sure the economy was going to tank at a given time, you could just short a bunch of big stocks and make money that way. But no one really knows when or whether there will be a recession or how big it will be. So the best plan is just to ignore the economy.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88410
Well, that's the way it often is. But I hesitate to agree that it's the way it should be. I try not to shy away from implementation myself, and I think there's a lot of benefit to exposing oneself to details.

To quote PG:
"In principle you could make any mark in any medium; in practice the medium steers you. And if you're no longer doing the work yourself, you stop learning from this."

I speak for myself, but this true almost everywhere. Small changes in the resistance of medium, and in the convenience of doing one thing or another, often lead to drastic differences in the sort of things people create.

I heard that someone actually managed to play 'Flight of the Bumblebee' on Trombone. I'm not sure I can impress upon you how difficult that sounds -- there are like 5 notes per second, each requiring precise intonation, and it never lets up long enough for the poor soul playing it to breath. Apparently, it can be done. But I'm almost certain nothing of the sort would have been composed on it.

Programs are often the same way. Sometimes, the idea doesn't occur to you until you understand how to implement it. Or, as the case may be, until you actually implement it. I read that Scheme was in part an attempt to implement an Actor model. When they implemented lexical closures and actors, they discovered that the implementations were the same!
The Rails team has thought a lot about the stateless nature of HTTP requests, and they've pushed for a RESTful style of handling things (e.g., the REST architecture described in O'Reilly "RESTful Web Services" book). Seaside (and Weblocks) seem to focus on continuations, but I'm not convinced this is the way to go, particularly with richer Ajax and Flex clients.

Ezra Z has made Merb, a lighter and arguably cleaner version of core Rails (minus AR, etc), if you're bugged by Rails core code.
More likely The Simpsons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons#Influences_on_lang...
If it is a compelling business/startup based on a great product then you should start it. Nevermind the recession.

HP was founded during the great depression. Sun and Adobe were started during recessions.
I don't know how passionate you feel about your startup idea. I would take the plunge, as if I hunker down, my startup will never take off for sure. As others are mentioning it would be valuable lesson at worst. Your risk minimization instincts are making you think about recession and stuff. In my view, economic environment would only add very marginal risk to the risk that you would already take by going for your startup. I wouldn't be rash, but I would take the plunge.
Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums
:( 30-some men and 30-some women is a small small sample size to draw conclusions from.
rescuetime.com
Nice - fun to watch.
Have you tried different avenues of reaching out to new users ? Have you tried to take and accommodate feedback from your users ? Have you tried different features ? If you think you've done your best and can't do anything more than it's time to quit. Is it worth putting in cruise control ?
Rails Plugins Recommendations
Yes, I love rescuetime. Employeesugestionbox is a great idea. Share some more.
Mine ;P

(Should be a good answer for most of us)
Unless you specified that everything must be done by hand giving a 0 for using Java libraries was stupid. The important part about algorithms is not how to code them but how they behave.

IMO a good project for an algorithms class is to sort 20 GB of random floating point numbers. Having someone code a once off solution is of limited value as they will not recall what they did in a few months. However if you make them solve a problem and grade that. And then give them a harsh time constraint your students will learn something.
My point is that his work didn't drive him mad. This heroic Promethian myth about "dangerous knowledge" is as tiresome as it is false. These Hollywood types need a new stereotype to beat to death.
but I'm not convinced this is the way to go, particularly with richer Ajax and Flex clients.

Could you shed a little light on why you feel that way?
Please name a successful startup that began its earliest stages in an office. Google, Excite, Yahoo, Dell, Msft, Apple? They all started in dorms/garages/apartments.

Not saying its not possible or some dont prefer it, but the majority of successful ones do not. That is just historical fact.

But its a moot point as it sounds like (according to rms) the group office space is indeed optional with Techstars..
A lot of this is really a rant, but I do agree with some of it:

"- Reading and, in general, understanding Rails is horribly difficult,
since it's no design and layers upon layers of magic. Very often you will
find 5-7 layers of functions delegating the work deeper and deeper in,
until you arrive to a completely undocumented internal function that in
turn splits the work to three other, unrelated internal functions. Given
that each of those 10 functions takes a hash called "options", each layer
altering it subtly, but none having the complete picture, and that 9
times out of 10 that hash is not documented on any level, figuring out
what your choices are is pure hell. It's made even more fun by the fact
that different parts of Rails are accessible at various points of
handling the request, and you can't just jump in and poke things from the
console, since it won't have 99% of the things that only magically spring
to life once a request is live. "

Methods do really nest pretty deeply sometimes. And since all of ruby's classes are open, people just add stuff by hacking things together. It's pretty much impossible sometimes knowing where a particular method is in the codebase.
If the medium steers you, then that's not a good thing and you need to fix the situation.

For example, if writing by pen tends to force you to write a novel in a particular way that is undesirable, then fix the situation (e.g., use a word processor).

As a creative individual, you should be the one calling the shots.
People do raise men to be gay. Happens all the time. A few percent of parents do it (I don't know any reliable statistics). Not on purpose, sure, but parents don't raise straight kids on purpose either. (Yes, people try to "make their kid straight" occasionally, but there's no evidence the things they do actually have the intended effect.)

I definitely think one day we will learn how to analyze what parents do that causes men to turn out gay, and be able to copy it (or not).

However, I won't be surprised if the answer is: all present-day parents enact parenting strategies capable of causing homosexuality, but they only behave to cause it (unintentionally) when triggered in the right way (i.e., by some characteristic of young children other than homosexuality itself).
BUG : the RSS feed is broken here :

http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

links to YC are like this :

http://news.ycombinator.comitem/?id=101703

must be a typo.
The Significance of the MyBlogLog API
I can see where electric cloud could help for some big c++ project like OpenOffice, but has anyone found it useful for web applications (seeing as they tend to use dynamic languages)?
I'm not sure he had to be a cognitive neuroscientist to employ these methods. But he did well.

Another trick, which you could use if for some reason you don't know the answer to one of the early, supposedly easy, questions: Guess an answer, but give it with full confidence. If you're wrong the shocked reaction of the presenter will tell you before the answer is final, and only in this case you will need a lifeline.
8 Crazy Internet Schemers Chasing Fame and Fortune
I'm not trying to tell anyone it's a "better language". I have neither time, nor desire to do that. As I said, I'm busy getting things done. :)

As for building something, how about a non-trivial application with no analogues out there, 6 months, 3 people, 15KLOC of nice tight code, and public beta planned for spring? http://hypernumbers.com
Oh definitely. I didn't mean to imply that the Rails team hasn't thought about things like REST. They are huge proponents of that design philosophy.

One of the big advantages of statelessness is that it scales wonderfully. REST aligns itself with HTTP very nicely. Continuations are a clever compromise between highly stateful applications and stateless HTTP.

Ajax and Flex turn your browser into a smart client of sorts, and I think that a RESTful service design can stand independent of any particular client. It allows for many different clients to interact with your service besides just your particular Ajax web page. In that sense continuations would be perfectly suitable in those situations where you need to keep track of state. RESTful services need to stand independent of a particular client front end.

Anyway, I think that those principles are complementary and should work well together. Ajax (or some other rich client technology) on the front end and REST on the back.

Hmm. I think I may try my hand at writing a small web framework in Lua... that's been kicking around in my head lately.
If you have a very simple app that maps well to CRUD, a REST approach might be all you need. In that case, things are quite simple and scalable on the server side.

If you are building an Ajax/Flex rich client, particularly one that can work offline, you'd want the state on the client-side. Then you could view the server in a very RESTful way while handling program flow in your client app. Under these circumstances, there's less of a win with continuations.

Among the advantages in imposing a RESTful architecture on your server, the most interesting to me is the way that your server becomes a bunch of resources on which you can do a very limited set of things (the HTTP verbs). It imposes an easily understood interface, which is nice if you (or others) write other apps to access your server.
South Florida, are you ready for a news.yc meetup?
Anyone interested in attending or coordinating a South Florida meetup? or even Central Florida..
I'm sorry to say, but we're not hiring at the moment. We try to bring people on only when they can do something that we can't.
I was actually saying that Erlang has 'shown' - if nothing else, at Ericsson. It's the other guys - Haskell and company - that need to do more building and less talking about monads and things of that ilk.
15? Was it a Mark Twain story?
I don't accept your premise. Very few people have highly rewarding and productive careers when they are socially retarded. Inversely, a little social etiquette never hurt anyone.

The culture of computer science is currently unique, in that it gives the seed of antisocial behavior a fertile place to take root. That doesn't mean that antisocial behavior should be encouraged or accepted.
Good. He's probably about to launch his startup and is trying to distance himself from the asshole image he's been cultivating on Uncov.

This guy acts like he's so anti-"web 2.0" or whatever, and yet he still attends the Crunchies to blog for Valleywag?

And what exactly is he accomplishing by ripping on people like Leah Culver for writing a post on generating random strings? I get the sense that he feels superior to any startup that doesn't tackle some difficult problem.