skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked in the Gore HK office in the late 80's and even met the man himself. He was adamant about keeping groups small; small enough that everyone knew everyone else personally. New locations would start with about 10, and whenever an office/factory grew larger than about 50 they would split into two groups of 25. Another credo was that there were no "assistants" or staff positions. Everyone either produced product or sold product. Two roles. There were however senior and junior personnel, and decisions were made by rough consensus among senior personnel. However, all remuneration was openly discussed and agreed upon by the entire group in the context of production or sales targets.

I liked being there, although my role as a freelance systems analyst/programmer was not an authorised one.
True enough. Talk to a professor in an area where there is a high-salaried non-academic job market (business, medicine, engineering, CS) and see if you get a different answer.
It's a Wrap! Ernie Cline Has Written the Ultimate Star Wars Fan Movie
You could look at some php frameworks, i don't use 'em but some of them out before the rails way of thinking codeigniter, smarty templating, but then there is cakephp which takes a rails approach.

You should learn rails, but it will require learning ruby.

That said learn rails, start with a small project. Something that helped me learn how some of the rails magic works was to install plugins, then hack/mod them and read the source code. You'll pickup all sorts of neat tricks and tips.

Remember if you having trouble doing something or even wrapping your head around it, google around as chances are someone blogged about it or explains it.

To answer your question, the only thing that rails doesn't do well is multiple uploading thing, but you can always farm out uploading work to merb.
Well, Ruby is just a lot more fun to program in than, say, PHP or Java (http://judofyr.net/posts/haiku.rb.html - Ruby haikus, anyone?).

Rails is a very neat framework, which means it comes with all the pros and cons of a framework. The pros are that it can get you up and running very quickly, and it's really good at hiding the tedious details you would normally have to deal with. I think it's actually helped me write better PHP code, to be honest. The cons, of course, are that you have to learn it, like any framework it can sometimes get in the way, and it might be more than you need for certain projects. Rails is great for anything that resembles a CRUD app, and it forces you to stick to the MVC model; if you're doing something very different, it might not be the right tool.

One thing to consider is that PHP works on pretty much every *nix server out there out of the box, while Rails might take a bit of fiddling to set up and administer.
Is cloud computing more than just smoke?
Sorry, but no. What differentiates the factory worker from Brazil or India or Malaysia or Sweden? Nothing. Why should there be any difference in what percentage of the final cut is his? Is the Brazilian factory worker able to produce more wealth without the machinery, equipment, marketing people, product designers and everything else that is part of any supply channel? No, he isn't.

The problem in Brazil is precisely this mentality that keeps us with a half century old labor code and absolutely zero incentive for entrepreneurship.

The Welfare State is dead, see http://workforall.net/ScandinavianModel.html
Is this why many engineers and programmers are socially inept? (Vid Games Damage Frontal Lobe)
"Damage to one's frontal lobes can do a variation of things:

Mental flexibility and spontaneity is impaired, but one's IQ would not lower.

Socialization can diminish; talking may decrease dramatically.

Senses regarding risk taking and rule abiding are impaired.
"
OMG, it failed on 50 Cent lyrics!

"You can find me in the club / bottle full of bub / Mama, I got that X if you're in to taking drugs / So come give me a hug if you're in to getting rubbed"

Any reasonable "stupid" corpus must begin with lyrics from 50 Cent, T Pain, Limp Bizkit, Kottonmouth Kings, Insane Clown Posse, and other craptacular music popular amongst suburban teenagers.
Also, Intuit.
Playing Games May Damage Your Brain
I had a momentary rush when I thought that they were giving themselves 1000 * sqrt(3) bonuses. But that's $1,732, not $1,723.

Ah, well.
QuickLook Syntax Highlighter
Website looks really good. When I parsed this url

http://www.fortmason.org/calendar/2008/03/week4.shtml

it only listed the first event to follow the date pattern and sometimes listed all the events as one.

You guys are off to a great start!
Benchmark entrepreneur talks making money from open source
Oh yeah - I was a SYSOP on two BBSes in the St. Louis area, one of which was my own. This was in the early-mid 90's, just before internet became widely available.

I met my high school sweetheart on my BBS. Man, those were the days.
The emotional state drop-down is a wonderful idea! Don't mind if I borrow that for my contact forms :-)
And, Wikipedia. And YouTube. Can Dick Costello code? I can't remember (he's a really nice guy, though). No? Feedburner.
Slightly unfair comparison when it comes to admin pages. When it comes time to modify the Django admin pages to do something the framework doesn't supply, I bet the graph gets a bit more even, if not in the favor of Rails.

This is true of any framework: the second that you go outside the bounds of what it was designed to do, you are going to spend lots of time bending it to your will.
I liked the old one too, but this is just as simple with a more upscale (read: Web 2.0) sheen to it, I'd say.
Mandelbrot set discovered in 13th century by Benedictine monk
Also see:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=98615
What on earth is the point of such a thing? Seems more like a world record stunt, like a group of people making a mile long burrito, than a serious endeavor.
Also see:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/Story?id=98615
Heh. I was. But I'm no hacker.

I live in the Chicago NW Burbs and I think the most frequently visted BBS for me was Jake's File Exchange and second place was probably North By Northwest.

Jake's File Exchange was where I got my first taste of warez and where I spent WAY too much time playing Legend of The Red Dragon.

Sigh... to be young again.

(This was with a Packard Bell 486DX2 and a 14.4k modem. LIGHTNING FAST!!! for the time. I used RipTerm to connect. This was around '94 I believe)
Paint on Solar Power!
If you aren't clear on what the failings of PHP are, you may want to stick with the language. Keep flexing your SQL skills, build great UIs, and figure out how to modularize your code to keep repetition down. Take a look at Rails a year down the road -- start by browsing the official Rails book at your local Barnes.
You mean: welcome to the new AOL.
I didn't say a bank would want to guard against this; I just said that a 10% capital requirement isn't really a 10% capital requirement.
Given that 7 is apparently regarded as an unlucky number in some parts of the world, I'm sure you're right there.
Not a huge fan of it but I'm happy that they left the management console the way it was!
I thought a CS professor only makes $70k - $90k, even at a prestigious university.
Is There a TechCrunch Without Arrington?
AOL Keywords were my first though too.

QR codes work so much better, particularly for print such as the free commuter newspapers Murdoch gives to train travelers etc. The main problem is user acceptance/education outside of Japan & Korea. We did a small sample test (unscientific) with QR codes in Melbourne, AU: In the under 40s bracket, perhaps 1/15 could identify the QR code but only 1/25 could successfully use it.
> Not to nitpick, but how do you spend $474,662 on security?

Seems damn easy to me. How much does some security technology + bodyguards cost? I'm sure Larry/Sergey have at least as much security, but apparently they're covering the cost. I recall Ellison's security was into the millions.
That doesn't jibe well with tuition increases at an unbelievable scale (40% from 2000 to 2005 according to Marc Bousquet - http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/who-benefits-from...). The California State University system has seen tuition increases of 55% since 2002.

And I tend to agree with his analysis: money is flooding to an ever-increasing administrative layer while more and more classes are taught by "cheap" adjunct faculty who have zero job security and no opportunity for professional development. In his estimates, and for sure at the California state school I am most familiar with, adjuncts are now teaching 70-75% of courses, compared with rates as low as 20-25% in the past.

(Disclaimer: I'm a former adjunct university teacher :)
Why do people who want to do research go into academia? It seems like the economics are just completely not favorable in academia -- you have to spend a lot of time teaching and doing other overhead and you barely get any pay. It seems like the only economically rational reason to become a professor is a love of teaching for its own sake. Maybe it makes sense because you get underlings for free...?
This is a great example of using the scientific method to debug programs, and a perfect example of how useful a personal log can be. Imagine if every programmer kept such logs, so that when you have a question about a strange hack in a program you inherit to maintain, you can search in the original programmer's log and read what was going on at the time he came up with the fix?
I think the problem has more to do with email than getting people to pay attention. Example: the major thing that got me really into twitter was when quotably launched. First thing I thought to do was show it to someone who had a huge list, so I messaged the url to Scoble. Even though I've never had any contact with anybody in the Web 2.0 / blogosphere world, he checked it out, linked to the site in his feed, and even messaged me back saying thanks. This is with only having an account for a few hours and nobody on my followed list. Not everyone will always react so favorably, but there will always be alternative channels to get the word out to somebody if you really want to. To me, email just isn't the best form of communication for initially attracting attention, especially in this industry.
This is true. Many departments are granted budget depending on their PhD student headcount (and where headcount doesn't determine budget it often determines prestige). This leads to two things: 1) no consideration for the actual demand for PhD recipients; and 2) no impetus to actually get students out of the program. When I was at University of Chicago, their anthropology PhD program had an average completion time of eight years! Of course, many of those got opportunities for tenure-track employment. Still...
What is new in Rails 2.0? There are a lot of books and resources available for 1.x. Are there any good resources available for the latest version?

I understand there were some significant changes. Does that mean if I'm learning this from scratch that I should avoid the 1.x way of doing things?
I think all of the people who were too young have simply not commented, so I'll just throw this in: I was too young (I'm 24 now) - or at least if there were BBS's going on, no one I knew, knew about them. How late were they still in vogue?
Rails isn't fun to use when you have to integrate with legacy systems and database schemas that doesn't fit with active record's way of organizing databases. Far more work than necessary. When your database has simple things like checks, restrictions, foreign keys, pl/sql routines & weak entity tables built into the schema, active record completely ignores it and craps out when the db gives errors about it breaking your restrictions (it doesn't handle them as it does it's other types of errors). Even doing a db schema dump into migrations doesn't fit 100% and you have to recreate the entire schema in rails-pseudo-sql for it to work properly. Totally against the DRY principle.

When your starting from a clean slate although, it's a different story. Then you can use rails conventions & restrictions and everything runs a lot more smoother. But if you got previous systems to build on, it's a bit more extra work. Rails is an opinionated asshole (like steve jobs), and when your not willing to back down, you got a lot of extra work to go through.

Also sometimes rails is just too complicated or inflexible for the job and whipping up something quick & dirty in 500 lines of php would do you far far better.
Indeed. You can probably infer this is the case when they show the graph with the admin component removed.
I used a BBS in the 806 area code on my commodore 64. Anyone ever play Empire? Fun game.
The CS professors at small schools can make about half that.
Man, I don't mean to comment-whore this thread, but it happens to be one of the topics I know the most about :)

I can think of a couple of reasons:

1. Access to grant funding. It's really hard to get granting organizations to take you seriously if you are applying for monies unattached.

2. Teaching load actually isn't that much of a concern for people at big research universities. One of my mentors described it like this: you have "cosmopolitan" professors and "hometown" professors. The cosmopolitans are always presenting their work, speaking at conferences where they were invited, and bringing in huge grants. They don't do much committee work, they don't have teaching loads (or, when they do, they hire someone to do the teaching for them). This leaves them plenty of time to concentrate on writing (or managing their ghostwriters aka grad students, spouses, research assistants, etc), presenting, researching, and publishing. The hometown faculty actually do all of the "dirty" work of running the university: sitting on committees, teaching, designing policy, etc.

3. They do get a cadre of grad students to help them out. Basically, they get to hand-pick a research team and work with them for 3-10 years (this happens more at large research universities and with senior faculty). These students are there to work with you because their interests and/or past work somehow connect with what you are doing (research interests, publication plans, lab work, etc).

4. Teaching a graduate-level seminar isn't like teaching an intro to technology or English 101. It's mentally tough and rigorous for everyone involved, including (and, you might argue, especially) the faculty. You have to be on your game, every week. And good faculty will use these seminars to develop and flesh out new ideas, concepts, and arguments. Like your cadre of grad students, this is another place where you get to exchange ideas on things that YOU are interested in.

That's just a couple of the reasons I think people go into it. However, I do think that opportunities to do work at this level will continue to shrink as universities are seen, more and more, as a place where you go to get trained for a job. It isn't too distant in the future that we will start seeing standardization movements in higher ed. Then you'll get everyone teaching to the test rather than their passions.
I'm reasonably sure this isn't the case. Even in pure math, postdoc salaries tend to start at $50k ($45k in low cost of living areas like Urbana Champaign). Associate (tenure track, but not yet tenured) profs tend to start at $70k. I can guarantee you engineering/CS makes significantly more.

However, the average professor makes very little, because the average professor (of, e.g., Medieval English Literature) has few marketable skills.
They should totally have apprenticeships, it results in cheaper labor with more focus on your technologies in the long run. Take Zoho for example, they recruit kids who are still in high school to become programmers for them.
That's the big problem people fail to mention when they talk about persistence - the trick is to be persistent at the right things! Being persistent at the wrong thing is sometimes hard to recognize until the point where you go down with the sinking ship.
This is slightly off-topic, but is there no way (yet?) to browse jobs on snaptalent? I can't even get their widget to load in my browser on sites that have it, for some reason (Firefox and Opera on Linux).
The URL system is a dead end. There are just not enough good, or just reasonable, domain names out there. A drill-down method, for example, a simple search and a selection among a few alternative, looks like a potential alternative. I never used AOL keywords but this does look like a smart way to find a website.
The testing was done on two collections with several thousand images each. But the number of individuals in these collections was 38 and 114!
Muxtape
Has anyone used this for hosting? Can you give some pros/cons?
Excuse my French, what's QR?
There's a great book for Rails 2.0. It's "The Rails Way", by Obie Fernandez.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321445619/

By and large, most of the 1.x stuff will still work, but it won't necessarily be the most efficient use of your time; lots of the 2.0 changes make things easier.
Battle of the comment add-ons: 6 services compared
I don't like the use the word "design" gets on the web.

I see this as mostly a re-arting.

The way I use and more importantly: read this page hasny
't really changed.

As a signed up user I click on the button that lets me log in.

The experience is a little bit more different for first time users.

I would prefer it if we called design design and art art. This distinction is important, not just pedantic. While working in groups or at my office discussions of design regularly get caught up in what should be the icing on the cake: the art.

And I think slicehost just got some nice icing
There are many nice things about Rails. If I had to pick, the secret sauce is ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord avoids 90% of the SQL that is usually required when writing an app. ActiveRecord avoids this in such a way, using metaprogramming and conventions, that the time saved writing SQL is really time saved, not merely exchanged for time writing an extensive ORM mapping layer. The boost this gives can be amazing when compared to some other frameworks. I can't speak for Django, though.
Asaph Microblog - Beta - phoboslab.org
They give an example of filtering out lowercase text. Lowercase and stupid are very different. I sometimes write whole essays in lowercase.
"When I try to explain why professors at small, private universities -- where tuition costs tend to be high -- usually earn significantly less than faculty members at more-affordable public universities, people shake their heads at the absurdity of academe."

The people at the more-affordable public universities are usually there more for research than teaching. They are getting paid substantially more because the research brings in many more dollars than tuition nets. The professors that get big university research jobs are also usually from top notch, competitive programs. The numbers she is looking at for big universities still includes profs in areas like creative writing, but also the higher paid economics, engineering, and cs professors.

"But if the average person reading U.S. News assumes that characterization is accurate -- the same person who, perhaps, sits on the governing board of a university and approves faculty raises each year -- then it's no wonder that faculty salaries are as low as they are on many campuses."

Wait. Does anyone in academia actually take US News that seriously?
Research professors spend much more time doing research than teaching. Usually you love doing it which offsets some of the monetary compensation issues. Also, "barely get any pay" is relative. It depends on where you live, the type of school, the department, seniority, and in some cases whether you do something like spending your summers consulting.
yeah, I'm trying them out for a little side-project.

plug!(http://theskyisfree.com)

Instance management not as programattic as EC2.

Slice manager loving rocks.

browser based shell access rocks!

tutorials section taught me a lot about system admin and are
easy for a web-devs to follow

Root access for $20 a month :)
Was the 2.0 stuff thrown in at the last minute or was it well done?
Ask YC: Generating a Buzz for a B2B Product?
It seems that one of the critical components in creating value in a startup is generating buzz. Something along the lines of:

1. Get a million users.

2. ???

3. Profit.

As things start to shake down for us in prototype land, it's looking like we're going to have mostly a B2B product -- a tool to enhance other people's sites.

There are a few ways we've thought about attacking this:

- Focus the demo on something that is groovy for end users

- Work our connections to quickly get a couple of partner sites up and running, do some joint press releases

- Focus more on trying to hook up seed / angel investment right off the bat, come back to these questions once there's a little more money to throw at them

The first one would require time for significant polish that wouldn't be directly related to the core functionality of the product. It'd also require a server with a little muscle to it (not exactly off the charts, but say, a dedicated server that can keep pace with my MacBook), and associated hosting costs.

The second, well, there'll naturally be bumps along the way for the first couple of customers, but that would bring us closer to having a market-ready product.

The third I pulled from some of the Founders at Work examples (Viaweb, for example), but most of them are from the early days of the web, and I have a feeling people it's a bit harder to get investor's attention these days.

Anybody further down this road that would like to share some wisdom?
If anything, this just highlights how fucked up our tax system is. Modern executives receive all of their income in the form of stock options so they'll be taxed at the capital gains rate, ensuring that their marginal tax rate is half that of the bottom of the line programmer in their organization.
Trade in mammoth ivory, helped by global thaw, flourishes in Russia
Virtual Appliances explained: a 5min video by VMware
one of the best explanations I've seen of how virtual appliances are changing the way software is deployed and managed
Open-source coders care.
In theory, but we're talking about guys who think that you love programming so much that you'll just work for some of their worthless equity.
Why not link to, you know, http://muxtape.com/ ?
They paid for hand-holding and a patina of authority. All in the name of centralizing control....

They could have created a Darwin cull facility for the evolutionary developments they observed. That would have provided a path for growth.

They could have identified the users that wanted things to not change (alumni with open wallets for halcyon images), and mass-customized the logo presentation.

Recording and using preferences? Acknowledging and using diversity? Un-Possible!!!

Maybe they should update the school slogan while they're at:

"BU. Where you can make your voice heard.º"

º offer only valid for strategy-level administration officers.
be better than mangolanguages.com
I'm actually employed to do research in grid computing... one thing I've found is that for all the talk of cloud computing, there are very few mature actual implementations of software solutions for it, and the one I've worked with (Globus) is chaotic and byzantine in its architecture, difficult to set up and difficult to use! (It was designed by committee, as far as I can tell.) If Globus is any indication of the state of art, the field needs for someone to totally rethink our approach and make a simple solution, not a committee solution.