skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More specifically, the release notes were compiled by Mikel Lindsaar (and props to Engine Yard who paid him to do it) [1].

1. http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core/browse_threa...
A recent improvement for Arabic searches
Tell HN: We just added Web Apps to our app discovery service
If they don't MAKE you want to scroll down, many people will not.

This is a very real distinction that should be included in these fold discussions. Many of these pro/con arguments fail to take into account the content of the page that is above the fold. If the content above the fold does not visually lead you to the conclusion that there is content below the fold, users will not go there.

I'd bet that many people did not know to scroll down on the author's site because what's above the fold doesn't tell the user that there is content below it. Had the author, say, moved the text down so that it was bisected by the fold, more readers would scroll. Things like horizontal lines and paragraph endings just above the fold signal to the user that the page is "done." Other cues, such as bisected text or obviously bisected images, tell the user the opposite.
You've misunderstood [my] post. The article is arguing that China's massive population (and consequently the size of a cream of the crop brainiacs slice) is irrelevant, which made little sense. [edit]
I took "short" to mean small which python use to be but is growing too large. Too many new constructs are being added to the base language (ternary operators for instance).

Encapsulation is the wrong answer to some problems. When it's the right answer (large, disperse, avg or lower ability developers aka "enterprise") go use a language built for that environment such as Java.

Same with self.

[to OA] Not all languages should be applicable to all problems. Quit trying to change Python into your language and leave it as my language.
Launch: AngelList, a curated list of angel investors
Infrastructure for infrastructure's sake? If it crashes and forces the government to re-think things, you think this happens instantly? That crash is figuring things out and filling up the excess capacity.
Forget Stock Nexus one get Cyanogenmod 5.0 Rom.
Awesome. If you need to look somewhere first, we have uploaded a small app to the Apple Web Apps directory. We look forward to seeing some things come out of appstorehq for this implementation. Sweet
This is the comment where I show everyone how much I paid attention in English class by correcting the (grammar|punctuation|spelling|turn of phrase) you used in your comment while contributing nothing to the discussion at hand.
> built road is still there and a built office still exists

You could equally well say this of a house foreclosed on by a bank in the U.S. during the housing crisis. But do you really have any doubt that such houses lying fallow and the resources that go into reselling them are both economic losses? The same will be and is true of the empty offices and untravelled roads in China.
HeLa cell lines were one of the first things I learned about when I started doing molecular biology research. They're truly universal in the research world -- pretty much every molecular biologist knows of Helen Lacks. That said, I doubt that very many scientists know that she was an unwitting donor, or that there were serious class and racial issues surrounding her "donation". An amazing (and sad) story.
I think Reddit clones would be a lot more commonplace and popular if they had a name other than "Reddit clones"; it's a simple site architecture in retrospect, analogous to a blog or a wiki. They are all categories of web applications that have interactive elements, but also act as websites for those who don't care to participate.

Now, imagine if blogs had been called "Wordpress clones", or wikis had been known as "Wikipedia clones"? [Yes, I know, not the originators of the species, but surely the ones the most people are familiar with.] I don't think they'd have nearly the traction on the web that they do now, as the media wouldn't be caught dead talking about the "Wordpress clone usage and participation phenomenon" without being payed off. If there was a non-trademarked, one-to-two syllable name one could use to describe both Reddit and HN, I think we'd see the usage shoot up.
> single-user system

Am I missing something in the grand-parent that suggests that his is a single-user system?

Even if it is the case, then, as you pointed out elsewhere (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1096327), the solution's still sub-optimal: better `~/bin` than `/usr/local` (right?).
Bestinclass.dk is always hyping clojure and actually does more damage than good. Remember the 'clojure vs python', 'clojure vs ruby' and 'clojure vs global warming' articles.

If you name your blog 'best in class' I think that sets that bar for the quality a bit higher than what is generally on display there.
Agreed. I think the lesson to be learned here is "feel free to disable comments". Not "you should never enable comments".
Social bookmarking site?
Managing software packages on Unix has always been, to put it politely, a giant pain, and most Linux distributions are built around the different ways we’ve all been trying to alleviate that pain

Ubuntu (Debian) seems to do this very well in my opinion.

sudo aptitude update; sudo aptitude upgrade

And with 9.10, to add a repository you can just do

ppa:$repository

To add Wine for example,

ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
Care to elaborate? From what I've seen this statement seems to be true.
Hopefully none of the participants of this thread take on the task. ;-)
But I understand that their soles are very thin, thus they still don't protect against the impact when running on a concrete sidewalk.
News Flash: You can't turn off people. If you really can't learn to deal with the inane comments of morons, your life is going to be nothing but stress. Plugging your ears just attracts more attention and will make people want to kick and scream more than before.

This is going to happen with big announcements. Just suck it up and deal.
Smart reasons? I love when people who are paid for the precision of their language construct a sentence that anthropomorphizes incorrectly.

(full disclosure: I may be in law school)
It doesn't require you to install a second, shadow Perl, Python or Ruby in order to install other packages. Instead Homebrew uses the Perl, Python and Ruby that OSX already provides. (This may be a con, depending on what you think of Apple's treatment of those packages. I grant that.)

There are certain things that just don't work right when using the Apple provided interpreters for particular languages, even if the versions are right. Though I don't recall anymore what the specific problem was, I recall needing to install a custom build of PHP to get a particular library I depended on to work. I wish I could remember more of the details. The point is that I can understand a modest amount of distrust for the built-ins.

There's also the matter that the internal versions of the interpreters run the risk of becoming dated, staying that way, and perhaps becoming so dated that the needed code can't run without later version of the interpreter than the OS provides. Discovering whether it is "too dated" sounds like a fragile process, you'd have to either parse the interpreter version or make assumptions based on OS version.

The solutions I see available are: to leave it up to the user to figure out if a newer interpreter is needed, or just assume the internal interpreter won't work and build your own that you're much more certain will work. This comes down to a matter of philosophy, where MacPorts says "we'll figure it out", and Homebrew says "we trust you know what you are doing."

I found the Python issue to be a particular pain in the ass, since MacPorts's Python build requires tk, which requires some GUI libraries, which ends up building more or less an entire X11 sub-system on OSX that I will never ever use.

This seems like more of a criticism for the python port maintainer than the entire build system. It might be worth posting a request for Tk support to be made a variant of each of the python ports.
[SF] Justin.tv is hiring iphone and android engineers
Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power
In the beginning of the article, there seems to be an implicit claim that this kind of testing is bad because those who score on the border of a "cutoff" only have a probabilistic chance of making it into these coveted schools. The author seems to be suggesting that the error prone nature of measurement instruments means that we need to create something that is free of error or we need to stop using them all together. Unfortunately such instruments will never be error free and there doesn't seem to be an acceptable alternative for collecting predictive information. The measurement community will continue to improve on their instruments, but it seems like the only real remedy given the author's criticism is for these schools to just admit everyone so that nobody misses out. This, of course, isn't realistic.

When resources are thin and there is no way to deduce a provably optimal allocation, we start having to make guesses given the best possible information and algorithms. Until we can come up with something better, schools will continue needing instruments like these (as well as other tools) for making the best possible guesses.
[SF] Justin.tv wants an engineer to help produce insights from 4TB of daily logs
I have another reason for the old-fashioned approach. I do hedge fund accounting for a living. With my software tools I can reproduce every result ever created for a fund from original input, even going back several years. I have translators for various brokerage feeds that I've had to maintain and adapt for years -- and this is no small feat considering that information technology people in the financial industry can't do a complete, consistent, or stable data feed to save their lives.

Whenever I make a change, either to a translator or even the core accounting code, I make a copy of the library. I then have to go back and run all funds, including my test funds, as a regression test using the new modified library. I have to do that one fund at a time, testing to make sure no catastrophic differences have arisen. So during this interim period, I have some funds running on the new code and some funds running on the old code. BOTH versions have to be "live" at the same time.

I also have to keep backups of the data as well, both inputs and outputs, so I can "diff" those easily. I'm sure as heck not gonna put that into git.

So I'm not just stick in the mud trying to be contrary -- I have work to do, and it needs to be as reliable as a Swiss watch.
It seriously takes like 10 minutes to learn the HTML -> HAML and CSS -> SASS mapping. The semantics are virtually identical, only the syntax is different.
In India it has become the other extreme. Meaning, if you are a graduate from a top university, you are good. Otherwise, you are considered pretty much a loser. That doesn't help majority of the people. It has become a skewed system of status symbol than respect for education.
Startup compensation in Canada
Better to spend it on roads than on cheap Chinese merchandise.
High Networth Individuals vs Institutions as VC Fund Investors
I fail to see how this is relevant. The article is about disk compression, not disk encryption.
[HTML5 apps] link goes to http://www.appstorehq.com/googlevoiceformobile-html5web-1341...

Which is broken :/
I'm buying if it does. I'm on the bubble right now due to lack of camera and multitasking, but multitasking can be solved using software if someone manages to jailbreak it. Skype video chat on this thing would be really nice.
Why transition away from fossil fuels will take decades—if it happens at all
What has changed is the easy part. It is Richard Hilton vs Paris Hilton. Born to power and an easy life has made the US soft. The average US citizen demands that the government fixes their problems.
>I view static indentation as I do most forms of static typing: needlessly restricting in an attempt to solve problems that don’t come up much in Real Life code but make for nice pedantic rants about “But what if?”.

As a happy Python user, I absolutely resent going to languages that require code block delimiters. Since I consistently indent anyway (and have done so since long before I ever discovered Python), it just feels like pointless duplication of effort to indent and delimit using curly braces or do ... end or whatever.

Significant whitespace may not be for everyone, but there's no case to be made that it's punitive.
Keyword was 'reads like'. Try reading it imagining you didn't know much about Rails and its terminology. You'll learn the release is a 'landmark'. And that, apparently, we now live in a world enriched by the fulfillment of the Merb Promise of 2008.
Thanks. We're hoping to come up with a nice little service around HTML5 (truth be told, I'm a big believer in web apps), and we have some fun tricks up our sleeve, too.

Feel free to contact me directly (iseff@iseff.com) if you ever have any ideas/comments/suggestions/etc. Or just to meet, too! :)
> It's why everyone wants to be American

Pardon?

Seriously, do you actually believe that?

Definitely not everyone 'wants to be an American'.

The only people that 'want to be American' in very large numbers are those that currently are below the standard of life that America offers, and plenty of those people would still be quite happy to be European, Japanese or even Australian.

As for your sense of mission and purpose in the world, that might be more of a problem than a part of the solution.
This is something I've been thinking about since the iPad announcement. One of the reasons I desire access to my filesystem is that I like to keep some stuff in archives, either for compression or encryption or easy transfer or avoiding long readdir(2) operations, or any combination thereof. It'd be interesting if this whole issue can be avoided, and whole-filesystem compression is a good step toward that.
These two threads seem to confirm that updates will be possible via WiFi:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=736...

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=38c...
Whoops, sorry about that. Fixed. :)
> everything is done with oddly-named functions that take positional arguments in an inconsistent order, return error codes instead of throwing exceptions, and randomly spew warning messages

These are all anti-features for programmers who already know how to program but they're quite helpful or moot when you're a complete noob. You're going to be spending at least a third of your time in the manual so guessable function names aren't as important as findable ones, you'll be doing lots of "what the?" style debugging so verbose warnings right on the page save you one fewer step in the debugging process.

Additionally it's easy to find a PHP hosting provider for peanuts, it will happily scale to moderate use without overmuch cleverness architecturally and there are literally thousands of noob-level tutorials that get you from "I want to build a website" to something that works rapidly. You don't feel the pain of the language until you're pretty far down the road but as Flickr and (obviously) Facebook have shown it's not too difficult to limit the pain and keep growing.
http://www.amazon.com/All-Statistics-Statistical-Inference-S...
http://www.androidcentral.com/how-manually-update-your-nexus...
My Nexus One Battery Adventure
anyone have instructions on how to upgrade ruby to 1.8.7 on mac, or 1.9 , preferably the option to switch between both ?
It may or it may not.

The comments point out that it could easily be just an ambient light sensor, which is actually listed on the spec sheet.
"MacPorts is an autarky -- you get a duplicate copy of zlib, OpenSSL, Python, etc. Homebrew uses what is already there, and consequently, most stuff has zero dependencies and builds faster."

MacPorts made the decision to package and version their own versions of everything for a reason. Conflicts can start to arise when you start compiling against Apple's default shipped libraries for X11, Python, etc. Especially if the default shipped versions don't provide what you need. E.g. the PHP install that shipped with Snow Leopard is missing several notable extensions.

It might be safe to ignore these issues now but as the app grows they will need to be addressed. (Or of course they can ignore it and just point to MacPorts as an alternative for some subset of packages).
I happen to like cheap chinese merchandise. I'd rather pay $1500 for a Macbook Pro manufactured there than $2000 for one manufactured here.
I forget where I've found it, but nano-particles do sometimes have significantly different health effects than larger particles.

And personally, while I LOVE glass bottles / glazed ceramic things, as it's nigh-tasteless and doesn't have nastiness in it, spraying plants with this makes me worry about ingesting it in (relatively) large doses. I doubt people have been eating glass to see what health effects it's had, so it's probably going to fall into new research... and if it's that effective, I'd be willing to bet companies will cover up research that would be bad for their business.
21st century energy: Some sobering thoughts
Well everyone is calling this "A computer for their Mom." Newslfash: My mother is in her late sixties and she uses Skype to talk to friends all around the world. My co-parent's brother lives in Belgium. My brother lives in Winnipeg. Guess what my children use to talk to their uncles? Guess what our respective parents use to talk to their sons?

Skype is software everybody's mother uses. A computer for my Mom has a camera for Skype.
Natural Language Processing: Analyzing the Meaning of Sentences
The Power of Keywords with the Google
Proof that you can't build a great product with clever programming alone.
The easiest solution(possibly a cop out) for 1.8.7... Upgrade to Snow Leopard.
I think for 'breathable' they meant 'porous' or permeable, otherwise it makes no sense.
There is a google spreadsheet benchmark ( http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlX1n8WSRNJWdGNQME5B... ) released by one of the developers of ZFS-Fuse.

Makes for interesting reading, since it confirms this benchmark. but on Linux and shows comparable results with Solaris ZFS benchmarks.

And SSD + linux BLOWS everything else away
I would just say that this is a changelist, not a product landing page. I would want as many details in the changelist as possible.
Agree. I won't get a first generation of these for myself, but I'm considering one for my grandmother - > simple touchscreen, some shortcuts set up by me, and then skype video and a flickr account the family can access would change her life.
Lancet retracts a controversial paper linking vaccine to autism
It's a great idea if you want to make small callable objects with limited (hidden) state, in a way that's easy to translate between any languages which support closures. For example, in JS:

function gencycle() {
var args = Array.prototype.slice.apply(arguments),
i = 0;

return function cycle() {
i = (i+1) % args.length;
return args[i];
}
}

I can then use gencycle("red", "green", "blue") when I want a function which gives me a rotation of colors.

In py26, I'd write it as:

class GenCycle(object):
def __init__(self, *args):
super(GenCycle, self).__init__()
self.args = args
self.i = 0

def __call__(self):
self.i = (self.i+1) % len(self.args)
return self.args[self.i]

In Python 3, I'd have to choose between the two versions.
Flagging this poorly written inaccurate article.
Use RVM: http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/
You should care how much it costs them. If they can't recoup their costs in making books then they will stop making books.

Books are already a very slim margin business as it is, author superstars, let alone folks who can make a living from writing alone, are far, far rarer than in other similar industries such as music, tv, and film.
Thanks for posting this seasoup, but maybe it's a bit too much? I mean, we release all the time (48 releases in 2009), maybe let's only post here when the release is a big one? :)
This meme has to die.

A photo response from John Gruber's Twitter feed: http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/4/2010/02/roncassel.jp...
Does anyone have any idea when Rails 3.0 stable is supposed to come out?
how do I see two different branches' versions of files?

You could clone the branches to different paths, I guess.

But nobody else will [know that a branch is "done".]

If you've instructed the team to care about merged status, they will. And there's nothing semantically strange about it either.

I get it, git isn't for you. I concede.
Remove it won't do anything, if you visit https://www.enum.cn/ it will come back to your system. You have to disable it and add it to Untrusted.
Its unfortunate there wasn't a better solution for your colleague. The half hour ride in the morning isn't at a hard enough pace to make me a sweaty mess, though if it did, luckily, we have showers (along with a gym) at the office.
Long term that's a losing strategy. It means you are willing to export all your production facilities to another country, creating a massive trade-imbalance in the process.

Think about how strange it is that not just your macbook, but almost everything you can buy has been manufactured on the other side of the planet, can be transported, imported and still be sold cheaper than you could produce it locally.

It's a bit like selling your birthright.

Also, don't forget that those workers abroad are usually working in circumstances that local authorities would not tolerate.

A nice bit of backstory about moving production to China.

A few years ago, rubbermaid was forced to raise its prices because of the developments on the raw materials market.

Wall-mart refused to accept the rise, dropped the rubbermaid product line, rubbermaid filed for bankruptcy, and then the whole production was moved to China and wall-mart signed a distribution deal with the new owners of the moulds.
"I think his point is a bit deeper than "I don't like it". His point relates to the distinction Alan Kay makes [1] between programming languages which are either an "agglutination of features" or a "crystallization of style"."

Sorry, but this is flat out wrong. I mean, Python's syntax is pretty consistent over all (aside from a few quirks). Even still, Kay's archetypical example of a "style language" (Lisp) has definitely evolved more over the years than Python has.

The point isn't that the language has to be perfect. It's just that it has to have a "feel" to it. Python definitely has its own flavor (I mean idiomatic code is called "Pythonic" after all). The other part of the Python philosophy is "practicality beats purity". Therefore, there are times when the Python developers decided to just implement something practical and simple over something that's ideologically consistent.
It's as if knowledge of one feature makes you less likley to be aware of the other.

Indeed. I've seen people struggle with this in things like single vs. double-clicking, using scroll wheels vs. scroll bars, window edge-dragging, and keyboard shortcuts.
Kinder, Patienter, Honester
It's not a changelist, although it does link to one. "These release notes cover the major upgrades, but don’t include every little bug fix and change." It's exactly what it says, release notes. I didn't say it wasn't or that it was a product landing page. They're release notes rather reminiscent of product release notes that excitedly told you all about CORBA integration and ODBC 2 support.