skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I couldn't agree more... It's absolute lunacy that a student who has gone through an engineering PhD program, subsidized by US taxpayers and corporations via research grants, may not be able to stay in the US post-graduation. There should be a direct means of converting a student visa into a "path to citizenship." Instead, it appears our immigration system promotes the exact opposite, giving preference to unskilled workers through an amnesty every 10 years or so.
Honest question: how do they count robots ?
I mean, where does one end and the other one start... unless we are talking about humanoid robots of course.
Ed-Tech Startup Takes Aim at Legacy Software Systems
For law firms, (software) customer service beats integration, features, or price
I think your suggestion to reframe this in a positive way is a good one but the dilemma remains to some degree. For instance, I've cut out Facebook, Twitter and TV and cut my time spent on various online forums down to a bare minimum. This has certainly helped my concentration but I also feel less in the loop wrt web development as a result.

But it's better to be building the next bandwagon than jumping on the last, right?
There is an element of non-randomness in drawing from Facebook users although I'm not sure who it favors. (I'm one of the minority not being on there. I don't text people either)

Looks like you did a pretty good job with this. It's a thought provoking read for sure. It occurred to me that there may be an issue with the "lust" category. It lumps those who lust for an Escalade in with those who lust for a human - very different things. I suspect that geeks feeling plenty of lust for humans may be less likely to regard it as a sin and might be less likely to respond to that choice.

It's interesting that the iPad demographic seems to lean away from slender and no children (which probably includes most gays?). If I had to guess, I'd say that group leans more than average towards the Mac. It would have been interesting to see sexual orientation and OSes used/avoided or primary OS in this. I suppose it might have generated a number of emotional responses though LOL
For new RoR programmers, is it recommended to just start in with Rails 3, or stick with Rails 2 until Rails 3 "stabilizes"? There are a bunch of Rails 3 books out there; do they generally line up well with this release candidate, or are they full of old information that a new RoR programmer would stumble upon and not understand how to fix?

[EDIT] The three books I saw available that specifically mention Rails 3 in the title are available for pre-order, so hopefully they will be pretty up-to-date.
RSVP'ing as per the email thread, I'm a "maybe".
I plan to prove this point with code. Please stand by.
Fair enough. As I said, I "assumed" the details of how you invited participation in the survey, and you proved my assumption to be incorrect.

I did look at your pie chart for the question, and it still doesn't strike me as a properly constructed interval type of question (are "think it's a silly product" and "don't care that much" mutually exclusive? I could agree with both statements). "It's a silly product" is also not the kind of phrasing you would use to get objective results. The survey probably would have benefited from additional questions.

In any case, I'll stick to my original statement and say "take it with a grain of salt", as I would with the results of any poll.
I have not changed my original stance. I've just provided more arguments to this mild debate. I know, we've all downloaded illegal music and yes many of us believe this is no big deal even though objectively speaking it is wrong. Somebody worked really hard for those songs.

OK. So lets agree that doing Marijuana may not 100% of the time lead to cocaine use. That doesn't mean that it doens't increases the likelyhood of using it because you've already broken multiple moral values that go beyond just drinking or smoking.

Another example: Does smoking mean that you are going to get cancer? No. But it has been proven in plenty of studies that it does increases your chances of getting cancer. And I think we can agree that using Marijuana is a step closer to using cocaine than just drinking alcohol. For once, if you are using Marijuana that means that you already have a person providing you an illegal substance. That same person can probably get you cocaine and anything else you want. If you only drink alcohol you would still have to find this illegal substance distributor.

Finally, are you making the claim that there is nothing wrong with smoking Marijuana. If so does that mean that you would be OK if your kids smoke Marijuana? Now please be honest.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you seem to be conflating purity with callback vs. coroutine--I'm don't know why the second would have any bearing one way or the other on the approach to the first.

If you don't want global variables, don't use them! If you don't want side effects, don't use them either. Those are the same decisions you make, callback or not. Both are great ideas.

Example 1 (callbacks):

function do_request() {
return get_from_database(argument,
callback=function (database_rows) {
return make_html_table_from_rows(database_rows);
});
}

Example 2 (coroutines):

function do_request() {
database_rows = get_from_database(argument);
return make_html_table_from_rows(database_rows);
}

What about the second requires a vastly different approach to state? What about the io loop "up the stack" has fewer effects or global variables than the loop called into at the coroutine?

In fact, clean state management is easier!

Example 3 (coroutines):

function do_request() {
database_rows = get_from_database(argument);
tweets = use_twitter_rest_api(...);
return make_html_table_from_rows(tweets, database_rows);
}

I can do the first two calls serially without either passing through the first, or using a global variable or some kind of catch all "context". The local frame is the context, which is the oldest, most straightforward, most tried-and-true context in the book.
I think it depends on what you're doing. If you're learning Rails just to learn it, go with Rails 3. If you're being asked to spec a Rails project, go with 2.3.8. Rails 3 isn't done cooking yet, and may potentially shift under you while you attempt to complete a project under a deadline while learning the stack - not a great choice, IMO.
It was already legal under the DMCA (at least, according to the spirit of the law). Apple and the RIAA just wanted you to believe otherwise. The language has simply been clarified so overzealous companies can't easily scare consumers.
This: "I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government.

Sounds very similar to much of Neal Stephenson's work, especially Anathem, where the Avout plot their own way and everyone else is merely addicted to the world. Snow Crash also has aspects of what the world is starting to look like, and I wonder if Stephenson is particularly well-placed to look at some of these trends because he's got a lot of the hacker ethos and yet makes his living by writing very long, very detailed books that demand attention if they're going to be read and digested.
That is absolutely correct, I have no idea why people are hammering you.

It is quite genuinely not a random sample. It is a self-selected group of people who all belong to facebook, and who all actively wanted to express their opinions on a quiz.

I know 6 people who own iPads, only 2 of whom have facebook accounts, and 2 of whom haven't ever heard of facebook.

The two who haven't even heard of facebook are older people (60+) who have been confused by computers right up until now - the iPad is a breath of fresh air for them.

This blog post is a projection of the hopes and dreams of the person who wrote it, which is fine, but to pretend it is anything else is to buy into the blogger's personal fantasy life.
20 Rails (and Ruby) Development No-Nos
One of the reasons I wrote up the blog post was to try and get some views from people who are trademark lawyers.

We need to remember that lawyers are human too and screw up as well. How many programmers do you know who never miss things ?
That is why I called it an anecdote to begin with. It is a serious defect in cognition that you did not realize that this is why I spelled it out as such. I knew him during high school. From what I know about him I think he just gave in to peer pressure as many do.
I worry about the acceleration of addiction in particular subgroups of the population. WoW (or Farmville), for example, is not crystal meth... but that flippant observation is a response to a core truth that some people just have a lot of trouble saying no. Maybe they're poorly educated, maybe they're genetically predisposed to addiction, maybe they're clinically depressed, for whatever the reason they've got a weakened psychic immune system. It gets dramatically easier (A/B testing! end to end analytics! using their own friends' pictures as your call to action!) and stupendously more profitable (virtual goods!) over time to pay extraordinarily savvy engineers and marketers to design the Skinner's Box From Hell and extract money from them.

And what do you do if you're a startup founder at the next Zynga and discover, running the numbers one day, that 80% of your revenue comes from 2% of the population who cannot attend the user meetups because they can't bear to be separated from your service for that long?
I wonder how many people would be happy to "delegate their vote" if there was some officially supported way of doing it.

This would be an interesting way of reimagining representative democracy in the digital age. Why should we bother limiting ourselves to a fixed number of representatives? Let everyone vote on everything _but_ let people choose to assign their vote to someone else.

Rather than electing representatives, I'd choose someone whose intellect and experience I trust, and delegate my voting rights to them. They'd become my representative. When someone accumulated enough other people's votes, they'd reach the political stature of people like senators.
Think of it as a Rework Candidate then.
Inspiring Cake Decorators All Over the World
I got "rails 3 way" and "agile rails 4.ed". rails3way is pretty much a complete rewrite; its only 266 pages filled so far, but looks good. Agile rails is more finished than rails3way. They are both pretty good books, but if you want more of a "completed" book, agile seems to be the one closer to that. I'm learning RoR from scratch too. The recommended setup is to use ruby 1.9.2. Your first question really depends on what is your intention. If your primary focus is for job hunting, 2 may be the way to go. If you're trying to build something, I don't see much drawbacks (yet) on going to 3.
"The real question ... is the chosen sample biased or not? ... and you can't answer with a yes/no just because the survey was done on Facebook"

yes, you can. it is clearly biased because (a) the sample was not randomly selected from the full set of iPad users and (b) the sample was a self-selected group of people who actively wanted to record their opinions on a general quiz.

its not a random sample. hence it is biased.

electoral polls, the ones that tend to be pretty accurate, work very hard to get a random sample. You did not.
I'm in :) The last was one was great...
I would jump right in to Rails 3. It's pretty great right now, and it's only going to get better.
That’s just targeted at users who plan to use Noloh and PHP to write their applications, right?
It's very good idea. I would love it if it supports multiple users under the same account. I would also like to see something like a custom gadged to put on my site.
In the end, it's all good. It brought back fond memories of my Research Methods course from my undergraduate days (2 decades ago - scary). The one takeaway I got from that course was to never believe anything you read, even if convincingly presented.
However within the 20,000 they focused on slices of critics (11%) and owners (3%). Within those groups they focused on geeks (33% of the 11%) and selfish elites (18% of the 3%).

Sure, they started off with a good sample size, but from something like 108 people they are painting a vivid image of all iPad owners. Even though their sample suggests that over 80% of iPad owners don't fit that image! (The geek image was not as poorly fitting, but it still didn't fit well.)
You're thinking like someone who most often writes code. Think like someone who most often reads code—a maintenance programmer, say—and the benefits become obvious. We get away in this industry with writing things that, upon being encountered again, immediately provoke "throw it away and start again" comments. This sort of code will not provoke those sentiments.

(That's not to say that it's actually good code—the article itself points out the problems—but those problems can actually be fixed by modification, not replacement, of the code, which is what we should all be striving for.)
Stock Market Trading For Starters
> We can start off by acknowledging that you can write good code and bad code in any language

It would be nice if we could agree to this, but it is not true. For anyone who really believes this assertion: Go ahead and offer a sample of good Malbolge code. It may be possible to write better or worse Malbolge code, but it will all be slow and unreadable.

Obviously that's a pathological case, but once we accept that language affects code quality, we have to conclude that Language X's "good" and "bad" code may be better on an absolute scale than Language Y's, albeit with a smaller delta than Malbolge vs. anything.
The original domain owner's declared intent, expressed via private email, to someday use the domain did not confer him any trademark rights relevant to this declaration.

And, it's reasonable to assume that a company that paid $250K in an international transaction for a domain name that matches its registered trademark had competent counsel.
Could you be a bit clearer about what's going on in your third example?
I was reluctant to sign up because I suspected you would be asking for my credit card details. If it is free to register then you should mention that.
The Hacker News post (from earlier today) mentioned in this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547943
Windows, Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune HD, and the upcoming Windows Phone, all run Direct3D.

If you've run Vista or Windows 7 lately with an Aero capable card, then much of your desktop experience was rendered by Direct3D.

Finally, Firefox 3.7, Office 2010, Internet Explorer 9, and many more upcoming apps, all make use of the Direct3D rendering layer (via Direct2D) for hardware accelerated rendering.

So yeah, these days it's used in more than a single OS and for a lot more than just games :)
Re: e) (This is purely my personal opinion, but …) Anyone who uses the serial comma [1] must be seriously insane. How can you? Doesn’t your brain explode? (Calm down, calm down … [2] … there, better.)

Friendlier is indeed a word, the comparative of friendly.

Amazing idea, by the way, beautifully executed and immediately captured my imagination.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g
The most up-to-date book is the free Rails Tutorial http://railstutorial.org, which will be updated to Rails 3 soon after it's final is released.

If you have an older book using an older version of rails, DON'T use Rails 3, use the version used in your book (DHH mentioned this on an episode of coderpath http://coderpath.com/posts/1)
Awesome site, if only I didn't need cancer to get medical marijuana in Washington. :/
Go to Rails 3, a lot of the ways of doing things in 2.X will be deprecated in 3.1 and removed in 3.2, so just save yourself the hassle. Rails 3 also cleans up a tremendous amount of code and removes a lot of the 'obtrusive' Javascript from your views.

As far as 1.9.2, if you plan to do deployment (Even for testing) any time soon on Heroku (the coolest, if not the best hosting solution for Rails) then you may want to kick back to 1.8.7, because Heroku won't support 1.9.2 until a final is released.
So.. how much cost HN? :)

And what/who pay for that?
I know this isn't exactly on topic, but a query for summary like '%killed%' returns 666 records...
"I challenge anyone to point to any result in the study and give a reasonable explanation why that result is likely way off."

plan to buy: forrester 3.8%
plan to buy: you 2.0%

so your results differ markedly from the forrester report itself?

Your results are different (and likely differ from reality) because you did not use a random sample, you used a self selected sample of people who belong to facebook and wanted to respond to a poll.
That is simply a fact.

Having taken a non-random sample you then projected your own opinions into all your conclusions.
Its an amusing post, but not really an interesting one.
US rail freight is the world’s best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it
> Are you sure? Did they really lose 8 hours worth of work? How is "time spent" any better a metric for productivity than counting lines of code?

Coding is a poor example because there is no generally accepted metric for productivity. (Figure out good way of measuring programmer productivity and you'd have a mint.) However, some jobs do have a valid metric. Data entry: 300 forms take an average of X hours to do. After X hours reading Reddit and not entering forms, 0 forms have been entered. Simplistically, X hours have been 'lost'.
The list of changes in Rails 3.0 is fairly approachable if you understand the basics of Rails. I'd recommend taking a look for yourself - http://guides.rails.info/3_0_release_notes.html

As far as whether 2.3 or 3.0 makes the most sense at this point, it depends. Personally, I have been working on a brand new project that I started with 3.0 beta 1 and haven't ran into any major headaches. That said, since you're new there is a lot more information out there regarding 2.3 (be careful, some is much older).

To give you some better advice, why are you getting into Rails? Are you trying to get a project started/out the door/etc, or simply looking to learn it because it looks interesting/fun?
A comment or two down, jedberg explains they use reserved instances from Amazon, so their hosting fees are more like $22,390.37 a month.
it is also legal for Apple to push a change that happens to break jailbroken phones

Are you sure? That sounds like trespass to chattels to me, or if they hadn't tested their update on jailbroken phones, then reckless, possibly criminal negligence.
oh, for sure. I found the blog post an amusing read and an interesting insight into the bloggers mind and opinion set.

as scientific insights into the world of iPad users go though, that blog post makes a fantastic donut.
How is it a jerk way?

Two efforts (at least) came up with the name independently. One team, the one now known as Groupon, put the name into commercial use, immediately acquiring trademark rights under ancient common law. They also then went a prudent step further, and registered the trademark.

Another guy registered the domain earlier. Without lifting a finger to assert a trademark or implement a related business, he got a giant payday.

From the details available, everything went as it's supposed to work -- everyone's customary rights were respected, and a mutually beneficial transaction occurred to move the domain asset to its most-productive use.
I could be wildly mistaken, but I would think that marijuana is actually less controversial in California than gay marriage.

In particular, the state's 1 million Mormons will raise a huge ruckus over anything marriage-related and bring a bunch of other Christian groups into the ring spreading FUD.

Weed, on the other hand, doesn't really have any loud opponents and it's hard to spread FUD around it because it's a pretty familiar topic for Californians and it's already legal medically.
How did hunch.com get a multi-page story in Wired.com
The August edition of wired.com has a multi-page write up about hunch.com

I found it curious because Hunch has been out for a year or so now and its its reception has been lukewarm.I expected (lacking a big hook) only established sites or sites with amazing growth to be featured in wired.
I'm trying to learn more about how the process of getting an article in a magazine works.
If you have any insight please share.
I think now would be an excellent time to jump into 3.0. So much has changed since 2.x, practically every Rails developer, new and old, will be blogging, tweeting, debugging and asking and answering questions on StackOverflow about Rails 3, you'd be daft to lag behind and miss the opportunity.
Debunked here: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ctm81/autistic_girl...
Four downvotes, zero comments. I don't mind the downvotes at all, but I would expect better from HN users than to downvote without offering any contribution themselves. Is my logic invalid? Do you not like my example? Are you simply opposed to three-character usernames? Simply downvoting does nothing to correct any deficiencies you might see in a comment.
I had a discussion with tptacek about this one day. See, I don't think Google (the search engine whose opinion's most influence my thoughts -- no offense DDG) sees content farms as a bad thing.

If someone is searching for "how to make a blueberry pie", and they get an article entitled "how to make a blueberry pie", they're happy. Are they actually going to make a blueberry pie? Probably not. Therefore, it doesn't really matter whether they get a good blueberry pie recipe or a bad blueberry pie recipe. As long as they quickly get to a well-designed page that they won't read anyhow because no one reads on the Internet which has a few bullet points they'll skim fast and a blueberry pie picture on it, they're happy. Their blueberry pie voyeurism need is fulfilled.

Content mills make that happen, for huge segments of the population. Let me strip that of euphemism: content mills make this happen for women, the elderly, and the technically disinclined. Absent the content mill, there is insufficient "organically produced" content on the things they care about on the Internet because their participation on the Internet is dramatically less than y'alls participation is and y'all -- speaking in generalities -- do not blog about good blueberry pie recipes.

You can think of content mills as an organism in symbiosis with Google: how to you juice relevance algorithms to identify the sliver of a sliver of a fraction of the Internet which talks about blueberry pies and other things your mom cares about, identify the best tangentially related article, and present it to her every time? Well, you could have your crack teams of geniuses work on it for a few years, even though your favorite tricks like PageRank are likely to function less well because there's less linking data to go around. Or, in the alternative, you could encourage content farming.

It surely has not escape Google's notice that their bottom line revenue increases by about 80% of the top-line revenue of the entire content farming industry, incidentally. Contextual ads are the perfect monetization vehicle for laser-targeted content produced at quality which will be solely viewed in search mode, and Google owns that entire field.
Put me down as 'unlikely' for this one, but almost certain at the next. Looking forward to it (one of these days...).
Cost of Freight Shipping Rises to Max in 5 Years, Hurting Retailers
For some reason, the effects listed for this strain, "MK Ultra", don't line up at all with the description...

http://www.leaf.ly/indica/mk-ultra
and san jose
CrowdBase: Help Build The Definitive List of Crowdsourced Businesses
I'm pretty sure YC pays for it. It's one big server, so it's probably like $1k/month or something. But HN isn't anywhere near 8M active users, and it's pretty slow much of the time and has brief downtime often (multiple times per day, I think) so they can reboot the server to speed it back up.