skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sinatra is also based on Ruby yes? How does it differ specifically from Rails?
I think that their hiring and internal quality-control process excludes it, actually.

For building Google's search engine, you need people who know search and sorting algorithms backwards, forwards, inside-out, and upside down. You need hardcore A/B testing based on statistical significance, and rigorous respect of the data you collect.

To make the iPhone and the iPad, you need neither of those.

You need one guy who will walk around like an idiot for months pretending that a deck of cards is his telephone, and writing down every observation and thought that he has on usability. You need a master craftsman who can direct the entire experience, without losing his head in the tech specs.

Google doesn't hire people like that. Decisions are made by committee, backed by data and research, which gives them their edge in technical excellence, but also cripples them in hardware and marketing.

It kills me. I really want Google to succeed here; Apple has effectively zero competition in the smartphone and tablet market other than Google.

Ok, what follows is a bit of a rant. :)

Personally, the first thing I'd do with Android is revamp the market and distribution model to standardize the OS across platforms and vendors, so that an Android works the same no matter where you got it. Vendors can add in custom content (wallpapers, extra apps, ringtones, etc), but the interface (icons, look-and-feel) needs to be the same.

The vendors will go with this. They're getting their asses handed to them by Apple, and Google is their lifeline, because they're saving a ton on development costs.

Second, I'd market the hell out of the areas that Apple cant match, but that matter to the consumer, namely voice search, and maybe being able to hold the phone in the human hand without losing reception.

And whatever you do, don't play the celebrity card. Apple's iPhone and iPad ads make it look like you're using the device. Google could steal a page from that, but with Android devices being used in the real world, not in the Apple cleanroom.
Weird moderation on an article that could be interpreted as an attack on Microsoft... Why am I surprised?
Well, in a job I was, I was forced to use Joomla and work with the code, to me it sucks really bad. I guess I were force to use it 'cause the place I was working they just were able to create stuff in Joomla and in a bad way. My work was to fix all the stuff that didnt work ok on Joomla, so I had to fix it in the code.
wow the journalist is clearly inefficient at finding and bookmarking stuff.

Also 3 mins spending does not equate revenue for that website.
In fact Web Design is supposed to make the search time smaller.

We dont pay with out time, we just waste it fighting inefficiency
People can claim that they were deceived when the prenup was signed. "He didn't tell me about his extra bank account when we were married. If I knew about that I would have insisted on a different prenup"
Yeah it's a hoot, especially coming from the guy who will kill people not using statistics, which is a great read btw.
http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html

I'm sure it's just an off-the-cuff remark. I've made plenty in my day.
I wonder if it is just good game mechanics or the way that guy processes things in his brain but he always gets tetris on the right side and not the left.
This is absolutely huge news (esp. once the release version is out, and scipy fully ported) for anyone writing number-crunching code. Python 3 has some neat new low-level abstractions for dealing with sequential data (see PEP 3118 http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3118/ which was incidentally written by the primary author of numpy), meaning that it should become even easier to exchange data between numpy and (for example) various image and audio systems/APIs. Many modern examples of such APIs are being structured in the same way to take data with arbitrary size/stride parameters. For example, Apple’s new (as of 10.4 I believe?) image/color API is structured in such a way. It should be possible to trivially wrap that API, and just pass in any numpy array with the relevant dimensions, no matter the specific memory layout, and have everything “just work”, no intermediate data-organization-massaging required.

Numpy has a fantastic syntax/API/feature set (advanced slicing, the fantastic automatic "broadcasting" of differently shaped arrays, a “batteries included” set of common operations), that in my experience makes coding matrix math much more pleasant than, say, Matlab. Numpy code is concise, readable, and relatively efficient, and very easy to mix-and-match with C and Fortran code when that’s helpful. Best of all (compared to, say, Matlab or Mathematica) it’s free!

More and more scientific computing, especially of the quick one-off type, is being done with numpy, and getting numpy to Python 3 can only help both numpy and Python to keep attracting new number-crunchers. I long for a day when, for example, the code accompanying SIGGRAPH papers is written in Python/numpy.
Serious long term relationships are great, but without some kind of well-understood commitment like marriage there's nothing keeping two people together for life.

When everything is going great in my marriage, I don't need a reminder that I'm obligated to stay with my wife. It's when things suck that my ring, my vows, and my marriage certificate are beneficial. They keep me there because I know that if I break them, I'd be a liar. And I know my wife will stick with me when things are tough because she's made the same commitment.

If marriage is silly, are contracts between employers and employees and between founders and investors also silly? If not, why?
AFAICT, quantum entanglement is a blanket term for unexplained magic. It would be "real" if they could use this "magic" to construct something that otherwise can't be explained by anything else.

Is there proof of anything constructive coming out of quantum entanglement?
I think his point is that good science strives toward perfection as opposed to being manipulated and twisted to appear relevant.
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Why? What makes it a great place to work?

Which jobs roles and groups are good? The fab engineers I know at Samsung aren't very happy with their jobs, and they have terrible reviews on glassdoor.
Interesting. Both Google and Zynga are very much data driven companies.

Remember story about Google choosing shade of blue by testing 41 variants?

That's how Zynga designs its (extremely successful) games. Everything is measured and analyzed. They are basically conducting one massive experimental psychology study of what makes people (s)tick.
This sounds like TechCrunch editorializing and trying to make a story out of nothing.

I don't think Google cares about this.
Math/CE undergrad, EE MS.
How to impress a date?
I'd honestly suggest just playing around with Rails rather than trying to get through the reference manual that is Agile Web Development with RoR. That book seems to be well meaning, but it's slow and horribly long. I managed to get through the first 200 or so pages, gave up, and just used Google, the API, and a Rails developer I know to fill in the parts that I didn't know. I've now been a professional Rails developer for over a year, and I can't say I would be any more proficient if I stuck with the book. That said, YMMV.

An alternative is http://railstutorial.org/book, which has the advantage of being free.
Django is great for rapid prototyping. The admin area is built in, that alone saves a ridiculous amount of time
Fluxus is another cool Scheme-based live coding environment, more focused on graphics and physics: http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/. Here are some awesome examples: http://vimeo.com/gabor/videos.
Not to me. I hate the taste of coke - it tastes like acid to me. I like pepsi much better. (And I'm not talking about just a few sips.)
It is still organizing the world's information. They've just learned that there is a prioritization people see in that organization: information from people they know trumps information gleaned from Page Rank.
Yes, Sinatra is a Ruby web framework.

Sinatra is more of a "micro-framework" and puts you closer to the http method.

Basically, the api mimics http more closely, you literally use get, put, post, and delete methods to define your routes and actions.

In Sinatra, you define your routes in the same place where you program your Resource's functionality, so less mapping is required. In Rails, you have a separate controller and route files.

The model layers between Sinatra and Rails are very similar. For example, you can use ActiveRecord in Sinatra.
New Intel processors have hardware-accelerated AES built in. Apparently an i5 with this does about 2G/s AES encryption, while my i7 without this does about 80M/s AES encryption. Yeah.
I fail to understand how you simply ignoring it is not a better option.

That would seem a more efficient, happy, and logical path to me.

I don't like X, therefore, instead of ignoring X, I think everyone else should stop doing X because I said so. Sounds silly when put that way, doesn't it?

Also, downvoted for implying my marriage is silly and/or somehow bigoted, ;)
Excellent points. As to your first action point, Google is actually going the opposite way! By Gingerbread (Android 3.0) they intend to squeeze out all vendor-specific add ons, like Motorola Blur or HTC Sense. This is a big mistake that will end in a lose-lose situation.

Another area that AFAIK Apple can't currently match is turn by turn navigation, I no longer use my GPS device in my car but rely completely on my Droid.
haters gonna hate! srsly?
The RC4 choice seems fishy, especially considering how easy it is to get hardware-accelerated AES these days. If you want to use weak encryption, why use encryption at all?
I was hoping that someone would find the meta value in the inanity.
... and in other news, pigs have grown wings and are flying!

seriously, why QE?
is base stacking plus some electron cloud sharing not a good enough explanation for dsDNA?
Wow, F#'s backwards function composition is confusing!
Haha, I wish I could downvote you ;-)
Apache Cassandra Now At Twitter
The Entitled Generation: What is it Good For?
That is a cool article.
"I Am Not a Paper Cup" by Decor Craft is great.
The Hippocratic Oath-Do we have Physicians now?
... and why is that bad? or rather, who is it bad for?
I think few people actually know how to taste food or drink. I'm not sure I'm one of them, since I'm having to teach myself. You have to make sure the smell of the food strongly makes it into your nose, which tends to happen only weakly by itself. The best technique I've got so far involves taking a bit, inhaling a lungfull slowly through my mouth passing through the food as much as possible, then slowly exhaling through my nose while returning to chewing, which works great except for the bit where you are "eating with your mouth open" (though it isn't gaping and nobody seems to have noticed, I still feel wrong). Pedestrian foods become good and great foods become stellar this way.

Do this and almost anybody could probably tell Coke and Pepsi apart. Just take a swig from each without inhaling it, though, and you'll just get the tongue, which isn't very discriminatory at all, and you just get "sweet" and "bubbly".

Do this and you'll also understand why Coke is preferable. Pepsi is guy on a viola, Coke is a string quartet. Both are frankly pretty limited in the grand scale of things, but Coke is at least complete.
I'd answer "no". The great thing about ruby, for those people who like it (including myself), is that it's _fun_.

You didn't list "fun" in your reasons above, so my answer is "no, you shouldn't learn ruby."
Just throwing this out there: I consider it unethical to invest in Zynga.

Edit: They are essentially using psychology, social and otherwise, to ultimately trick people out of their money. A classic on the topic: http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming...
Wait...6 weeks to become conversant in Ruby? A recent engineering grad (from a top ten school no less) even takes the time to post this question? Why not do a quick google search on learning ruby and find a wealth of free resources on learning ruby and just dive in, like most engineering minds would?

Hmm...I guess that's just me, someone with an engineering degree myself.

http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/ruby-programming/The-Book-Of-Ru...

http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/
If you are as yet unfamiliar with webapps, learn a little about HTTP. It's what makes all webapps "go".
Bad Research as Spam
Justinbieber Twitter account hacked?
Rosetta probe passes Asteroid Lutetia
Recent engineering "survivor" would probably be a more accurate description ;-) As I mentioned, I'm much more of a business-minded guy. Don't ask...
As if the only thing that happens when you hire a lawyer is you pay them money. The "capital" that is destroyed is ultimately the lawyers' time and energy.
Also, if you want rapid prototyping, you should look into a document store such as Mongo.

Not having to write migrations (as you would with ActiveRecord + Mysql) is huge.

Also, your models can be more flexible. You can add keys to your document as needed. With Mysql, you need to have a migration to add the column.
Some people really like designing toys. And at least IEEE thinks it's a cool job: http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/shanno...
So is this supposed to be shocking? This is actually one of the reasons I've always had significantly less respect for the 5-year masters programs. Undergrads typically have neither the maturity nor the time to dedicate themselves properly to learning the material. As an undergrad I was assigned to a lab where RAs were expected to work 40 hours a week, and on Friday afternoon they were standing by the door looking at their watches.

I've always thought that an advanced degree (past a BS) requires a ton of dedication, and the goal should be to know a topic better than anyone else. But I guess the advance of non-thesis masters degrees gives the lie to my belief.

That one point about how "in effect I am choosing where I think you should go in your professional career" reads pretty harsh, but if you think about it most of us do that when giving a recommendation. If I get a call from an R&D shop, I would naturally think about different parameters and behavior than if I got a call from a sales department.
Presentation Zen: Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic
Centrifugal force is also used to achieve the concept called artificial gravity, which is the reason why characters in Star Trek walk around like normal in their starships.
Say I take the Rails class. What's the learning curve from there to Sinatra? Better / worse than the other way?
Wuh...? Care to cite a source for that?
Battelle on developers, neutrality, and Yahoo
Membase: A distributed key-value database for modern web applications
It's unfortunate that you're not getting many responses, I personally would have loved to see what the HN crowd would have had to say here.

I think it's probably because you posted this question on a Saturday -- I hope you try again maybe on a Thursday, I've a hunch the question will do better then
no learn python!
[citation needed]?
Not to mention - most couples think it all going to work out.
> and spreads liability across both spouses, so both can be held accountable if the other one commits fraud.

I think you're doing it wrong.
That description reminds me of the 4 hour workweek guy to a t.
Some differences between marriage and those contracts you mentioned...

* they have performance requirements
* they aren't life long commitments

If you don't perform well as a CEO the board can fire you. And you don't get to keep half of their personal net worth either.

You make a valid point that when things are tough, marriage helps you stay together. But it seems like for the wrong reason (fear of divorce, rather than love of the person).

It also seems likely that if the other person know's it's difficult for you to leave, they may not try as hard.

This same problem exists when professors get tenure, when you sign a 2 year contract with AT&T, or any long term contract that locks you in.
Then I guess you can't tell very far.

I think you are confusing measurable, reproducible quantum entanglement with the quackish invocation of the term to lend scientific credence to kooky paranormal theories.

There's a reason that Einstein was freaked out by "spooky action at a distance" and it wasn't because it didn't exist. It's because it did.
Just sounds like you have a bad case of "shit's easy" syndrome, as Yegge said when I was reading him yesterday.
Well, Mercurial is written in Python, so I guess it belongs on the right side lol.
"That said, I threw my hands up after running into multiple libraries duck punching (monkey patching) ActiveSupport into a mangled, conflicting mess one too many times. The open classes thing really is harmful, no matter what anyone tells you. It's a feature that, when used with care, can be very powerful...but the problem is in my experience it's not used with care very often in the Rails world."

I don't quite agree with this. Of course I agree that you should use monkey patching with care, but it's the implications I disagree with.

First, you can monkey patch in python too. Python doesn't make this safer, but it is used more in the ruby world. I think the implication that I take issue with is that it's rails fault that some other library you used monkey patched rails. It's the libraries fault, and people should look into libraries before they use them. Just as you should use monkey patching with care, you should use other peoples libraries with care. Peek at the code before using it.

Rails 3 makes it easier to change things without monkey patching so it should occur less frequently going forward.
Searching HN for past discussions on Joomla, you see mostly negative remarks....

http://www.google.com/search?q=joomla+site%3Anews.ycombinato...

Searching HN for past discussions of Drupal or Wordpress, you get a lot of positive remarks and lively discussions about the pros and cons of each system... just as you would with most any technology.

But Joomla seems mostly negative yet it is the second most popular open source CMS in use! Why do people use Joomla?
I always spell his name Djikstra the first time 'round. :(
Synthetic Marijuana Spurs State Ban
Still waiting for Django, ReportLab, xlrd, xlwt, html2pdf... after these I will not have any more excuses.
Oh! Wait! They have to learn a new Visual Studio every couple years. And they had to learn VB.Net (or C#, or managed C++).

Most information workers are not developers and have never heard of the above technology. Keep in mind that developers are more receptive to change than most computer workers, which is part of the reason MSFT evolves dev technology more rapidly.

They already do relearn lots of stuff.

Switching to the new version of Windows/Office is not the same as switching to Linux/OpenOffice. To keep things in perspective, the switch to the Ribbon was the biggest change to Office in many releases. Most releases (e.g. Office 2010) require little relearning.

And if you have a developer who is not willing to learn, fire him.

Long term productivity hit meaning these workers cannot learn new things?

It isn't black and white like that. This isn't about not being willing to learn or not being able to learn new things. Many computer workers -- lawyers, managers, schoolteachers, administrative assistants, my parents -- hate having to learn new technology. They'll learn eventually, but it might be slow and costly, and might not result in any productivity boost in the end.

Come on...How many people within Microsoft really stress Words feature-set? 1%? The average "information worker" would be perfectly fine with WordStar and Visicalc.

It's not about feature set. It's about familiarity, muscle memory, ease of use, efficiency, stability, performance, interoperability, accessibility, backwards compatibility, ubiquity (Office is installed on most PCs), documentation, supportability, and visual polish.

Alternate response: why are so few organizations switching to WordStar & Visicalc?
Never read the book here, or any Vonnegut. It seems like some satire might be underway, but a little into the description of the words, I felt this wasn't teaching me anything. Is this here for more reason than just nostalgia?
I think Joomla was honestly an appropriate choice in its time - a few years back Wordpress really was "just a blogging tool" and Drupal, while perhaps a better cms at the time had (at least for our clients) a big downside in that explaining the whole "taxonomy" system was just too hard.

Things have changed lot in the last few years, Wordpress is an honest-to-god cms these days, and people (again, I'm thinking specifically of a few clients of ours) are beginning to understand why learning how to use taxonomies solves some real world problems. Perhaps Joomla hasn't progressed at the same rate. We've got a few clients with Joomla sites, but I haven't considered recommending Joomla for quite some time...
In terms of accessibility, I assume the label element is more important as the name of the input element isn't visible anyways (for screen readers and people with CSS disabled). I agree with you though, it does seem like a headache to deal with for more complex (or multiple) projects - makes more sense to name the input field something unique that you can easily remember.
I guess the issue is the prevalence with which it occurs in Ruby, as you say. I've been programming professionally for over a decade now, in at least as many languages, and I've only had this problem with ruby.

Still, I enjoy ruby very much, and I haven't seen my last project in it or Rails. I just need reliability and consistency now, and Python seems to offer more of it. I may as you say hit this same problem in Django, but I haven't yet.
For those that don't know, most probably do... but I would like to point out the irony in Zed's statement. He's most famously known for creating Mongrel [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongrel_(web_server)], an open source HTTP server for Ruby commonly used in Rails deployments.
I started to agree with you (my first initial reaction while reading this article was "Huh, typical 'I don't do what's easy and became an entrepreneur and now I'm semi successful' story"). But what does make it different that is that women don't usually go this route, whereas it might seem more normal for a man. So it's worth heralding someone who is technically a minority for doing something difficult. I don't see it as discrimination, rather, making it an example for more women to follow.

Of course, I am a woman, so my viewpoint may be skewed.
You're certainly right about the effects of being in a long-term relationship/contract. That's why things work much better when one has an attitude of, "I'm in this for the long haul- I better make an effort to straighten things out," rather than, "It's hard for my spouse to end this thing so I can slack off and be selfish."
Political correctness and emphasis on public image may have created some measure of accountability over the last few years, but more than too often it means that what is actually going on is simply never said aloud. Instead it must be inferred and gathered second hand.

Reading this stark honesty is really rather quite pleasant and refreshing. It's nice to know what somebody actually thinks and what they're going to do instead of a washed out and contrived 'official statement' which requires severe interpretation to understand.
>Look, the real enemy is not FB but Apple

The first thing I thought of when I read this news was precisely that it was targeted at matching Apple. All of a sudden Apple has come out of nowhere as a gaming force, threatening even Nintendo's portable gaming systems. Google investing in gaming looks like a move to reinforce their offerings in this department.