skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For someone who isn't a serious programmer but is looking to prototype a business idea, I think Ruby/Rails are more user-friendly than Python/Django.

- Rails deployment and hosting are super simple with Heroku (http://heroku.com), which, again, I think is more user-friendly than the Python equivalent (Google App Engine)

- There are some excellent free resources out there (check out http://railscasts.com, http://guides.rubyonrails.org/, and http://railslab.newrelic.com/scaling-rails)

- There is a very vibrant community of plug-ins (gems)

Honestly, I think that getting a book (try this one: http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with..., 4th edition), and then simply practicing will get you up and running faster than a course.

Also, now is a good time to get into Rails, as version 3.0 has just came out.
You are not the first person to point it out. See explanation below.
Interesting. I know Scipy are one of the biggest communities of Python users.

Once Django (and all it's dependencies, specifically the database backends) are ported over to Python 3, I think a critical mass will have been established in the move to Python 3.
You have to play farmville, first of all. It isn't a game. It's just as I described it--"cow goes moo" and that's the extent of it.
Loopt [YC S05] Hits 4 Million Users, Propelled By iOS 4 And Android
learn rails. during this process, you'll pick up on the ruby that you actually need to know, vs learning ruby and then learning rails. i learned rails over the past year and now have a number of apps running in production for clients.

http://railstutorial.org/ taught me rails. (along w/ stackoverflow.com)
I find it mildly interesting that the NYT article omits CS from her dossier. Does branding her as purely an Economics grad make her more of an 'everyman' and thus result in a more relatable story?
The connectivity of the railway is largely responsible for the string of lights through Russia:

http://nightearth.com/index.php?lat=43.961191&lng=80.683...

If you consider the artificial light emitted at night to be a proxy for density of wealth and economic connectivity, it seems clear that the railway has had a substantial effect.
See my comment here if you are looking for additional resources (I see you mention else where that it's both a Ruby and Rails course): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088887

To add to that list: http://railstutorial.org/book
The Fed shows no signs of stopping its approach. With quantitative easing, etc., the Fed has actually created negative real interest rates.

If anything I'd be worried that there are powerful interests lobbying for targeted booms. The housing/building sector has been a huge beneficiary of transfers of wealth from taxpayers and users of currency as a store of value, and probably has its sights on another Fed-fueled building/housing boom.

Right now lots of Americans make payments on credit cards which are useless bc the limit has been reduced, etc. There is also pressure on the Fed from banks who know that there could be waves of new defaults in consumer credit cards.

So on balance I think the fear is an over-reaction by the Fed rather than an under-reaction. There is also an interesting meme coming into focus in which credit is viewed as a right just like healthcare.
I second the suggestion of trying out both Ruby and Python. Both languages are modern and agile but with distinct styles such that one will likely fit your brain better than the other.

Also, regarding Python web frameworks, I would highly recommend looking at Web2Py over Django for your needs (something that gets you up and running with a minimum of fuss) Web2Py is supposed to be more Rails-like than Django which might be a good thing in your case. (Also, check out Cube2Py for something to look forward to: http://vimeo.com/13154869)

Disclaimer: I am of a similar background (Engineer/MBA/Entrepreneur looking for a platform to rapidly prototype ideas) For folks like us, scaling can wait until you validate the idea and confirm that a real market exists, then you can raise capital and add real developers to help you scale.
Where do you guys shop in the US? If you explore stores beyond 7/11, you'll see that there is plenty of "normal food" in the US.

Some people choose to eat artificially-produced cheese substitute, but despite the ads you see on TV, not everyone does.

The same goes for coffee and beer, mentioned in comments below. I always buy coffee within a day or two of roasting, and even if I buy it at the grocery store, it's still within two weeks. Sure, you can buy old coffee and save money, but you don't have to. (As for pre-ground coffee, many people value the convenience of not having to buy a $200 coffee grinder and grind their own coffee over having the best coffee possible. In America, you get to decide!)

Finally, we have a lot of good beer over here. In Chicago we have Two Brothers and Goose Island (who sometimes produce a good beer; Green Line Pale Ale -- tasty), and New Belgium and Dogfish Head are good American beers that are widely distributed throughout the country.

I think you Europeans need to watch a little less TV before you judge.
Having to maintain my own software and keep adding features. I have redesigned my largest project several times, and am still not entirely satisfied.

You need to suffer.
Why do we keep hearing about mod_ssl overclocking? Have any of you overclocked your Cassandra lately? what about your Apache? Does MySQL have a multiplier that can be tweaked with? Or voltage settings on the BIOS?

"Yeah dude, I water cool my SSL. Look at those dark blue LEDs glow."
Indeed Terragen is a very good and powerful tool. We are solving the same problem, but using different approaches.
Or maybe it'd be fun because you'd be making something that people can relax and enjoy and that adds a little extra social interaction to their everyday experience, often with people that they don't have another "reason" to be in contact with.
well, i'd hope that in most cases closure would compile to var i = arr.length, since the body of the loop was nil.
Dude Seriously, I couldn't agree more!
I would be rather be Tim Berners Lee rather than some multidimensional above average being
The lies that software developers tell
yeah CS would mean she is geek, shyaa. They must keep the whole econ major models can design an Iphone app feel!
Well shiver my timbers! I didn't know that. :-)

Anyways, good luck!
Wall St. Hiring in Anticipation of an Economic Recovery
Maybe we should just rename the "MembershipIdentityProvider" method to "SuperLaserWeapon"?
Yes, but it's a nontrivial calculation, especially if you're moving in more than one dimension. What you want to do, roughly, is this:

1. Pick the largest motor you can stomach in your robot.

2. Figure out how much current it can handle when stalled. This will be proportional to the square root of the power, because P = I^2 * R.

3. From the motor specifications, you can figure out how much torque you'll get when the motor is stalled, which it will be when you first start accelerating your 2 kg.

4. Figure out how much force on the load will result from the torque.

5. Once you know force, you'll know how fast the load will accelerate.

6. Assume the load accelerates for 0.01 s (or some small time step) and then recalculate all your parameters.

7. If it's not fast enough, pick a more powerful motor.

Really, you're trying to solve a system of differential equations, so the actual answer might be "go to engineering school and take a class in dynamics" or "find an engineer who will do some system modeling in Matlab for you."
I'd never go back to the game industry. Low pay, long hours, and a pervasively juvenile mentality that just keeps getting more annoying with every birthday after 17.

If you like doing bare-metal high performance coding it's one of your best chances to test your skills though, unless you're doing lolgames.
As someone who has done 4 years of Rails development and has recently switched to Django for new projects, I can tell you it would be worthwhile to learn both. Ruby and Rails are great most of the time, and the Ruby way of doing things is a great learning experience.

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've heard Scala solves the issue with open classes by keeping things in context with the code that surrounds it, but I personally haven't verified it. Besides, that's not what you asked.

Here's a metaphor that I really feel holds true: Rubyists are magicians...Pythonistas are masons. If you have to rely on your own code only, then by all means delve as deep into magic as possible. However, if you have to rely on other's work, the mason's approach is much more intuitive, reliable, and safe.
I think Google's worry about Facebook (partly justified, partly not) is starting to cause them to make pointless (and time wasting) decisions.

If I had 5mins with Sergei and Larry, I would say (after taking a long sip from the free organic drink I just got from the snack bar we're standing next to)

"Look, the real enemy is not FB but Apple (and sometimes your own engineering hubris, e.g. Buzz), so focus all your troops on this front. Don't dilute your strengths with topsy-turvy fads like Farmville. Remember the last time you tried that route when you tried to copy Second Life's act, does anyone even remember them now? Concentrate on (i) getting an Android tablet out, and (ii) get a $99 Google TV box running on Atom with cool software (not the sorry thing you showed at the I/O) to beat Apple to the punch.

It's that simple."
Sorry but I really find her website too cheesy!

Someone who claims to have 5 Million $ worth web company should know better.

Also her modelling portfolio is like HFCS worst than cheesy.
You can also get a large mix of both. My brother works for a studio that, until recently, only developed racing games for the DS. So they might be working on the next Need for Speed and Barbie racing at the same time.
No, actually, it is just a stupid waste of everyone's time.
You can get motors with encoders built into them that are very, very accurate. You can decode their pulses into position with a quadrature decoder like the HCTL-2020.
They've been profitable since their very first quarter and, according to the TC article, they will likely make as much in profit next year as they've raised in the last three years.

The fundraising is almost exclusively used for acquisition, so what's the obnoxious part?
Presumably Fisher Price itself employs people who go to work every day to refine their moo farm and other toys. I doubt most of them see the nature of their jobs as particularly embarrassing or degrading.
From the Django 1.2 release notes:

A roadmap for Django’s overall 2.x Python support, and eventual transition to Python 3.x, is currently being developed, and will be announced prior to the release of Django 1.3.

Anybody know what this roadmap currently looks like?
CMS Critic Recommends... - July Edition
Relief! So I wasn't the only one thinking that. It sounds like a warmed up version of Timothy Ferriss-like mantra.
that's because they make moo farms for kids...
They've been off that course since at least 2005 or so. Notice how now they're putting money into social when things like Book Search are relatively stagnant.

Their real mission is something like "exploit cloud computing".
Good idea. Though I prefer VirtualBox to VMWare, as the former is open-source.
IANAL, but this is how one explained it to me: Varies by state in the U.S., but basically, the longer you are married, the less binding the prenup. Married for 8 years with two kids and the judge can just ignore the prenup. Married 1 year, no kids, prenup matters.
Make a Python JIT compiler without using C or 3rd party libraries
Cat's Cradle was the only book that was required reading in high school that I actually liked, and it's still one of my favourites. As a result I've read just about every one of Vonnegut's books.
Any time someone lists "Microsoft Word" as a skill on their resume (other than a secretary, and then I'd expect a lot more detail) my gut reaction is to assume they're the kind of person who enjoys listing accomplishments no matter how deep or meaningful.
Kill screen (video game bugs)
Obviously NYT was having a slow day. However, what I'd like to point out is the discrimination: Do you think the same piece would be created if the entrepreneur in question was an average looking guy? People always talk about how women get discriminated against in CS, EE and the like (which is true to a point) while refusing to see the advantages of being a woman in these areas.

When we were interviewing people for positions, I always sensed somewhat more enthusiasm before interviewing a woman in my colleagues, even if it's a phone interview.

You may find these comments Summers-like, but let me know if you have not experienced similar things in your work environment.
I hadn't heard of the term "lolgames" before, it is quite apt.
Yes. I remember the "practice elocution" part.
Why Mercurial? Most Python projects I've used are on git.
Gexf4js - visualizing gexf files using protovis js library
Google -> Google!
The other 90% of these initiatives, on the other hand, are genuine attempts to reduce costs with the added benefit of breaking vendor lock-in and thus reducing costs down the line while increasing decision autonomy.

I have no idea who suggested it, but, if I were a UK citizen, I would prefer the money that comes from my taxes to be diverted to companies that create more jobs in the UK than they create in Redmond, or Bangalore.
Excellent!

One thing I'd like to see is a website where tech talks are collected, with viewer ratings and tags. I've seen lots of good talks and a good number that weren't really worth my time, and it's hard to decide when they show up one at a time. (I like to watch things with mplayer, so easy access to the video URL would be a plus ... but that's putting the cart before the horse.)
Just out of curiosity, you've your degree in CE, EE, or what..?
I guess should have known that the people around here would know what wheat rust is. But yeah, that stuff is pretty nasty, as far as its ability to kill wheat goes.
I gotta agree with your comment about marketing idiots
OOo does a decent job with XLS files (in my limited experience) but butchers PPT slides (also in my limited experience)
A little Googling suggests that this was written by Paul G. Gassman, a professor of organic chemistry at University of Minnesota, who passed away in 1993.

This probably reads a little harsh, especially to the software hackers among you, but I can say that my thesis advisor espoused most of the same core ideas ideas, even if he would not have written them down in this form. Strip away the snarky comments about re-shelving his books, and this is the core of what is expected by most research advisors at top universities.
The Promise of the Cloud Workplace
Read the memos! Sending this to someone at Purdue.

"Thus, when you do not perform your research duties with diligence, dedication, and efficiency, is it any wonder why your research advisor seems to always climb all over you?"

"In effect, I am choosing where I think you should go in your professional career. This is an awesome task with considerable control over your own life and I accept this responsibility with the utmost of concern."
Add to the list those who write:
ASP,XML,ORACLE,SAP,Javascript,AWK,GREP,PERL,.Net and few more capitalized abbreviations

In fact beauty is in minimalism. Such as Google which just say C++,Java and Python
great article. thanks for sharing.

As someone more of the startup bend however, I wonder about his pursuit of "perfect but useless" vs "imperfect but potentially useful".

He favors the former, but it seems to me that alot of companies make a big contribution to the world by 'doing the best they can' and pushing the ball slightly further along.

Examples:
Google and Search (not 'perfect' but much better)
Microsoft and OSes (OS for the masses)
Apple and iPhone

etc....

It seems like the risk of pursuing perfection is that you become paralyzed, and the risk of doing something no one finds practical is that it contributes nothing to the world.

Isn't it better to find a slightly more effective solution that everyone finds they need rather than a perfect solution for a problem no one has?
Exercise Suppresses Appetite By Affecting Appetite Hormones
That's a helpful metaphor. What I'm looking for is a framework that can be used for rapid prototyping, and it sounds like rails fits the bill.
Canadian Immigration Skilled Worker Point Calculation
You may want to reread his post. The penultimate sentence is a kicker.
> How will worker productivity be affected by the transition?

It's easy to run a pilot and check. From previous experiences, it drops a little in the beginning, but training smooths the transition. With increased decision freedom due to removed vendor lock-in, governments can both choose the best tool for a given job (even if it's incompatible with, say, MS SQL Server) or develop the missing functionality (because they have access to source code). And governments can cooperate over these developments across regional or national borders. Reduced licensing cost is just the beginning.

> especially for information workers who are set in their ways

In other words, who can't learn another IDE beyond Visual Studio and other language beyond VB. 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++). They already do relearn lots of stuff.

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

> OpenOffice is still far behind Office in usability for the average information worker

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. Also, it's not like Office 2003 users weren't completely lost when upgraded to 2007 and more so on 2010. The GDP of a decent-sized country was lost on menu repositioning over Office's history.

> The savings in license costs is probably outweighed by the long-term productivity hit.

Long term productivity hit meaning these workers cannot learn new things?
My opinion is that it is more important to learn programming paradigms. That way you are able to decide what language you believe is the best and learn it easily.

For example, I've never programmed in Clojure but I can read quite a bit of it because I understand functional programming. It wouldn't take me very long to get the hang of it if I chose to learn it.
They have a pretty disappointing track record when it comes to consumer hardware. I bet it is not in their DNA.
Last time I was asked to send an Excel spreadsheet, I used "Save As" and chose XLS. For good measure, I attached the OOo version with a brief explanation. The other side responded he was also using OOo.

I still call presentations "PPTs", even when made in OpenOffice.
Technologies that should be extinct (but aren't)
I seriously doubt that, if the NHS system were to be developed "in the open" with public access to daily builds and in-progress documentation, a 400M GBP disaster would have happened.

Light is a great antiseptic.
Rapid prototyping is exactly what I'm looking for. From what I'm hearing here it sounds like Rails is a great platform for that. Also looking at the MBA at some point ;-)
Building Your Happiness Framework
I wasn't meaning it was specifically controversial in this case - poorly worded on my part. I remember when these ideas were first gaining steam years ago in various govts (linux people always liked to point to any 'wins'). I guess I was just wondering if it's primarily inertia that still keeps people from basically even trying pilots to determine cost savings or other benefits.
I've spent the past two years working for one of the monolithic IT consulting firms. Communication overhead is something anyone attempting to understand enterprise software needs to grasp. Omnipresent meetings occur as an individual's defence mechanism. It is a mischaracterisation to treat it as a problem divorced from corporate structure, as they really are two sides to one coin.

Holding a meeting keeps a paper trail of your attempts to solve a problem and dilutes responsibility across all those involved. Hence, despite the fact that all participants likely sit within ten metres of each other a meeting will still be scheduled: complete with calendar invites, hour-length time blocks (as less would not look like the issue is being given sufficient credence) and the scheduling of follow-up meetings.

Additionally, enterprise projects do not consist of harmonious teams. Each team is akin to a project of its own: each with its own corporate structure, politics, budgets, risks and resources. I recently had a manager from one team demand I attend dual hour-long meetings per day for her team. I politely declined, stating that to do so my team would require an additional resource to cover this gap. This did not ingratiate me.
F# is one of the hidden jewels of the .NET platform, I really hope they give it first class support like C# and VB.NET.
http://wyattgwyon.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/wittrealschule...
The real question is not how, but why?
The End of the Free Internet?
As far as I know, quantum entanglement has not been validated yet, as all experiments since Alain Aspect's 1982 paper suffer from flaws in experiment design, leading to what is known as "loopholes".
This is like having a list of the 50 tallest people in basketball, only less objective. Once you hit 6'8" or so, it's irrelevant.

How smart do you have to be to succeed in the tech space? Smart enough. After that it's luck, tenacity and people skills.

Of course the real point of this list is to fluff the right players to make scoring interviews and information easier in the future.
With the right engine, that should be a matter of theming.
Original research paper: "Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior through Introspective Self-Talk: The Role of the Interrogative Form of Simple Future Tense"

http://www.psych.illinois.edu/~dalbarra/pubs/Wll%20I%20I%20w...
Samsung.
You may also want to consider Sinatra for rapid prototyping. It's lighter weight (less framework) than Rails. Depending on your preferences, it may suite your needs.
Dijkstra slipped up and used "loose" when he meant "lose", which I found to be humorous and a little bit jarring. That's all my above comment meant - nothing base! Apologies if anyone read it the wrong way. Also, pull my finger.
Why I Never Miss A Solar Eclipse
Did you bother reading the entire article? Yes, it was one of many ideas, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, was pushing for open source. Not some random secretary or janitor.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=meaning+of+phrase+%22take+with+a+grain+...
Hey now, don't talk smack about the Fisher Price moo farm. Memories right there.
I'm also considering learning either Python or Ruby, but was leaning more towards Python due to its strong math libraries. Does Ruby have equivalent capabilities for math and science?
Every day I go to 7-11 for coffee. And cringe at the zynga branding everywhere.
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