skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking about switching to Rails many, many times in past. I've messed around with it and coded up some util type stuff (probably not enough) and found that it doesn't really fill some great void that's missing in Python. Of course Rails does offer a hipper, younger, more vibrant community. If you already have a strong toolset in Python why switch? I don't write nearly the amount of server side code as I used to anyway.

Also Google still supposedly uses Python.
>Flying, after a while, can become routine and at a certain point the marginal value is low - it's expensive and if you're not going to be a professional pilot, it begins to seem like a very expensive and pointless hobby. but the experience of learning to fly is worth it.

VERY well said! Exactly my experience!
This is the reason I like to use jQuery: I would never have time to take on all the headaches with supporting some of these platforms. I use jQuery so I don't have to worry about all that stuff and I can get my work done.
In mathematics it's hugely damaging though, the conciseness of published proofs makes it much harder for other mathematicians to see how they reached that result. And in mathematics how you got there is as important as the end results.

Especially for students studying proofs, the step from being students to being researchers is greatly impeded by not being able to see how researchers reached the end results they did.
Actually OSX's market share peaked with the debut of Win7 and has been declining since.

Your point stands, though.
I love these. Nothing beats having 100 strangers in a bar work together shouting "Don't buy sambuca shots til they drop to 70p!!" and then just as it does everyone screams "BUY! BUY! BUY!" and chaos ensues...

There is a prisoners dilemma type problem where people don't want to wait in a 100 person queue so they will go to the bar and order at 80p, but thankfully the lag on the pricing is enough to mean this isn't an issue and it still drops to 70p. I would love to remove the lag and see if people notice and react much differently...
The as Operator
That doesn't mean they weren't. User familiarity is a big part of good design, so playing to the current trend may well make your thing easier to use.

For example, there's no reason why search boxes should have rounded corners - it's just an arbitrary style. But since users are familiar with rounded search boxes, using them could make your site easier to use.
Android "is" java, you cant drop java from android. Oracle is just pissing around. Java support in android just wont go away.

Secondly you cant reverse engineer iOS "API", its a language (Obj-C) and a API. The API consists of surely patented and copyrighted routines. Most of it is called Cocoa and personally I would say it sucks balls. Its a totally different metodology than what most other languages use.

iOS development is if anything even more cumbersome than android-development. I just dont see the point.

Also, there are initatives to crosscompile code (in LUA for instance) to both iOS and android.
I hate to rain on anybody's parade, but this is awful tripe. (I hope I couched that diplomatically enough)

Most of America is rural. Having an open space for your mode of travel has been de rigeur since the days people rode horses around. Most poor people, really poor people, can barely afford a car and the mandatory insurance now. Jacking up gas and parking taxes has terrible consequences to theses folks. No matter how precious the goal you are trying to accomplish.

Look, I'd love a world without gasoline-powered cars, but when it's an hour to town, I'm going to be going in something. And that something is going to need to park somewhere.

I increasingly see a vast difference between urbanites and suburbanites/rural America. It's a shame they seem at cross-purposes so much. The United States is simply nowhere near as dense as Europe is, where things like this might make more sense.

EDIT: Just to be clear that I am directly addressing the author's point: The fact that the cost of land (and to society) for free parking has risen over the last few decades is not germane. Everything has risen in cost. Providing parking for others has always been a cost of having a residence or doing business in the city. I see nothing new in this article except a new look at those costs. The reason for them hasn't changed at all. Nor their justification.
The article is from 2002. I wonder what the percentage of modern startups don't try to meet these guidelines (particularly the ones involving showing physical addresses and details of real humans behind the site)

It'd be interesting to see whether any more recent a/b testing gave any indications on whether they still make any difference...
Come on!!!! Seriously??? Do we want to start another of those python v/s ruby or this v/s that kind of debate. It seems really frustrating that such questions frequently make it to the front page. These are just pointless.
Python has a lot of different options for web frameworks, so there's not really any void to be filled. You can go simple with web.py or flask, you can go full-featured with Django, or you can roll your own with something like Tornado, SQLAlchemy, and Jinja.

You can see some of the sites running Django at http://www.djangosites.org/.
After living in New York for a while, I came to the conclusion that one good way to improve quality of life would be to simply ban on-street parking everywhere in Manhattan and in the denser areas of the boroughs. The only people allowed to stand or park should be certain official vehicles (police, ambulance, etc) and vehicles with a valid delivery permit that would need to be purchased. Anybody else would be ticketed and towed. This would free up extra space for traffic on most roads, reduce the number of vehicles in circulation in the city, and eliminate economically stupid outcomes like UPS trucks constantly getting tickets from fleet-footed traffic officers while they are making deliveries.
this is a holywar topic of course, but why would anyone regret if python frameworks are superior in almost every possible way? ruby is a fun language and rails is a fun magic framework suitable for pet projects but when your codebase becomes large, then it's a mess to support. we switched to python and could not be happier, the only problem is supporting an old rails app. so your question is wrong.
Here's that link for 960 grid: http://960.gs/

They have lots of layouts on that page.
Water on Moon Unlikely, a New Study Indicates
That was amazing, thanks.
Are Charities Killing African Entrepreneurship?
Parking and also other infrastructure, mainly highways and larger roads that cut up the city. The largest benefactors of the Big Dig in Boston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig) were not those driving on the newly improved road or those benefiting from the reduced traffic, but rather those who could now enjoy the green way, those living in or visiting the North End (hey I can walk there now!), those benefiting from the improved air quality of having a filtered highway, etc.
Like I said, Google is hypocritical. But still not even close to Microsoft's behaviour during its glory days. I dislike a number of choices the company has made, but there's only one thing it has done that I consider really evil. And no, the Net Neutrality proposal isn't it.
This article sounds really interesting but I got lost in the details when I started reading it. Why do transposons make us unique? It seems to assume I would know that. Are they handled specially during recombination?
Your message is lost when one can't respect how you are saying it.

Although, in this case, the main role for the vulgarity seems to be covering for the fact that the author has no message.

"The RIGHT data to the RIGHT person at the RIGHT time on
the RIGHT device. Data first, Device LAST."

This sounds good, but what does it actually mean, practically speaking? That we should be targeting SMS on old phones that Haitians use in national catastrophes? That doesn't sound like a very good business strategy...
Right-time > Real-time.
Ask HN: Has anyone ever been sued for distributing Python or Ruby VM?
Does anyone know of a situation where someone distributed a solution with the Python or Ruby VM and was later sued?

It seems that Oracle has pulled out a double barrel shotgun and filled Java with bullets, particularly for folks that want to distribute a solution that includes the Java VM.

Advocates of Ruby or Python in the enterprise can now talk to corporate about minimizing legal risk by going with a Ruby or Python solution instead of Java.
I'm listening to the rain.
I code better when it rains outside.
Just ported our app from Rails to Django - couldn't be happier. I'd still quick prototype in Rails or use it for simple apps, but pain starts to increase with app complexity. Django admin is awesome and SQLAlchemy is maybe the best ORM ever.
I phone application development
I use Python/Django for all my web projects.

I've never used Rails, and haven't felt a great need to go down that road. Sure, I'd love learning Ruby/Rails for the sake of learning it. Honestly though, if I ever decide to learn something new, it won't be Ruby/Rails, which is supposedly very similar to Python/Django. I'd rather learn something completely different.
The Web 4.0 - Embody emotions in your App
Ask HN: Good Open Source Survey Software?
I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good open source survey system, preferably in PHP.

I'd like one with a bit more intelligence than just counting up the answers, for example:

- For a question of "which of the following sites do you read (tick all that apply)", it would be nice to also be able to see statistics such as "x% read more than 3 of them" and "of people who read site A, x% also read site B"

- Tracking between answers: show results from question A made up only of people who also answered x in question D, etc.

Or would I be better with a paid hosted service?

Thanks
Rework: 37 Signals Book review
I suggest Chinesepod. The service is relatively cheap, there are a ton of resources for learning there and the podcasts are generally much more interesting than Pimsleur and other methods. I signed up for Chinesepod a little bit before I took a college class for Mandarin and I believed Chinesepod to be better for learning the vocab and characters. The college class was obviously better for pronunciation and real conversation because we had a great instructor and podcasts don't give feedback. You could supplement Chinesepod with remote conversations and tutors though. I believe they also have a network for this sort of thing. It's the cheapest option I know of.

If you have no funds at all, then you could probably find people willing to have conversation with you for free through the net and teach you some things in exchange for you offering the same with English.
I went Googling for science on this subject and promptly found a review of the usability literature:

http://www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html

and a second study:

http://www.unc.edu/~jkullama/inls181/final/serif.html

And a poll of user preferences:

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt6/html-email-fonts.htm

The apparent conclusion:

Serifs hsve a small-to-nonexistent effect on the readability of digital text, one way or the other.

However, other qualities like x-height and letter spacing do make a difference. In a Times New Roman vs Arial battle, Arial tends to come out on top. But that may well be because it has a larger x-height.

When you poll users on their preferences they love sans-serif fonts. But a big part of the problem is that so few serif fonts come installed in all browsers. Times New Roman seems to be a poor screen font, and Georgia is better but isn't installed everywhere. In short, the fact that we prefer sans serif fonts for the web may be an artifact of our crappy selection of web fonts.

It will be very interesting to see if and when serifs stage a comeback in the era of 300dpi displays and, more importantly, a much larger choice of fonts.
It would be far more efficient to implement the tax and give the money directly back to everyone. At which point you would see people using that money for other things, which would let you reclaim parking spaces for other uses, and or build more based on supply and demand.

PS: I pay to park most places around me, and I take slightly fewer trips because of this. The net effect of which is I spend less money on my car and buy more stuff when I do go out.
I think you mean subconscious.
I posted this without agreeing with the author. I thought it was interesting to contemplate without actually needing to agree with its premises.

But anyways, I came on here to express some surprise at the tone of some of the responses. Can we take a wide detour around the ad hominems? The most valuable comments are the ones that dispute the words themselves rather than speculating about the author.
Your comment is known as "Playing the man and not the ball." Do I have to link to "How to disagree" to underscore my point?
When you have 300 million people, the privilege tends to get abused.
Really? All major languages have a web framework that's on par with Rails these days. Actually, most languages (including Ruby) have a web framework / ORM / templating system combination that's better than Rails.

As long as you don't pick something like Java or C++, you'll be fine. Worry about your idea, not which flavor of nearly-identical languages you pick. Pick the one you know; Ruby, Python, and Perl are all the same language with tiny superficial differences.
I thought a while back that Google's Appengine could eventually compete with Oracle Database and Oracle Peoplesoft. As more people use Google Apps, Gmail and build custom apps on Appengine, they may start to compete with Oracle offerings. Maybe this is Oracle's way of slowing that down.
Agreed, I'm not taking the bait on this one. Personally I use (django|rails) but I haven't tried anything but $1 and don't want to.
>local governments already engage in social engineering, in the form of requiring public businesses to provide parking spaces.

That's reflective rather than manipulative. Most municipalities have long knowledge of transportation patterns, and they know that when an establishment has insufficient parking, it causes grief for neighbours.

People end up circling the area indefinitely, or they park illegally on neighbouring grounds, etc.

The real social engineering are articles like this that are, as someone else mentioned, essentially propaganda pieces.

There are places where vehicles aren't appropriate or as usable -- dense urban centres -- and in those places most people don't drive. Most New Yorkers don't own a car. People living in downtown TO condos don't own a car. That is great, but that density and very expensive mass transit system doesn't carry forth to the suburbs, exurbs, or rural areas, so save the rhetoric.
Are Student Athletes Worse Than Other Students?  Deadspin Contest
> There are a few good points

Precisely: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/10/how-to-use-blunt-instrum...
Respectfully disagree. Reputation and image are important if yours is poor amongst a community that influences buying decisions.

Traditionally, this hasn't really been the case with Oracle, as their products are still adopted up the food chain from most developers who might be expected to have a poor image of Oracle.

The question is how long this remains the case, and what impact a poor image will have on hiring, partnership, investment in the Java ecosystem, and so on.
There is both a mapper and a reducer internally, but a real map-reduce implementation should let you run custom code on both the map and the reduce, and a full-featured one should let you independently specify how many nodes you have mapping and reducing.

I may have missed it, but I don't see those things.

(I'm ignoring the fact that it is nice to be able to pass around arbitrary data structures. While true, I wouldn't expect that out of a bash implementation.)
I buy in bulk (from Amazon) and live in the city center. Food does not take up that much space.
I read something similar about Starbucks. Their approach is or was to be located next to a dry cleaner or movie rental business (when they existed). The thought was that people have to go to those stores twice to drop-off and pick-up and they thought it increased the chances that people would stop in for a coffee.
I know I'm being downvoted for political reasons, but this seems a clear-cut case where you can reason your way around here.

Please explain. Let's use my circumstances for an example.

I live an hour from any city. I do well enough financially, so parking taxes will not effect me one way or the other (neither would a gasoline tax). Within an mile of where I live, there are probably another 100 families. Most of them do not do so well. I live in a very rural and poor area. One family I know is a single mom and teenage daughter. While their housing is provided by family, each of them makes minimum wage and have to drive to the city to work. They barely keep one car running and the lights on at home.

Now I believe you are saying we should tax them for parking in the city. Then give everybody the money back from the tax. Perhaps at the end of the year when they file their taxes.

This would be devastating to these folks. Sure, you'd cut down on car use, but at what cost? For every middle-income person who took a few less trips, how many low-income people did you just kick out of work?

Did I understand that correctly? And please, no "but those folks are living the wrong way!" comments. These people are living as best as they can. One social engineering event per conversation, please. The point is to defend, explain, or analyze the article in question. The essay seemed to me to be the kind of pontificating that looks good from the ivory tower living in the city, but has very limited real application to the rest of the country, aside from hurting people for a noble cause.
You can learn about IP protection in different countries here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/johanna_blakley_lessons_fr...
>> If there are any worldly Arabs who enjoy al-Mutanabi with MJ and the occasional line of coke, and who love reading scripture to ladies of ill repute: hola at me, dog.

I'm not Arab, but dude we should so get a drink.
Top Tools for Managing and Automating Your Media Downloads
The Anchoring Effect
C'mon, Ruby's just Python with slightly different syntax.

But seriously, it's more and more common to write webapps in Javascript and to keep your server-side views and controllers minimal. And for that minimal REST frameworks like web.py are just enough. Full blown Rails (or Django) webapps are bad for caching and do not provide the best user experience possible.

It's glorified PHP.

EDIT:

Oh, thread's dead. Anyway:

> can lead to significant differences in ways of working, code being produced and community building.

Sure, that was mostly joke anyway.

> That I completely disagree with, though. And the paragraph which precedes.

Would love to know why.

> How are full blown Rails/Django webapps bad for caching?

If you're doing all your user interaction server side than almost all of your views become dynamic.
What you're describing is called Spaced Repitition. There is software out there that capitalizes on this phenomenon, i.e. Anki and (shameless plug) http://www.cardmonkeyhq.com/ that I develop.
"and then you release and aggressively promote a commercial Java IDE and make a ton of cash"

Who pays for IDEs any more?
Many people need to also read Office documents, not just write them. If you cannot sign or edit a crucial contract for your company because you are using some Open Source word processor (and all of your partners use MS Word) your decision to move from MS suddenly starts to look very, very stupid.

Also, I heard from a writer that Microsoft Office is superior to any word processor (a.k.a computer program you use to write a novel) to the point that he writes novels in Microsoft Word under Wine.
How to report a Cyber Crime? Indian Cyber Army
There are a ton of books on the subject, most are fine.

Regarding graphic design, I would check out something like Pixel2Life (http://www.pixel2life.com) as it provides a lot of tutorials and step-by-step exercises.

Regarding the bigger issue of web design, my best advice to you would be to start following those in the industry that are proven leaders. Most big designers write blogs; follow them and read up on their tips. There are also a number of design magazine-like sources on the Internet, including sites like A List Apart, Drawar, and Smashing Magazine.

That would be a good mix of both contemplating theory and actual exercises.
Interesting. Downloading the non-commercial Q implementation and checking it out.
Of course cars are necessary in the suburbs--suburbs were designed around freeways exactly to enable automobile usage in the first place! Refusing to see the post-WWII changes in urban design, land use, and zoning laws as the social engineering they were and continue to be is shortsighted.
I also have the same need. I tried silentale.com a while ago, but abandoned quickly because it was unbearably slow and missing some basic features.
Currently trying networkhippo.com, I'm still not happy with it but it's a bit better.
Try them and see if they fit your need.
I’m always confused as to why so many websites from the US don’t provide some sort of physical address, a name, a telephone number, even only a email address. Maybe I’m spoilt because it’s actually against the law in Germany to not provide name, address, telephone number and email address on your website (you can either put it on every page or put a link to the page with this information on every page) but to me it just seems impolite, unprofessional, even scammy if you don’t.
Do a rough sketch on paper, then a heavily detail diagram in GIMP/Photoshop, then spend your time trying to make the site look as much like the pic as possible.

Pull out your hair when you then view your site in a different browser when you realise you'll have to do the same for that one.
We must be smoking crack then: http://carbonmade.com/

Pink unicorns. Really?!
Does the user have to set that up? Or does it just happen automatically? That to me seems one of the main advantages of centralization of this sort of thing: users just automatically get publicly posted photos, posts, invitations, etc. from anybody they've friended and vice-versa.
Liquid Fold
I read something else similar involving Starbucks. Apparently other coffee chains have taken the strategy of building next to Starbucks. The thinking is to let Starbucks pay for marketing, then when the lines are long at Starbucks, people will try the rival instead. Some will prefer it, and so a customer is born.
Do you mount your phone on the handlebar? What if it gets wet?

I have bought Garmin device[1] for hiking and mountain biking specifically so that I wont' need to worry about it getting wet. And for long battery life and changeable commodity batteries, too.

[1] Garmin Oregon 450
https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=63349

there's also top model '550, which adds camera. https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=26875
I find everything except the popup on entry fine. But that caused me to bounce.
How are full blown Rails/Django webapps bad for caching?
> C'mon, Ruby's just Python with slightly different syntax.

That's overall true, but the pervasive use of blocks (as crippled as they may be) and a culture of metaprogramming, as well as some Perlish inheritance (I would guess) can lead to significant differences in ways of working, code being produced and community building.

Ruby and Python are very similar syntactically and semantically, but have greatly diverge socially.

> It's glorified PHP.

That I completely disagree with, though. And the paragraph which precedes.