skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My initial idea, given the technology you have, would be to sell it to bloggers. So, let's say I've got a blog with a reasonable readership. I could go through and manually add affiliate links to relevant books, but that sounds like work to me. I enjoy writing; i don't enjoy jacking around with my templates to add affiliate links.

I'd suggest selling 'monetization made easy' movable type and wordpress plugins.

Just an idea; but it might make you money, and it wouldn't be spammy.

but that's the angle I would take. I mean, not only bloggers, but everyone who has content and users who wants an easy way to monetize.

hell, if you had an affiiate account with more than one bookseller, you could even choose the best deal (either the lowest price, or the highest commission, maybe chooseable by your blogger?) then take your cut before the blogger sees it...

Yeah... that's your freemium model. Give away a plugin that does it but with your affiliate id... give the blogger 50% or something. Then, for a higher fee, offer the plugin with the bloggers affiliate id, where they'd get the money direct from the affiliates, without you taking a cut.
Your logic is tautologous. Evolution seeks no such things. Evolution just happens and is random. It's quite likely we have many traits which are not advantageous for survival, especially in our modern world. Appealing to evolutionary psychology is an intellectual and argumentative reductionist shortcut.
Ask HN: Suggestions for Starting with Ruby on Rails?
I have been coding for about ten years, and consider myself to be very experienced with web app development in PHP. Recently, though, I discovered Heroku and it has left me with a strong desire to learn Rails.

The basics of the ruby language have been easy enough to master. It is just slightly different syntax and grammar. However, I have so far found it impossible to get started with Rails.

I have heard all the statements like "development in Ruby is 10x faster than development in PHP" but so far it is proving 10x harder to learn and 10x less documented.

Readjusting my thinking to work with the MVC framework is proving difficult, and its not helping that most of the tutorials I find are old or contain bugs that cause them to not work.

I find a nice looking tutorial, follow it perfectly and it fails because routes are not being set properly. Or I try to use gems such as restful authentication and they cause the server to fail on startup.

Ruby on Rails seems nice and I'm sure that once I get experienced with it I'll enjoy the 10x faster development speed, but so far it has proved 10x more frustrating to learn than PHP.

Do you have any tips or advice on learning Rails? Do you know of any decent (working) tutorials for learning MVC thinking?
Youtube and other google apps don't support IE6, not to mention many other big traffic web apps and web sites (including 37signals apps).
We're looking into every possible idea we can to shave file size and images down for mobile. Look for very aggressive use of CSS3 that falls back gracefully. We're hoping to eliminate all images (!) or radically reduce their use compared to current ThemeRoller. Using SVG is an option on the table for some elements but I think we'll end up using a TR style tool for this to generate static CSS for performance and compatibility.
Not really... The syntax of natural languages isn't really comparable with programming languages. Completely different modes of understanding. Calling programming languages "languages" is only an analogy. Humans have highly evolved linguistic capabilities that don't really apply to programming languages (though if you could invent one that leveraged natural language capability, you might have something very interesting on your hands.)
Embrace Technical Debt
For what it's worth, as Daniel Gilbert notes in "Stumbling on Happiness", people's minds tend to rationalize their actions and warp the past based on more recent events.

If you were to marry and have kids, you would likely argue the same points about it being the greatest experience of your life. However, you would only feel that way because your memory of your past bachelor life would be distorted by the joy that your new settled life has brought you.

So I think you're both right. :)
All bachelors are men.
'Grammar vigilantes' fined for fixing sign at Grand Canyon
Github Blog - Design updates
I was just discussing about recommendation engines with a friend yesterday.

My pet peeve is that i find a lot of the companies,datasets,research focus on the positive aspects of recommendation. There is probably a lot more negative data we're missing out on, which is not being collected a lot. That data consists of things i would "hate". I would want to chart out a hate pattern of the internet and an anti-pagerank of sorts.

I was reading a post about the same thing yesterday(1), linked along with some questions of my own at http://blog.sidmitra.com/where-is-my-dislike-button.

Ref:
http://blog.superfeedr.com/social/algorithm/a-social-filteri...
Upvoted for finally naming that algorithm I've been off-and-on trying to research for the last year or so. Thank you!
Good failure versus bad failure
Is Oprah the only self-made Billionaire in the US/Europe?

I know that there are several female billionaires but all the fortunes I can think of now are inherited
There's a trick to it. I was reading Ken Iverson's Notation as a Tool of Thought paper (look it up, it's worth a read) which is basically a whistlestop introduction to APL. I realised that it's very difficult (for me) to reason about when I read it left to right, but it's almost trivial read right to left.

That's right, it's a language that makes more sense backwards than it does forwards.
People who know APL can read it. I've been dabbling in J and K off and on, and it makes sense to me, though I still need the dictionary. APL code looks dense and intimidating, sure, but so does a page of Chinese. Both use ideograms rather than words made of letters, but the APL vocabulary really isn't that large. You probably already know what + does.

Also, I can't read Bosnian, but that says more about me than Bosnian. It doesn't make it a "write-only language".
Hah, thank japherwocky for that one!
That's fantastic! I think they'll get me at customs, though... Too bad :/
Oh, you misunderstand. The product itself is profitable, it makes more per day than the operating costs. Right now, actually, it makes the monthly operating costs every two days on average. Fingers crossed that this trend will continue.

The consulting gigs are so we can afford food. We aren't getting paid anything, but we don't count our time against expenses...
At the risk of being obnoxious: if you want to write British you need to spell not only "maths" but also "programme" with more letters.
I had the EXACT same problem as you did until I really got a hold of understanding what MVC really meant.

I thought I understood it (yea, model, view, controller, gottit, so what). I figured it was about as important as a folder for css and a folder for scripts. But MVC is the core structure of how rails operates, so it is super important.

A friend of mine who is a rails developer helped me immensely by describing MVC as

Model - Anything that describes the structure of your data and interacts with the database

View - The layout and display of the page

Controller - gets the data from the model and passes it to the view.

I didn't bother with a 'restful' gem, as rail3 (which I decided to learn with) is already restful, so I'm not sure what that gem would have done for you. But it is true, some Gems won't work, I think that is just the way things are with Rails and Python due to different versions, and they being younger languages (though this can happen with PHP packages also I think, I never really used many of them).

I also dove in head first and went with MongoDB with MongoMapper, which I wanted to learn anyway, instead of using mysql and ActiveRecord.

The railscasts are actually quite good, though I actually learned by creating a twitter clone
http://teachmetocode.com/screencasts/creating-a-twitter-clon...
The tutorial wasn't flawless, but I am using MongoDB and Rails3, so I wasn't expecting it to work perfectly, but I eventually got it all working.

Part of my challenge with Ruby was that it seemed to do SO much for me that I didn't understand what it was doing, but it kinda worked. Then when I wanted to make changes, I didn't know enough about what it was doing to get it to work.

As far as Heroku, I'm yet to actually release a rails app, so I haven't even tried that. I decided to learn Rails because it seemed like every developer I've teamed up with over the past year has been a ruby dev person, and I figured it's easier for me to learn their language and add to my quiver than get them programming in PHP which some of them knew, but didn't really like.

After using Ruby, I can't say that I'm a complete convert, as I think I could still get much done in PHP at about the same pace, but I think we're moving into a rails world.

MVC does make sense when you get used to it.
Best of luck.
That's an excellent idea, and one that I think xulescu was getting at with integrating the book recommendation engine into a bulletin board.

Part of the challenge is maintaining a large enough corpus/histogram to generate good results. Meaning, I'd probably have to host an accessible corpus interface (or make one downloadable) as part of this project. But maybe that's where the dollars come in?
It seems that they only deliver electronics in the UK...
Part of my challenge with Ruby was that it seemed to do SO much for me that I didn't understand what it was doing, but it kinda worked. Then when I wanted to make changes, I didn't know enough about what it was doing to get it to work.

This is my EXACT problem, but worded much better than I worded it. Thanks for the MVC description and the link to the screencast.
Why does FireFox blank screens when it can't connect?
Wouldn't it make better sense to pop up a notification and allow me to save my text in case I might have to reboot?
It's possible that my memory is faulty on the matter. I was probably around 14 or 15 at the time, but I remember looking for a nice heatsink/fan combo so I could try overclocking, a project which would later lead me to make a really awesome water-cooling contraption (it involved a sizable A/C radiator soaked in ice water, hooked up to a doubly stacked set of 60w and 80w peltier coolers -- I ultimately had problems with frost which ended up frying things).

At any rate, I (think) I remember waiting forever for each individual and unappealing icon to load at this store. It's completely possible that the store was a Yahoo Store knock-off, or that it was before the optimization you mention. I guess we'll never know, since I've probably cleared my cache since then.
Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation Seeks Education Founders
Theory A: he was too busy with hardware to waste his time writing a website any other way

Theory B: he doesn't know much about or care about learning how to make web pages- he is into hardware.
I'd get a stronger command of Ruby first. It'll help you, and Ruby is awesome. Rails may not be your thing even if Ruby is.

It's probably not the best way to learn Ruby, but the most fun way is definitely reading _why's poignant guide[1]. It's awesome and teaches you pretty well (you can find PDFs and such out there too).

Once you're satisfied with your command of Ruby:

I'm not really sure what the best way to get started is. I think RailsGuides[2] is supposed to be pretty good. The "getting started" page looks good and complete. When I started, the first thing I did is read the very-introductory parts of the Pragmatic Programmers' book[3], which is great. I didn't bother with the whole thing, just got the basics from it and then learned by doing, occasionally referring to it.

Once I read a few chapters of the pragprog book, I looked at official rails docs (I think it was guides.rubyonrails.org, but that site has evolved a lot since then), got started with something pretty simple, and googled if I had any trouble. For specific issues like getting exceptions, the api documentation[4] can be pretty useful. Though really, you should use apidock.com/rails because it's way more searchable (it's the same docs, plus some comments that apidock users have added, they just made a better search and made it less ugly).

Also, if Rails isn't doing it for you (especially if you do love Ruby), take a look at Sinatra and Padrino. There's of course way more plugins out there for Rails, but you can still use any gems (libraries), and it can be less annoying than Rails.

I'm not sure of any good ways to get used to MVC thinking. It wasn't that hard for me to get used to. What's the issue when it comes to MVC? Not sure where to put which code?

1: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

2: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

3: http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with...

4: http://api.rubyonrails.org/

EDIT: Forgot to mention that railscasts.com has awesome screencasts on all kinds of topics.

I also forgot to mention that restful_authentication is really old. Use authlogic.
Wouldn't it be better to be able to recover the text for storage so you can submit it later?
By what metric? Revenue, profit, cash on hand are all pretty much the same. Market cap is perception and even that isn't quite a bit bigger. Oracle has the advantage of many different revenue streams and long-term contracts. Google has advantages, but head to head -- it's pretty close.
In my first experience with the Kindle, I was fascinated by the backflash. It's clearly not desired, but the technology apparently isn't there yet to do away with it. I just found it so neat that such an apparent flaw is kept in the product because even with it, it's a "good enough" experience. If I imagine myself on the team making Kindle, I think I might find it unacceptable that the screen flashes on every page turn.

Aside from that, the first Kindle had some sort of really awesome scrolling mirror thing on the right. What is it, and how does it work? How can you make material selectively reflective like that?
Wrong layer as I understand it. Seems more like it's trying to allow the providers to set transport prioritization, not application layer.
AT&T/sbcglobal being one.
Theory C: Like me, he's too lazy to learn a proper web framework.
What topics did you guys cover (in class)?
Portal Hacking (DNN) - Website Hacking Technique
Somebody always gets the impression that they are real . . . :P
The comment I wrote was a pithy, uninformative comment that was misleading about the content of the article (I suggested that the author just didn't understand ambition very well, but she's clearly not talking about general ambition; she explicitly distinguishes people who are in it only for riches.) Worse, it had 7 upvotes almost immediately, meaning that people were reading it and getting a wrong and unfair impression. The reply added nothing except to correct me. I don't feel like anything was lost.

You could say that I should leave it in case someone else makes the same misinterpretation. Perhaps I should, but I would not anyway. I don't care to represent myself with incorrect or useless comments documenting my stupidity; I would prefer to remove them from the record and let people who know what they're talking about go ahead.
Is that on purpose that Free account comes with 3 Minutes of Data Resolution, while paying 6 bucks will allow only 1 minute?
How is focusing on the future doing a disservice to anyone?

Well, you're clearly not serving the present.
Greenfoot's Greenroom: What a Bonanza
Krati - Fast, Persistent, Append-only Data Store for the JVM
OK but it's not convincing to think Google would have thought, oh Sun is a company that is nice to open source, so lets base our whole Android operating environment on this open source friendly Java language and JVM and disregard any possibility of being sued. I would think such companies would think about the possibility of someone else taking over or generally anything else happening. Its unprofessional to base your business decision on something as vague as attitude. You need something more solid like an agreement - especially for something as big as Android.

So anyway my understanding is probably Google has some agreement or plan at hand for this situation. Ideas welcome.
IE6 has around 7% marketshare according to this: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Not supporting it is like telling one in fourteen of your customers you don't want their business. This seems like a bad idea, unless of course you have non-financial motives, such as wanting to kill off IE6 by not supporting it and driving it into oblivion.
Isn't the good part of being open-source, that you can fork it at any point?

If there is any interest in OpenSolaris, someone will fork it and continue the development.
At Ramadan dinner, Obama defends plans for Ground Zero mosque
I bet he's pretty happy now that he is rich. And Steve Jobs wouldn't have bought Pixar and created NeXT if he hadn't made a fortune at Apple before he got fired.
That wouldn't help in this particular case because Google did not use said code to develop Android.
I strongly recommend PeepCode's "Rails 2 From Scratch" screencasts.. I'm not affiliated with them in anyway, just a very happy customer. They are only $9 each, but each one is over an hour long. Together they go through everything you need to get started with Ruby, Rails, and the MVC pattern.

http://peepcode.com/products/rails-from-scratch-part-i

http://peepcode.com/products/rails-from-scratch-part-ii
It seems that many people who are "outraged" in reality stay on Facebook anyway because they really don't want to quit. Witness Facebook's ever-climbing popularity and the failure of all the "Quit Facebook Day" protests etc. to be a success. This reminds me of the threats many people made to move from the USA to Canada if Bush Jr. were re-elected...if you know people who said that, I'm guessing they stayed put (the people I know certainly did).
yeah. if you do require a large corpus, that seems like an advantage to me... as if you do that, and maybe make more of the processing done server-side, it'll be harder to just reverse engineer your plugins, and even if people do, then they still have to come up with a good corpus, which presumably you already have.
Thanks for the links.

For me the problem with MVC thinking is that I am used to my own system of MVC that I programmed for my personal PHP toolkit.

My version of MVC allows me to just write something like:

<form>
<?php databaseInput("tablename",$id,"keyName"); ?>
<?php databaseInput("tablename",$id,"keyName2"); ?>
</form>

It is very simple and works great with key value databases. My code system is designed to automatically detect the type of the key and output the appropriate control, even building dynamic AJAX controls such as input fields with attached google maps if the key is an address key.

After getting used to my own incredible easy to use MVC style system Ruby feels complex. I can use the generate script to build scaffolds, but then the generate script does so much that I can't really grasp all the connections.

For that matter I don't even see if it is possible to create a model with key value storage. The Rails generate scripts don't seem to have an option for that.

Perhaps you are correct that Rails might not be the thing for me, but I do really like Heroku, and want to be able to use it to enjoy the ease of scaling a web app by just dragging the slider upward. That means I need to build in Rails.

In addition, I feel that it will probably be better in the long-term to understand Rails thoroughly.

Edit:

I just wanted to add that I have read _why's poignant guide and found it very useful, if a little less formal than I am normally used to. ;) I think that I have enough of a grasp on Ruby itself, and I have already developed a few standalone scripts. What I don't understand is all the things going on behind the scenes in the Rails code, and that is my stumbling block.
It's interesting how many of these that aren't outright misfeatures are recognisable as half-implemented Common Lisp features if you squint at them sideways: Python's comparison chains, bc's quit/halt difference, VB7's Loop, JS's multiple-value return, SFINAE in C++... I'm sure there are others.
I already explained exactly why the algorithm has no real world application. The burden of proof is now on you. And until you do, I maintain the challenge was completely invalid.
Hmm, that does sound promising. I like the idea of Rails "from scratch". For me using script/generate is a great idea, but generating a scaffold doesn't teach me about what is going on behind the scenes. If Peepcode's tutorials show how to write the model, view, and controller from scratch then they will probably help me a lot.
You may find some comfort in things like form_assistant[1] or formtastic[2].

In Rails 2, you can't have a model backed by a key-value store. Rails 3, which has a release candidate out, should make that doable.

Sinatra (with and without Padrino) also make it easy to use a k-v store. I think there's a good Redis library out there. I've used rufus-tokyo, which is a ruby library for Tokyo Cabinet, and it's solid. Though now there's Kyoto Cabinet. I'm not sure what the libraries are like for it.

1: http://github.com/rpheath/form_assistant

2: http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic
I totally recommend this book : http://railstutorial.org/book
There's also a free html version and it comes with rails2 and rails3 versions.
I don't know; he's been warning people about shit like this for years and no one seems to care. If anything I'd bet he's feeling a little like Sarah Conner before Skynet goes sentient.
> Also, I can't read Chinese, but that says more about me than Chinese. It doesn't make it a "write-only language".

On the other hand, the fact that the Chinese have put their language through several reforms because of systematic problems with literacy and reading comprehension does show that, on a continuum between "readable" and "write-only", the Chinese language leans more toward the latter.
How? If the people couldn't make it to your IP anyway...
Gates is pretty good looking. Maybe not compared to TV stars, but he is compared to, say, Microsoft CEOs.
Scott Aaronson explains his $200k bet (8 Signs A Claimed P≠NP Proof Is Wrong)
Demystifying events in node.js
This obsession with recommendation systems! the thing is when you like a lot of things that algorithms can't tell (or better: there is not enough information to train those algorithms).
Online welding course | TIG Weld Defects and Causes.
Okay, it sounds like I'll have to try Rails 3. I'll check out the other github links that you gave me as well.
Looks like he did: http://twitter.com/AndrewWarner/status/21084757625
I did not say that there shouldn't be multiple answers to the question, however if you're starting a new project today, you don't have a choice between A and B, you have a choice between something here today and something else promised Real Soon Now. Naturally, the one promised Real Soon Now is extremely shiny, it supports every browser, and it hasn't made any compromises to do so.

This kind of situation forces people to sit on their hands, which means that development stalls for a while. I won't go any further because I'm fighting the urge to compare this to things that have happened in other marketplaces, and I greatly respect John's code and design taste.
Just guessing that your #4, BEGIN and END, are for using Ruby like awk (that is, from the shell—you should never see them in a script.) Try this (and cringe):

cat /usr/share/dict/words | ruby -lne 'puts $_.reverse; n = (n || 0) + 1; END{ puts "total: #{ n }" }'
I recommend to enjoy your daughter. May be instead of focusing in your own mental performance you need to take advantage of the mental performance around you, your family, your teams, your friends.

Things change with children, but the human brain was trained for that situation for long time.
It's hard to say that for sure. Jobs seems to be a pretty driven guy.