skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah. In my experience, Rubyists are more likely to be solo developers, self starters and/or be keen to improve things/reinvent wheels rather than necessarily work on "official" projects with all the bureaucracy that's involved. I wouldn't dare to speak for all Rubyists but, in general, I'd say the typical Rubyist is very anti-bureaucracy (more so than developers of any other group I've experienced).

There have been tons of Ruby documentation sites over the years and if all that effort had been put into developing a good system for the "official" documentation, it'd probably the best of any language ;-) But Ruby is very "long tail" when it comes to deciding what sites to read, mailing lists to use, etc. There are few de facto points of congregation.

That said, I'm not criticizing, because I'm the same (I want to run my own gigs, not fit in with someone else's system) and that's what I like about Ruby and Rubyists. You don't get a single "official" book of documentation about math, architecture, or English language syntax. Instead, everyone releases their own attempts and a wide variety of viewpoints and coverage is available.

In this way, Ruby feels more like a discipline or "way" of doing things than a single, specified entity that can be centrally documented well.

(I'm talking from a Ruby POV rather than a Rails one, since you brought up Ruby specifically in comparison to Python. Rails has a much more bureaucratic and centralized community than Ruby does. Rails' official documentation is also miles ahead of Ruby's.)
Hmm, interesting. Click through to Hunch's VP Biz Dev blog. http://shaival.posterous.com/cannabilize-business-developmen...

For example, Hunch.com is built entirely on our own API. A team of clever and ambitious people could access the Hunch API and attempt to re-create Hunch.com from scratch. The functionality and the value is all there.

Are there other examples of web services built completely on their own API?
> when I think of documentation I think of a central place to find it

While your other points still stand, there is quite a bit of central documentation, and it's mentioned in the article. The fact that there's also a ton of extra documentation that other people have done in other places is just icing on the cake.
A couple things.

A long time ago, the author of FL Studio made a document explaining the file format. That was version 4 or something. Since then much has changed.

However Tobiass Doerrfel, the author of LMMS, did a bunch of reverse-engineering of the fl studio file format.

Then I did some emailing with Didier and a guy named Frederic, who did the Fruity Wrapper (needed to get plugin names).

The results are open source:
http://github.com/superjoe30/PyDaw
Ask HN: safe program for showing saved passwords
Hello..
I need a safe program to view all the saved passwords on my laptop... including passwords saved on internet explorer, firefox, and bla bla bla..

Waiting for your answer, and thanks in advance,
Ahmed.
Wrong. Read the OPT Policy Guidance, section 7.2.1:

All OPT employment, including post-completion OPT, must be in a job that is related to the student’s degree program.
For students who are not on a 17-month extension, this employment may include:
(...)
Self-employed business owner. A student on OPT may start a business and be self-employed. The student must be able to prove that he or she has the proper business licenses and is actively engaged in a business related to the student’s degree program.
It's about expression and communication. Improving your vocabulary doesn't give you insight into the physical world, but it does improve your ability to communicate your experience to others. Music is useful for communicating emotions and stories.
How is that for saturation? Amazing story. I heard that Coca Cola was pretty much the first western brand in to the most unlikely places.
This is the #2 result on the serp for [how to cook a great tasting steak]:

http://www.wikihow.com/Cook-a-Great-Tasting-Steak

"Take your fork and jab the steak with it. Don't jab it so hard that it gets stuck in the steak, though. Keep tendorizing the steak until it is like pudding. Make sure it stays together, though."

Sorry I managed to offend you, but you work in a field that tends towards grey areas, so maybe invest in some thicker skin. (Hey, look at my field!)
That is what I wanted to emphasize. There is a difference between drama and music. Drama or movies have a plot and a story. The author passes to us the thoughts and experiences that she has in her head, that is what makes it an intellectual endeavour.

Affecting mechanism for music is different. In this case, composer is like a cook: she prepares the music by the emperically established rules (certain frequency fractions, tempo to match the heart pace for a specific mood).
When I looked at the home page, I thought the "how does this work" links were to different pages or popups, each for an explanation of just that specific piece.

Instead of "how does this work?" repeated 3 times, maybe you could put a single link that says "see how it all works".
Even the central documentation is split between two subdomains with edge cases for each. You have the api reference and then you have the guides (which is much better docs but still lacking in navigation and extensiveness.) It isn't necessarily a bad thing the way rails docs are, personally I just think the ruby community moves way too fast and in that the extensive docs tend to suffer.
Yup, absolutely his idea inspired me. It was the single creative element that made me realise that I can make invoicing a bit better than the other folks.

Besides a history and autocompletion... I can't think of anything else to improve this app.
Go for 2, then 1. Have a polite, but firm discussion with the CEO. Tell him that you can't wait anymore for what it's rightfully yours. Give them 30 days to get your money or you'll be forced to go through the state. If they don't pay up, file a claim (you gave them ample time and a fair warning). And remember, they are the assholes, not you for wanting your money.
I'm a South African.
Very neat. Although the science seems not quite right, the whole things is independent of nitrogen (you use N2O, after all) and cells (cocoa nibs seemed to work particularly well, perhaps in part because N2O is also very soluble in fats).

The comments section gets more sciency after more nerds than molecular biologists descend upon it.

In any event, to the cream whipper/booze.
I'm not sure why the Japanese don't adopt romaji more - Romanized Japanese.

Japanese already has two syllabaries - katakana and hiragana - so if anything replaced kanji it would be these. However Kanji makes reading Japanese a lot easier (if you know the characters), as it helps with:

* parsing sentences - kanji make word barriers clear

* disambiguating similar sounding words - Japanese have many words that sound the same, but mean different things - these words have different kanji

* reducing text size - one kanji character corresponds roughly to two katakana or hiragana characters (for example, this means Japanese tweeters can say much more in the same number of characters http://twitter.com/kharaguchi/status/22214712818)

So for Japanese, using kanji appropriately is more efficient for the reader than the syllabaries, and certainly romanized Japanese.
Yup, it won't change. I just need to figure out how to tell folks that they can edit in place.
Once I've got the PDF generation done I'll work on this next.
Good point, and rubbish-n-roadmaps is very apt (and google says it's original.)

But I did cover myself on this: if you do solve an unsolved problem, all is forgiven. Getting it out into a closed beta can tell you about a large miss earlier, with less investment, and less reputation risk. Of course, it would always be better to do everything right in the first place, if you can afford it. Rubbish-n-roadmaps is the worst approach except for the others.
If the profit is high enough prosperity might be accurate in that context.
If by handwriting, you mean "painting" then yes, but only because there are so few letters and they are relatively simple.

I am Danish, and we have three letters that are not from the Roman alphabet. I constantly have to think about how to paint æ.
I think you're getting downvoted because these sources you're citing are pretty silly. Hemp is produced throughout the industrialized western world. Why hasn't it revolutionized Europe, where non-psychoactive hemp crops are legal?
I had trouble getting through much of it, even though I tend to read technical books for fun. Lisp in Small Pieces or the Lambda Papers are more educational and easier to read. They will change the way you think about programming far more than the Dragon book.

The dragon book is okay as a comprehensive reference, but is bad at communicating the central idea of anything. You might want to skim it, looking for topics that interest you, then seek out several sources for those topics and see which clicks for you. If you start reading the Dragon book from page 1, you risk getting bogged down.
Core values are absolutely pointless for sure, but they are telling how the people at the top think about the world. And because of that alone they are very useful to investors and consumers. IMO
Thank you. This is exactly the kind of thoughtful, quality post that contributes positively to the discussion.
The interesting thing about compiler writing is the drastic reduction in complexity that's happened. There are essentially off-the-shelf tools that can be used to handle everything before semantic analysis and everything after conversion to a reasonably high-level IR. This has dramatically reduced the cost of language experimentation; it's now feasible to bang out a new language in a day or two (assuming you're familiar with yacc, LLVM, etc.), and generate efficient code on a number of target architectures.

These tools mean that "learning to write a compiler" can take several different paths; on the one hand, we could learn about how each of these tools work (e.g. "how to write a parser generator", "machine-independent optimizations", "code generation", etc.). This is the approach taken by the dragon book. This gives the background theory and mathematics behind compiler-writing (and will likely be something people need to know if they want to write for instance an LLVM optimization pass). The problem with this is that, because of the trends mentioned above, it has little to do with the day-to-day of actual compiler writing and language experimentation (this is only somewhat true, since most "real" compilers will have a custom-written frontend and at least a little bit of knowledge about the target architecture).

The other approach is to use pre-written tools, to focus on language design decisions and applications. To be honest I'm not familiar with any resources that do this particularly well. This is the approach taken by most of the "we're going to build a compiler!" websites mentioned on the Stack Overflow post. This approach is probably more useful for most of the people who want to "write a compiler", but it leaves people with a very shallow knowledge of what's happening beneath the surface of the APIs they use.

I don't mean to imply that one of these approaches is "better" than the other (and indeed, the second requires a little bit of the first - it's difficult to debug an automatically generated parser without knowing at least a little bit of the theory), but it's important to know which approach you're aiming for, and trying to optimize based on that goal. Going to the Dragon book as a "how-to" is a disaster waiting to happen.
The author more or less proves the exact opposite. The API docs are what matters most and Ruby's suck. Looking at this, http://railsapi.com/doc/rails-v3.0.0RC/ for a moment which the author cites as a good resource. If I were a beginner with the language how would I know what the heck any of this stuff is. The index is organized by class name instead of purpose. Compare that to Python's documentation, http://docs.python.org/library/index.html which is organized by purpose, ie: all the string stuff is under a section titled "String Services". Python is a gold standard for documentation is this regard as I've seen few if any other languages arrange their docs in such a intuitive way.

The mere existence of documentation doesn't make it great.
Ask HN: I am considering leaving my start-up. Should I exercise my options?
I am an employee at a privately-controlled start-up. The company has a bright future, but I have been thinking of leaving to pursue other opportunities. I was an early hire, and have been granted options which, after a few rounds of investment and dilution, amount to a few percentage points of the company. The majority of my options have vested, and I could exercise them for an amount in the low five figures.

The company is aiming for an acquisition of at least $100M (and will possibly get much more), and I am optimistic about its chances of achieving that goal in a few years. Thus I feel that my options are potentially very valuable.

Questions:

1) Is it sensible to exercise my options now in this scenario?

2) It is possible that the company will take another round of investment prior to any acquisition. Should I fear that when I'm not around anymore, and the company has no incentive to treat me well, that my ownership will be substantially diluted? Can my future dilution be estimated or protected against?

3) Are there other ways to proceed? For example, should I attempt to get bought out now, somehow?

4) What other questions should I be asking?

If I decide to go down this road, I will seek professional advice, but I thought I would begin by consulting the smart people here on Hacker News.
I'm intrigued by the trichotomy of the Korean language's complete deprecation of its use of Chinese characters for a phonetic alphabet, Chinese continuing not to use phonetics outside loan words, and then Japanese having evolved to use both. I imagine it's complicated.
Microsoft appeals to Supreme Court over i4i patent
Python docs aggravate me in numerous ways. One main complaint is that there is a single page[1] for all of the standards types (boolean, string, list, dictionary, numbers, etc.) that contains way too much disjointed information. It could really stand to be split into a few different pages, as it's annoying that Googling "python string", "python list", python int", etc. all lead to top of the same exact page.

[1] http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html
If you're interested in language design also may I suggest,
http://www.amazon.com/Language-Implementation-Patterns-Domai... and http://www.amazon.com/Language-Implementation-Patterns-Domai...

There are also some programmers around who are going through the process of designing and implementing their own languages, you can watch their progress and ideas. Here is 1(2?) examples, Magpie and Finch by munificent. http://bitbucket.org/munificent

It seems Magpie has started out using a C# compiler/interpreter but now uses Java?
I just learned of her (were've I been, I guess). Anyway, for me at least it's Chopin played in a whole new way, and a lovely way at that.
Are You Plunking Down Real Money For Virtual Fun?
"I'm not sure that any company I've worked for, of any size, really got more value from its middle managers than from the senior technical people it keeps trying to turn into middle managers."

I think tech companies see this as the lesser of two evils. Would you rather lose a good programmer and gain a decent manager, or would you rather keep the good programmer and gain a PHB who will drag down the performance of that good programmer and their entire team?
Ask HN: How to generate Product Hyptheses?
Steve Blank describes a Customer Discovery methodology that starts with a Product Hypothesis and then tests and refines it. But what if you aren't at step #1 yet? What are some good ways to generate hypotheses?

Thanks!
Again, this is pretty silly. If an agent led me into a bait-and-switch situation (ie, something advertised as 1400 rsf turns out to be a closet), I'd simply never use them again.

In practice, though, total moot point: the last time I looked for office space (earlier this year), the first agent I called sent me scaled floor plans for over 100 places. There were rsf numbers to go with them, but the dimensions of every office were right there.
Doesn't alcohol satisfy your definition of usefulness with the same success?
"There Comes A Time When You Have To Stand Up And Shout: This Is Me Damn It"
I think people are really just upset because landlords don't want to call "rent increases" "rent increases", and that this is mostly a nerd-brain problem. That's not an insult; I'm the proud owner of one of those weird nerd-brains. Query!
I found the some of the terms confusing... "My Recommendations" I thought would mean movies that were recommended FOR me not BY me. Also Movies To Watch is ambiguous and same for Movies filtered. The tooltip popups when you mouseover help but the button names should be self-explanatory. Also, as far as the UI/UX is concerned, maybe color-coding them would make the buttons more 'intuitive'.

Also, while I understand the primary aim of your site is to let users manage their lists/recommendations, this feels a lot like 'expert-mode'. I myself would love an 'easy-mode' wehre I could get my automatic recommendations from other sources (implementing your own may recommender is probably not worth it at this point and would suffer from a cold-start) but ALSO be able to manage them at the same time (recommend to friends/filter/etc).

Also, maybe this may work well with a Facebook/Twitter integration (like tweet that I just watched such and such movie).

Also, as much as game mechanics have been played out, I think it would definitely be useful to have a system for ranking/rating people who make recommendations. You could create experts (if you want to rip off 4sq et. al, you could make people experts by awarding badges for things like watching 10 horror movies or making 100 successful recommendations that people watched).

All in all, I think it has the beginnings of a good product.
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/FAQ#General_KVM_information
The API documentation is probably not where you want to look in this instance. It's more intended for looking up the behaviour or options for a specific method call.

http://guides.rubyonrails.org is the equivalent of the Python documentation you point to for Rails.

If you want Ruby-specific documentation, there are versions of the Pickaxe book online (http://phrogz.net/programmingruby/). Admittedly old versions, but well organised by-topic nonetheless.
Good luck changing public opinion. I think that route is pretty hopeless, the abolitions of the death penalty in Europe were not preceded by big changes of public opinion. That expert panel seems like a good idea, though.

There is no evidence which would make for good, rational reasons to keep the death penalty around, what keeps the public convinced is a strong moral conviction that certain crimes are so heinous that they should be punished with death. That seems almost like a human universal to me. If you want to abolish the death penalty you can’t use public opinion, you have to circumvent it.

The quoted lawyer from the human rights organization who presumably has some experience fighting the death penalty seems to be very aware of that (as are her US counterparts, by the way): The “death penalty should not be enforced by a majority opinion.”
From the HN title I thought "fantastic, that's a brilliant idea", but I honestly can't imagine anyone I know using what you're building.

If I wanted a remote session player to do some overdubs on a track, I'd FTP over a rough mixdown or use Indaba. Dependency management is a really difficult task given the amount of proprietary software and hardware in use - the people likely to pay you money for this sort of thing are unlikely to be using many free plugins. If you've got a regular collaborator then you can sort out a common toolset, but that rather nullifies the point of dependency management. Ableton Share works acceptably well, but only because it's deeply integrated with Live. Image-Line dropped collaboration because they considered it more hassle than it's worth. If you reckon that it'll be less hassle for you or that you can extract more value then I wish you the best of luck, but I certainly don't see how.

The project I'm working on at the moment runs to 1.6GB and that's just a 4 minute pop song. A full day of recording a band can easily produce 30GB worth of data and that's at low bit rates. The good DAWs manage alternative takes rather well, certainly well enough that I'd be loath to tie up my broadband for two days after every session for version control.

To take you on your own mission statement, I have absolutely no idea how your product would make me better at making music, help me waste less time with my computer or make it more convenient to collaborate. Maybe I'm totally atypical, but I don't think so.

You want my opinion? Discard everything but collaboration and focus on Reason. It's a closed box, so no dependency problems. It doesn't do audio recording, so no massive files. It can natively bundle project samples into its file format, keeping things simple for the user. I don't like Reason, I don't like people who do like Reason, but it appears to be the only thing that'll do what you're looking to do without a long list of caveats and ballaches.
So.. there has to be a way to benefit from this. Where is the startup startup dedicated to providing 1099s? The major problem is that all new versions of quickbooks, if Quicken has any sense, will have an online link to a proprietary database with all this information.

A feature isn't a startup, but...
Compare that with this: http://ruby-doc.org/ruby-1.9/index.html

I find that page (docs.python.org) easy to navigate using the side menu and the structure of the document the fact that it is so big doesn't quite bother me, I already know most of what I need on that page and wouldn't be upset navigating it if I had to.
$500 for something non-essential? Startups are launched with a budget of $5000, and you think spending 10% on a trademark should be possible?
Quick review: Amazon Kindle 3 e-reader
Do you want to build a compiler or design a programming language? The Dragon Book is pretty heavy on implementation details if you just want a taste without building one.

If you're just getting started in mechanical program transformation, I strongly recommend using something like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and its meta-circular evaluator to get the basics without the grunge of parsing and generation.
This is the first app I see that would actually be useful to me.
FreeBSD has this (mount_portalfs, whose man page references the paper you link to), though I've only messed with it sparingly out of curiosity. Not sure how stable it is, but I thought it was really cool when I stumbled upon it one day.
What would you to demo here
When you think about it though, Plenty of 28-30 year olds take on $100K in debt and forfeit as much or more in lost wages to get an MBA. Through that lens YC and an angel round seems like a great deal relative to the network and opportunity you get.
jxlib.org breaks my back button. Not good.

(Chrome 5.0.375.127 on Mac 10.6.4 (10F569))
What are some of those intangible aspects?
Any examples?