skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should I or Why should I bother continuing with rails
Over the past 3 weeks I've been trying to learn rails. I've been programming in PHP for about 4 years, and decided to expand my horizons and use the language everybody is talking about.

The things I like about RoR is that due to the structure and expectations of rails, I suspect it is much quicker to get new people up to speed on a project because theoretically, the structure is already laid out.

I also in theory like the way it handles migrations, though I haven't actually used it in a production environment yet.

The things I'm HATING is that every little bit of code I write doesn't work!

I'm moving like molasses here, and have very little to show for nearly 3 weeks of messing with this language.

As you can see from my stackoverflow account http://stackoverflow.com/users/48067/pedalpete, if you care to look, I'm spending hours doing minor little things like making a link to delete a database entry and it just doesn't work!

Has anybody been in the same situation? I'm following guides, watching the railscasts, etc. etc. but I'm absolutely not getting it and extremely frustrated.

Maybe I just don't remember being this frustrated with PHP, but I seem to recall with PHP i was getting into some much deeper stuff when I was still learning and I don't remember it being nearly this painful.

Has anybody else had the same experience?

Is there some magic bullet that is all of a sudden going to make this better?

I can't believe that all the hype around RoR is really applicable to everybody but me, so there must be something I'm missing.
Nice topic. Just talked to my co-founder about that. We are developing both web service and mobile app, so there are to different views on the problem.
We didn't really thought about the whole problem of calling the user "you" or "me" yet, so here is where we are today:

In the web service we use "you" everywhere. So far so good.
But for the mobile app (we just finished the first prototype - without beutification and such) we used "my" in almost every case... and we investigated why: For us it feels convenient that if I hold my cell in my hand, it is MY phone.. and such is the mobile apps that I use. They are MY apps, and as MY apps, they are a part of me (I take them with me everywhere I go - just like my keys). In the keys-example you would also say "my keys" and not just "the keys".. and you say "my phone" and not "the phone". I think it is just intuitive that it is "my app" and (inside of the app) "my posts" and "my messages"...
Cool. Good luck to you guys! One suggestion is that you guys should look into releasing a Safari version as well. Since it's Webkit-based, it takes almost zero effort going from Chrome to Safari. I recently wrote a Firefox extension and was able to port it to Chrome and Safari quite easily, since it's pretty much all Javascript.
It's a matter of financial opinion I think - putting a percentage of your income, whatever that's a little or a lot, into your long-term savings should be a mandatory thing for most people - like food and shelter. It's money you never touch - it need not be a lot, but it's not something you should simply stop doing just because you're cutting corners - it's more important in the long run than people often give it credit for.
Also now that it's packed up so tidily, we'll probably get some better tools for blocking/removing all of those tricks. Think of it like an Acid3 test for browser security.
Ask HN: Review my MVP web app Hello Hype
I recently launched my new web app Hello Hype. With Hello Hype you can recommend books, music and movies and follow your friends recommendation. There are no fancy recommendation algorithms, it is just organic friend based discovery.

I've been using it with a bunch of my friends and has been a great success with them so far. The app is currently at minimum viable product stage. There are heaps of things I would like to do to it, but I thought I'd share it with Hacker News and get some more thoughts.

I'll also get to see how my server handles the extra load... hopefully it doesn't die.

Check it out at: http://hellohype.com/
I'm guessing the top 10 super angels would include Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Ron Conway and the PayPal guys Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Keith Rabois

Who else?
I think the suggestion is that if you think of the design in terms of a dialog rather than a set of conventions, there are a lot of advantages. "My" vs "Your" is just an example.
Live From Facebook’s Gaming Event
On *nix systems including Mac you could do what I do: a cron job that runs every week to delete everything in the ~/.macromedia/Flash directory. Windows users can achieve the same thing with an event schedule, the directory is probably in something like %USER%\App Data\.
I feel sick after reading this.

Would a browser extension be able to clear everything?
Yes, you've hit the nail on the head. Especially in the case of dual-income homes, there is a discrete hurdle you must overcome that makes the marginal tax rate misleading. In this context, you have to make $40-50k just to break even. Ouch. And working hard enough to justify a $100k salary to bring home $30k? That's a disincentive, in my book.

Even further, consider the impact that this tax structure has on people deciding to take on debt for higher education (ok, so that's frequently a bad idea anyway, but there have been other discussions about that). A smart single person might well decide to take on $100k (or perhaps even $250k as the law professor seemed to imply) to raise their lifetime earning potential. But then two smart single people get married. They would like to have kids, but what was originally a reasonable investment is now quite a handicap because of the fixed cost + marginal tax cost related to the second income.
That's a good perspective. It's my fervent hope someone names their tool everenema.
> People who have never been poor, have absolutely no understanding, cannot fathom, why people are poor and why they stay poor.

It's amazing to me how many of the comments on this thread remind me of how I would describe depression.

I'm not poor and never have been. But I have felt hopeless despair that I don't think people can understand unless they've experienced it. It is an emotional response that is radically disproportionate to the actual circumstances that triggered it.

I won't argue that depression has any of the long-term effects you describe though.
Because he attributes his success to his own singular superhumanity. Nobody makes their way in this world completely on their own.
What version of Rails and Ruby are you running? A lot of tutorials, guides, fixes, etc are based on older versions (not 3.0 and 1.9.2). I've been trying to do some stuff with Rails (granted without 4 years of PHP) and it's been slow going as well. Everything is just a little less documented and a bunch plugins, bug fixes, etc just aren't up-to-date yet.
Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out

That's pretty "nice". It might be possible to "improve" it by storing metadata inside the PNG, and then reading it by parsing it out of the raw data after the call to getDataURL().

I haven't tried this though, and it's possible browsers drop the metadata when they recreate the image. The spec says A future version of this specification will probably define other parameters to be passed to toDataURL() to allow authors to more carefully control compression settings, image metadata, etc.
Thank you. Safari is the most requested one among the ones we're currently not supporting.
VideoEgg acquires SixApart
Yes, but that's the thing — you can't get sued for "obvious names." Even if he's completely making this up, if one of the obvious suspects sues him, he can just say, "Oh, no, I didn't mean him."

The comment I was replying to said, "his claims are laid out clearly without any weasel words. Either this is happening or it isn't." I disagree with that — Arrington is not laying it all out here as a black-and-white truth. He's consciously omitting facts in a way that happens to shield him from repercussions if this is false. As a traditional dead-tree newspaper guy, I'm very familiar with the ways reporters fudge their claims to avoid being responsible if it turns out to be crap. That's what this sounds like to me.
check out http://www.convertro.com/visitor-tracking.html .
looks like the analytics guys are already using similar sketchy methods.
Posts that consist of nothing more than subjective statements tend to get a lot of downvotes, not just the ones about Arrington.
When you write a standardised test, you're working for the test company. When you translate a novel, you're working for the publisher. When you write "Hey Jude", you're working for yourself. You created the song by yourself, and it's your song, and the record company is providing a service for you. The power dynamic is backwards. They should be serving the artist, not the other way round. If record companies go around hiring artists to make music for them, we should fear for the quality of music.
iirc nothing was, but it made available some features that would be used in 3.0 and 2.7 is essentially a back-port of stuff the 3.0 people found useful. I believe the idea is that in a major version number, everything is back compatible.
Teachers Inspire Greatness
Why Rapleaf Does Not Use Unique Identifiers in Cookies
The technical details were linked to a couple months ago but that post got no traction - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542586
It is OK to be a single founder
Depression is often a result of feeling trapped by life's circumstances. Being poor can often feel like one is trapped. It's not a stretch to say that many poor people are also highly depressed people.

I agree though, it's like describing what color is to a person blind from birth. In some cases (as are represented on this thread) it's like describing it to a blind person who thinks they already know how all the senses work, and a person can just get over the "seeing thing" if they just sniff hard enough.
There's a comment on Techcrunch that I found particularly interesting: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/so-a-blogger-walks-into-a-b...

"This group does not have a monopoly position in early stage deals. So getting together to discuss how they as individuals/small firms can better compete against much larger VCs and incubators is not price fixing or collusion."

It continues on to expand nicely on the point.
I wrote up a technique for storing values in the cache a little while back, no PNG or canvas necessary.

http://joshduck.com/blog/2010/01/29/abusing-the-cache-tracki...
Or even drop the pronouns: "Profile" works just fine.
You were critiquing the security cost of hosting on your own server verses that other server. It was pointed out to you that the admins of that other server would likely learn of (and react to) a breach on their end at a lower latency than you would for your server.

You implied that the security cost for hosting on your server was actually lower, because you weren't as much of a target. My reply was an attempt to point out to you at a technical level why that was a specious argument; your servers are likely being scanned by the same botnets that are scanning mine with automated exploit attempts against old and vulnerable software, and common errors in securing a server.

It's going to be far easier and cheaper for them to take a shotgun-scanner approach against a large class of average systems than to apply manual, concerted effort against a small set of high-value targets like CDN nodes.

The cost to the attacker to attack your system with automated tools is near nil. They'll attack, and if they get in, that's gravy. Using "we're not a target" as a security model makes about as much sense as putting an unpatched Windows box in your home router's DMZ.
Of course I'm just a 19-year-old kid. Someone who's worked on a large software project should tell me if they like my theory or not.

Your post would be just fine if you left that line off. It was well-stated, agrees reasonably with my experience, and provides concrete points that can easily be addressed by anyone who disagrees.

My next suggestion would be to try it yourself: join a large software project.
And who also mis-spells "Kayne" while attributing him. :-P
Thinking about it a bit more, it's actually worse than that.

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/imageinfo/ shows how to extract EXIF data from JPEG files, so using EXIF + the cache hack is possible for sure.

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/id3/ shows how to extract ID3 metadata from MP3s in Javascript, so you could do a similar thing like that.

Can anyone think why just using the cache hack + a JSON data file wouldn't work?
As a former competition regulator, I have to say this blog post is a beauty, in content. Making such a serious accusation, albeit one that is very difficult to prove, especially when the accusation is towards your friends is a gutsy/crazy move. This pretty supports PG's prediction that the power is shifting towards founders and startups when raising capital from VCs. Hopefully, this diffuses any further action on the part of the investors. It may be time for a career change...
Free Car Insurance
Clickable: http://hellohype.com/
Gaming for a cure: Computer gamers tackle protein folding
Congratulations to PG & company. When I first met Paul years ago, he was musing about spam filters and the finer points of a well-designed lisp. Now he apparently has the top 10 angels in Silicon Valley running scared of him.
Sure, but there's no basis for knowing whether he had more or less help than any other human gets from just being a member of society.
You can try this site for some useful information about salaries:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-developer-salary-...
For Froyo only.
Garmin acquires MetriGear
I have a friend who worked at a fairly large, private company. He was layed off but given more than three months notice. It sounded like the best possible way to be layed off.
I am running 3.0 and 1.9.2. I realize that I am ahead of the curve on much of the tutorials, but should that really be causing this kind of complete breakdown.

There is backward compatibility, and I am learning the rails3 way as much as possible, looking to the rails3 documentation rather than the older stuff.
Wow...
I'm sitting here, mentally mapreducing the HN RSS, barely awake, and then this news item pops up, I load the page and I'm like: "...ee... WHAT?". Then I got flooded by the wave of excitement and pleasant emotions.
Awesome idea! :).
Though I'm too excited to go to sleep now :(.
...it is 100% necessary to send an email...

I take it a step further. I always send a hand written Thank You Note by snail mail. Always. I have never failed to do this.

Why? Because if someone has spent an hour of their time (I don't care if it's on company time) to potentially change my life, the least I could do is take 5 minutes to share a sincere Thank You. I always take the time to hand write it, I always make it personal, and I am always sincere. (If you're going to be even 1% phony, don't bother, people will see right through it).

There are some nice byproducts. It demonstrates professional courtesy. It demonstrates good communication skills. It demonstrates good customer service. It gets you remembered. Every time.

But I don't do it for these reasons. I do it because it's the right thing to do. It is never "annoying" or a "detriment". Almost everyone I have ever sent a hand written note has told me that they really appreciated opening it and reading it.

Sometimes I even take it a step further. Several times, I have asked public speakers what their favorite restaurant is, and then sent a gift card in the Thank You note. I really want them to understand what a difference their contribution has made in at least one attendee's life. The gift card is a nice idea because I know they will use it and enjoy it, and maybe even think of me that night. I would never send a gift to an interviewer - that's not the same thing.
This technique doesn't address the right problem, which might be a misunderstanding in statistics.

That is, no matter how reliable the other source (Google etc) is, it is still below 100%. If you host the JS on your own, your site becomes slow only if your server hangs. However, if you host the JS somewhere else, your site becomes slow whenever your server or the other server hangs. The probability of the latter is always greater than the former, i.e. you don't really gain anything.

So this trick slightly improves the good cases, but increases the likelihood of the bad cases. That kind of trade-off isn't desirable. Usually, people design trade-offs for the exact opposite: scarifying the speed of the normal case (which should be more than fast enough anyway) in order to decrease the probability of the worst case.

(BTW, this is true for almost all long-living projects. The opposite strategy makes only sense in "car racing" like situations where you either win fast, or lose everything. However, hardly any website is designed to live only a few weeks or so.)
Web-site contract terms may need to be more prominent - court ruling
It is upvoted because:

1) the subject is politics. People have such strong feelings about it that HN policies about downvoting and name calling aren't followed as usual.

Compare to discussions about, say, web design issues, programming languages or copyright law. While articles on these topics tend to lead to heated debates, most people still follow the policies.

2) the majority of HN readers have liberal-leaning beliefs, and being judgemental about certain topics is frowned upon.
The privacy tools built into all current browsers can clear all but one of evercookie's storage methods. Specifically, cookies, cache, history & HTML5 storage should all be included in your browser's "clear private data" feature. Flash cookies are a bit more of a problem: they're in a plugin, so the browser doesn't know about them. A tool like CCleaner would work, or you could clear them manually with Adobe's Flash control panel: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...
Verizon: Our Apps Aren’t About Taking Over The Phone — It’s About “Choice”
Dave Thomas founded Wendy's when he was ~37 years old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Thomas_(American_businessm...

Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart when he was ~44: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton#The_first_Wal-Mart

Henry Ford founded Ford when he was ~40: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_ford#Ford_Motor_Company
Jacket is incredibly impressive. However, since I started using it I’ve noticed that I’ve spent more time benchmarking than I have doing math! Furthermore, I suspect it’s prohibitively expensive for most. However, GPUmat (http://www.gp-you.org) is a notable free alternative.
tjic said they were born with $0 net worth, which is generally true of all newborns, no?

Your assumption that they bootstrapped themselves up seems misplaced. I would very strongly guess that they had a comfortable middle-class existence. Only such a person thinks it's just a matter of work hard versus laziness.
Very nice, simplistic, usable design, and within a few minutes of just messing around, I was already able to find something cool to check out - http://hellohype.com/nicholasgross/391/

Good work so far and have fun building it out!
I have had so many debates surrounding this over the years its not funny. I feel elated to have a definitive reason to go with 'your' over 'my' and an article I can send people when they challenge me. Win.
I do B2C stuff like many here. If you are planning on using SEO or AdWords as channels, there will be long stretches where your ability to improve is rate-limited by Google loving, and you can literally acquire that while deceased. (Don't die! But understand that whatever you are spinning your wheels on isn't improving rankings if it isn't winning links.)
This is extremely classy and I endorse this. In the end, I gave up writing snail mail because it just took me too long to get around to it. I'm much better at writing email. But at any rate, a brief, courteous 'Thank-You' can virtually never hurt. Even if it can't help, either, it's not a bad way to force yourself to ruminate a bit on the interview.
No, it isn't 'non-idiomatic', it's just wrong. You could perhaps find some obsolete or highly technical usage but 'can take the place of metric' is simply inaccurate, in the context and usage. Take a look at

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meter

which while not exhaustive is quite indicative of standard usage.
That MAX thing is not precise at all. Around 600 miles away from my real location.
Agreed, I'm really looking forward to his response
I like the clean look, though the yellow-green links are hard on my eyes. I'll definitely be using this in the near future. Thank you!
If Arrington lists a bunch of people were at a gathering, and they were, then there is nothing to sue over there.

If he says "they were talking about pricing deals and how to club together to avoid convertable notes", and they were, then there is nothing to sue over even if he has named the people there.

I don't actually get your comment. If we DON'T believe this group were talking about what Arrington is claiming then there is a bigger issue here regardless of whether people were named or not.
Yes, you need to work 16 hours and, at the same time, make sure your kids go to the library instead of watching TV. He sounds like an expert.
As long as their probability is greater than 0%, they inevitably do more harm than good.
Will the Internet of Things Be Open or Closed?
So, uh, they were compiling off a floppy disk?
I'm disinclined to believe this study purely on the basis that I've yet to meet an heavily overweight person who did not have a terrible diet to exercise ratio.

I wonder how good the science behind it is!
Flash Cookies: I imagine that if he can create them, then you can remove them, though I'm doubtful that extensions have full access to Flash internals.

HTML5 Storage: I'm not an expert on the different types of HTML5 storage, though since this is at the browser-level, I imagine the it would be easy for an extension to access them.

Regular Cookies: Obviously extensions have access to these.

Force-Cached PNGs: Not sure what access extensions have, though I imagine that Firefox extensions have a higher likelihood of access than Chrome/Chromium extensions. This is also hard to detect automatically though, unless you want to take the NoScript route and block all force-cached images unless they meet a whitelist.

Web History: Extensions obviously have access to web history, though this is something that would vary from implementation to implementation of evercookie, so it would be fighting an endless battle, like spam email filters. The best fix here would be to close the css history hack hole.
Done - thanx!
Can anyone explain the clue? I don't get it.
If I had some energy (and cared) I'd be on foursquare and gowalla right now ;-)
For some reason here I'm reminded of Malcolm X's autobiography...
True, but it's more difficult to analyze and attempt to filter a PNG based on content.
I read about this recently when browsing the Yahoo design pattern library http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/core/yourvmy.htm...
> One of the major nono's of journalism is becoming too close to your sources.

Another one would be "don't out your sources". Which he would have done if he had of named names.
Gnumap - open source project mapping sequence data back to the genome
/me tries router xss

>400 Bad Request

Cross Site Action detected!

Sweet :) Though that's vs the vanilla script. Anyone know if there's one that works against DD-WRT?
Looking for a CTO/Co-founder
You mean upgrade applications that depend on that core library. Which you have to do anyway since a patched library will not be bug-compatible with the old one.

That's the biggest issue, if you test with library version X and run with library version Y, then any sufficiently complicated program will have bugs that would have been found by testing with the same version of the library you run with.