skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly, I think these "Ask HN: X vs X?" posts should be strongly discouraged here. The Rails vs Django threads get posted at least once a month, often more frequently, and it's beyond tiresome. They already get flagged and killed half the time, but people still post in them as if it's totally normal to have the same question posted week after week.

Edit: Instead of downvoting, explain why you think this same discussion needs to be rehashed month after month, sometimes week after week. When it comes to other topics we have no problem reminding people to search HN rather than ask the same questions repeatedly.
I don't understand it. So you'll still have to use Photoshop. And you still have to redo the html from scratch. In what step in the web development process do you need pixel-perfect html that's not a Photoshop file and that's not a final html design? I just can't imagine any place I've ever worked using this for actual work, I just don't see a need for pixel-perfect yet not designed throw-away html mockups.

I might just be being dense today too.

I'm really trying to understand it, but I just don't.

Now, if it was a tool that helped me create html+css that I could actually use in production, and that would help me quickly create a visual design that looks decent, that would be useful for me.
This is exactly the kind of "reply" that seems to keep the open desktop crappy.

Sure, it takes work and testing to get a UI into a condition that seems, to the end-user, to just work

BUT that kind of work, each in the small end-cases that only come up ocassionally, is needed. Sure "that doesn't affect a lot of users...".. yeah it will continue to "not effect a lot of users"* as long your usability sucks and not one uses the thing...

An app or desktop or whatever needs to fully implement the features it claims to have. And it is often true that the last yard turns out to cost as much as the rest put together. Yes but the last yard is necessary. I can understand if it won't get done 'cause there's not enough time or money. But the attitude that it shouldn't get done 'cause "that doesn't affect a lot of users" makes my blood boil. Sorry, I'm sure people put lots of effort into this stuff but I just have to get this off my chest.
There are plenty of reasons why you should use Django or Rails over the other, but I rather discuss why maybe you shouldn't use Django. I haven't used Rails, so I will not be discussing that side of the coin.

Django is a wonderful framework as long as you work inside the box. There's a large enough of a community for support, plenty of documentation, and alot of the pieces for a website are already written for you and work just fine.

Where Django seems to break down is:

1. When you upgrade Django, or
2. When you start customizing Django

With just about every release of Django, something breaks. Thankfully, these changes are usually outlined in the release notes, but this often results (from what I've seen) in projects running on fairly old versions of Django because nobody wants to break a working website or app by upgrading their framework. Where I come from (sysadmin turned web dev,) you don't want to run outdated software and you don't want things to break. With Django, you're constantly stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Theoretically, you can write all the middleware, decorators, backend authentication modules, etc you want and plug it into Django and have it work flawlessly; however, this isn't always the case in practice. This blog post from one person explains their gripes with extending ,and eventually replacing, Django: http://blog.brandonbloom.name/2009/08/dropping-django.html

It's important to keep in mind that Django was ultimately developed for news websites. This makes it a great framework for building CMSes, blogs, etc but causes it to break down when you start moving outside of that use case.

(Also, FWIW, Django doesn't natively support schema migrations, although their are tools such as "South" that implement this functionality.)

I think that if you're interested in using a Python-based like framework, you should also consider Pylons and Tornado.
Whenever I hear the phrase "a penny saved is a penny earned", I like to point out that if you do a back of the envelope calculation for inflation you'll come up with a penny being worth approximately $5 when Benjamin Franklin made his famous quote.

He probably would have thought us to be morons for hand-wringing over a few cents.
I don't think that most people truly consider gmail to be a 'professional' email address in a sense that it's any better than a university account.

As others have said, get your own domain name. It's cheap and guarantees you full control of accounts, plus an easy way to setup demo playgrounds for hacks/apps you may decide to play around with.
Remy Sharp says, "Underscore is awesome"
Borders Slashes Prices of eBook Readers
Really great work matt, very intuitive and I hope you see lots of success with it.

How do you plan to monetize ?
Perhaps Rapleaf is not as powerful as they sound, since they incorrectly think I am about 40 years older than I actually am.
Android Payments Snarl Spurs Upstarts
Absolutely biased, but still:

Simplest Signup Ever!

Since the form autonomously parses whois information, I would probably be aware that I am listed for presence.co, captain obvious. :)

Thanks for the heads up jpmc.
If David Heinemeier Hansson Was a Tech Recruiter...
He probably wouldn't send himself job offers for Rails jobs in the Valley, unlike an unfortunate and clueless recruiter who did just that!

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2598-why-are-technical-recruiters-so-clueless

Folks, I want to create a programmer-centric tech recruiting agency that is basically the opposite of the story above. And I need your ideas!

Imagine that DHH, Jason Fried and the rest of the 37 Signals crew were to create a small, scrappy tech recruiting agency. What might this look like?

Thanks,

D.
Chris Bowler’s iPad Life
Godsmack Photo Gallery - ARTISTdirect Music
Technology Review: Whatever Happened to ... Virtual Reality?
I got this twice, even seeing the captcha. Maybe I'm a robot. Hey....
There doesn't appear to be a network-manager SSH VPN plugin, which is a shame. I would love to be able to easily create a VPN with any of my servers...
Your correct it is not flat, it's value is modified by how much gold can be mined by companies. Also it is modified by how many people want the metal itself.

What I meant to say that if you worked hard for a year 200 years ago and saved yourself maybe 10 ounces of gold, and buried it in the ground for 200 years and now you have those 10 ounces. The goods and services you could buy between then and now would be comparable. whereas the various currencies he used 200 years ago would be either completely worthless or decreased in value 99.99%.

Gold is going to be around for another 50 years, and you'll be able to buy things with it. The US Dollar however is not. When I say gold is flatline, I mean that in principle a ounce of gold saved will buy you nice things 50 years from now, a thousand dollars now will buy you nothing 50 years from now.
That is not dedication, that is criminal, that is, following the first easy thing you can think of, regardless of the consequences. If he has the dedication, a firm no to the above suggestion, and a further five minutes thinking, would have probably brought up a much honourable means, even in times of desperate need, to get what he wanted.
Ask HN: is it better to let investors find you?
I was wondering, if you have founded a startup, and it starts getting traction and good press etc. Would it be better for investors to approach you rather than vice versa! Wouldn't you have a bit more control over the deal? Sorry if this is a stupid question, I'm a newbie to this internet hype :)
Did you look at their Dock drawing and menu titles? Straight ripoff of the Mac OS X Dock and Dashboard dock.
Oh, I think I need to wash my hands after posting this.

http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=Why+ar...
I like to cook and spend a fair amount of time in my kitchen. I eat a lot of yogurt: full-fat and no flavorings. Lots of beans: garbanzo, fava, kidney beans etc. Rice, eggs, lentils, vegetables and couscous.

I also bake a fair bit. Here is a dead simple cake recipe: http://cixa.org/about.php.

I have a pretty high metabolism so I snack during the day on fruit: pears, bananas, apples. Dried fruit: cashew-nut, almonds, walnuts, prunes.

I have increasingly become become vegetarian over the last year after having eaten fish and meat for the last decade. In a previous life I was vegan for sixteen years.

This has less to do with calorie-counting or religious dogma than the gradual awareness of things; mindfulness, if you will.

The manner in which meat and fish are raised, butchered, transported and sold in the west is disgusting. This has led me to eat a mostly vegetarian diet.
I was saying "should" as in "it'd be nice if it did".

But in retrospect I see why that was confusing.
Firefox is quite popular too, and uses its own custom cross-platform UI toolkit.
You should check active scaffold plugin for rails. (fork http://github.com/vhochstein/active_scaffold for rails 3)
Google now accounts for 6.4% of worldwide Internet traffic
I thought the problem was people getting dizzy? I'd imagine we have the computer power now to keep up with head turning? Anyone know why anyone hasn't marketed a VR headset? Would this make a good YC company?
> I don't think that it was so necessary to embarrass him publicly.

A good lesson to learn, albeit at someone else's expense.
Ask HN: Do CS students enjoy C anymore?
We hire C developers at OpenDNS. Most often, we hire them from some other company where they have been working for the better part of a decade.

They are computer scientists and they are very smart.

But we also like to hire students graduating from college. It's rare for us to find a CS graduate who knows C, let alone one who enjoys writing in C.

Apparently most CS is taught in Java and Python these days, with one or two courses in algorithms or operating systems. There seems to be only a few classes where C is involved.

Is this because teachers don't like teaching in C? Or because students prefer the speed of development of a language like Python or Java? Where are the students who do like C? Where can I find those guys (and girls)?
The article is so terribly flawed that it is difficult to take seriously. I do not have time to write a full critique of the article, but every paragraph has at least one sentence that needs to be criticized. For instance:

"The policy is designed to push investors and money managers into putting their money into the stock market"

Low rates are suppose to encourage investment, but not necessarily investment in the stock market. People may, for instance, want to invest in small software startups. Or maybe someone will decide to invest in a new restaurant, or perhaps they will invest in rehabilitating an old warehouse and turning it into luxury apartments. All of these activities count as investment. All of these activities are encouraged by low rates. The sentence above, that I'm critical of, seems to imply that all investing equals investment in the stock market. This is far from the truth.

The opening sentence is especially bad:

"The heart of the Federal Reserve's policy to extricate the nation from the lasting grip of a deep recession is in essence a variation of what's known as 'trickle down economics.' "

This statement reveals a surprising lack of any historical awareness. The phrase 'trickle down economics' came in vogue during the early 1980s, to describe the policies of President Reagan. In particular, the big tax cuts of 1982 gave most of the benefits to the wealthy, but the positive effects of the tax cut, though given to the wealthy first, were suppose to eventually 'trickle down' to everyone else. Low rates from the Fed are completely different, and have been around since long before the 1980s. The Fed has used low rates to try to fight every recession since the Fed was created, but no one has ever suggested that these low rates form a kind of 'trickle down' economics.

Paul Krugman recently wrote about what we might hope from quantitative easing from the Fed, and also the limits of the Fed power. I suggest reading this: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/monetary-base-an...
The reason is that the programming language, in this usage, is not analogous to a single tool (like a hammer).

People build all kinds of complete things with just "C" -- where by this term, I mean the compiler, standard library, build and debug system (make/gdb, say).

There are few things of interest you can build with just a hammer. The evidence for this is that no craftsman builds with just a hammer.

The better analogy to the concept of "C" above is "wood shop" (as opposed to, say, "metal shop", "polymer shop", "electronics shop"). You still get the point, which is that everything out of the wood shop to some degree "looks the same" but it's not so clearly leading the reader to the hoped-for conclusion ("the statement is stupid").
Green Thai Curry (I bought a big tub of green curry paste which makes it a bit cheaper)

Soup (homemade mushroom soup, or Heinz Tomato)

Falafel (made from a packet) in pita bread with lots of humus
Wow, they're just like us!
Color or pants for snowboard
there are people here mods or tasteful? well, or someone who can advise on the color of snowboard pants
I've already used up all
straight to the point
I bought a green jacket - http://yfrog.com/5lpicture043rj
and don `t know what color pants to fit her
little known (as in math, lol))
1. Green ruled out because it's silly (green green .. Well not really, admit it!)
2. very bright color does not want, I want something in more practical, but not black, because it's hot in the spring or in the mountains when the sun
3. I think there are not good at a very bright colors such as carrots or green, because it would be sooo hot. I have no goal to be the brightest on the side =)
Even if your ideas are contrary to those items, in any event, write or just throw links to ebey! =)

Thank you for your attention
sorry for my english
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange Live
I've been using zabbix for around 4 years now for all my monitoring needs, and i love it. In fact, I love it so much, that I decided to launch a hosted 'zabbix as a service' company this year, check it out: http://tribily.com
Same here. Works fine when I'm on the road. I suppose I could setup my own vpn through my server, but since this already meets my needs, why bother?
Yes, don't feel pressured by all these comments saying "Why not learn both? They're not that different anyway." You're probably better off semi-mastering one before you focus on the other. There's a lot more to a language with its idiosyncrasies in general use than what simple examples reveal, and it's going to take significant experience to really be proficient.

I'd say pick the language that you can develop the most passion to learn. Spend some time doing a little research. Are you a specialist in another technology? How well does either Python or Ruby integrate in whatever way with what you already know. If you're really at a loss, go with Python and Django.
A big news website in Norway lights up the IPv6 tomorrow
My friend has made four awesome sites like this, but everywhere he interviews at they disregard those sites and assume he can't program because he kind of stumbles around when answering coding questions. He told me it's a combination of being nervous and using a lot of notes while he works because doesn't have a good memory.

I always wonder who potential employers think made his web applications when they reject him saying he doesn't know enough programming.
Dude, what are you guys talking about?
What Big table integration?
What NoSQL?

There was a Django patch somewhere that used a thin layer to make the API "look" like the Django ORM, but IMHO it is broken in a lot of ways and you're better off using the raw App Engine API (which is in no way related to Django).

But it is a half-ass attempt, looking like some patch somebody did in an afternoon to get something working: and that was the "Google effort"?
lol [1]

-----

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)
Arguable, but I think Rails haw way more docs than django:
http://railstutorial.org/book , http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ , http://railscasts.com/ to name a few
New Mothers Grew Bigger Brains Within Months of Giving Birth
Yes, they have a Mac envy, which is a good thing, I think.
Facebook Open Graph Website Hacked
Facebook is the other 93.6 %.
Speaking about pointers, it is just an abstraction about addresses which itself is an abstraction of the bit pattern generated to access a memory location, which is an abstraction of the analog electrical voltages on those physical wires, which is an abstraction of ......
The word "distribution" has a meaning in statistics that is perfectly appropriate and correctly applied in this situation. To wit: "A set of numbers and their frequency of occurrence collected from measurements over a statistical population."
And for those as confused as me, Unity is this: http://unity.ubuntu.com/

Maybe someone else can elaborate on what a GNOME Shell is?
Hopefully Oracle will step up and provide the binaries like they do for every other operating system.
Because your idea is good, but not seven dollar good?

I mean really, if you're going to the trouble to fire up the IDE and actually write code for a new project, aren't you already a little bit committed? Like committed enough to spend four billable minutes worth of income on the domain name as insurance that it won't be gone in a few months' time?
Android Market Hits 100,000 Apps
Except those scientists stayed in America.

Today's crop of Chinese and Indian scientists want to go back to China and India.
Look at it this way: Currently, there are a lot of problems with Ubuntu's user interface. The crappy way it deals with shortcuts when you click a menu. The ridiculous way that the calender flyout stays on top. The un-customizable log-in screen. The lack of vertical panel applets. The list goes on.

This complaint is similar to desktop icons not maintaining their position when you change desktop resolution. It requires far more work than changing the way the backend handles shortcut keys (to fix the menu bug), and doesn't improve most people's experience.

I'm not saying you're wrong! This is a legitimate problem! I'm simply saying that it's not a priority, similar to how it's not a priority for Apple to expose a user interface to customize the button layout on their windowing engine, or fix their dock to work properly in vertical mode. All projects have priorities, open source and closed source, and this bug doesn't seem very important to me.
I saw the piece as well.. pretty depressing. A start-up migth not have the money to hire an old qualified PhD... I am not if an old qualified PhD will be interested either..
Almost feels like we have 2 worlds in the valley
I agree with the main premise of the article: that Steve Jobs isn't the one dealing a blow to Java, he is just getting rid of the white elephant that is already on its way down.

Seriously Apple does not have that much of a market share in the desktop and laptop field, and while it is a growing share, it is far from the market majority. Therefore, to think that Jobs is dealing a major blow to Java by not factory installing Java on a machine which is only going to sell to a small percentage of the market doesn't make sense.

If Java is losing popularity as a desktop app programming language it won't be because of Apple.
Yeah I'm pretty terrible on the phone, and I have over 5 years of professional experience (plus coding since I was about 15). So when I get to the part of the phone call where they ask computer science questions I haven't thought about in a bunch of years, I usually just fumble about, get concepts confused, and generally completely blank out.

The better ones are the companies who ask you to do a coding assignment (and I'm not talking FizzBuzz). Sure I wouldn't want to end up having TOO MANY companies ask me to do it since it would be very time consuming, but certainly if you're taking your time to go through the process you should be able to put some time into writing a small demo app for companies you're passionate about joining.
How well do these startups pay (as a point of reference, RethinkDB offered an absurdly low salary for what amounted to a top-5% developer)?

I think the original article might have been talking about the real world.

OTOH, the media is very good about discovering poster cases to earn our sympathy. One common theme I've noticed in all these cases is that the person in question took their job for granted in the face of the changing technical landscape, didn't upgrade their skills and finds themselves in a tough situation.

Another problem in the tech industry is ageism: the media doesn't talk about unemployed 30-something and 20-somethings. Haven't seen this piece, maybe it did.
For better or worse, it becomes more and more sensible to think about Ubuntu as a separate operating system, built on top of technologies like Linux, Debian or GNOME. Sort of like Android is built on top of Linux and Java, except less extreme, or what HTC and other handset makers are doing on top of Android. And on the more extreme example, one could argue Apple did the same with BSD and Mach.

If the platform is commoditized, it's relatively "easy" for companies to build a new personality in the way they think will add value. Canonical's great push forward was and is realizing that one of the biggest problem with Linux desktop nowadays is UX, and they're trying hard to fix that.

Personally, I prefer GNOME Shell and I think it's going to rock, especially on tablets. I've tried Unity in Maverick on a few netbooks, just for a few minutes each, since it's default for live install image. I do think it lacks polish and stability and, compared to Moblin/Meego, it's still got a long way to go towards tablet friendlyness.

But I love the fact that there are options [0], and that Linux Desktop, aside from never having its year, is a viable platform on which people can experiment and build cool stuff, even if the end users never learn that under this Ubuntu (or Fedora, ...) operating system there's something geeks have holy wars about.

[0] Then there is, obviously, KDE, which a great many people use and love. But this is a comment about GNOME technologies :)

EDIT: markup
What if I wrote the wrapper myself?
ShowHN (weekend project) : Ready.js - prepare your js for production
You can find it on GitHub at http://github.com/dsimard/ready.js

Ready.js does 4 things :

* Check if your javascript are valid with jslint.
* Optimize and minify your javascript with Closure Compiler.
* Watch your javascript files for jslint while you're coding.
* Create an aggregated file of all your javascripts.

It's written in node.js but can be used in any kind of project (rails, django, plain HTML).
needless?
Ohh look at the koreans part: "good at starcraft". I don't know if it's awesome (or sad) that Korean stereotypes (can I call it a stereotype? Since this is probably completely 100% true anyways), include being good at starcraft as one of their most talked about traits.

NAAAAA, it's freaking Awesome!
clickable : http://github.com/dsimard/ready.js
Product Designer — BackType
LOL at the "Everything was better in a magical time that never existed, but my faulty memory has synthesized from biscuit commercials i saw as a child."

ramanujan: no one blames door manufacturers for break ins and there has never been a time when it was wise to leave your door unlocked.
I enjoy it and I graduated less than a year ago, though I am an EE, not CS grad. Perhaps look at the CE/EE crowd a bit more in depth. Where I went to school (large Big-10 engineering program), we were required at least one C course, with more as electives.
Digg To Lay Off 37% Of Staff, Product Refocus Imminent