skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you DO decide to switch from PHP to Ruby on Rails make sure to get very familiar with Ruby before you dive into Rails, otherwise learning rails will be very frustrating. You can also try out Sinatra before Rails. Sinatra is a great lightweight framework that I've been using extensively. It is awesome. http://www.sinatrarb.com/

Regarding whether or not to switch I will say this: you can build whatever you want with either language. The big reason you should switch is the fun and challenge of learning something new. Both languages/frameworks have their advantages and disadvantages. You will be LESS productive if you switch languages at first because you will be new and will have to learn the 'ruby way of doing things'. Eventually you may end up more productive in the long run, but productivity is influenced by so many factors and language/framework is just one of them.

Regarding deployment, Heroku (free for small apps) is a good option for if you don't want to deal with deployment much. Linode ($20/mo minimum) is great if you need to do anything fancy and/or want to have root access to your deployment environment.

http://railstutorial.org is the best rails tutorial I've seen

Good Luck!
It's questionable whether the MVNO business model would allow Google to innovate the ways they want to.
Why does Apple have such a cult following?
It's a bit cleaner than that -- it gets the decryption key from the reader with the Windows debugging APIs, and then removes the DRM. You're left with the original ebook.
All thanks to jashkenas: CoffeeScript, Underscore.js, and Backbone.js.

Using those tools has helped me to really enjoy writing JavaScript and to start doing it in a much more organized manner. They have been a huge catalyst for my growth as a JavaScript developer.

Also, using MongoDB has been awesome!
They won't do any of the above directly. Carriers don't make phones, but they do market and sell them (because they own the customer). They'll simply refuse to do so for Android phones that aren't neutered in ways acceptable to them.

"Hey Motorola, of course we'll do a big marketing push for the Droid 9000, so long as it complies with our guidelines for handsets on our network. You have made sure users can't install Google Voice, haven't you? What's that? They can install any software they want? Well, maybe we'll just go for that Samsung device instead. See you next product cycle."
Code Janitor.
Transcending the Human, DIY Style
all those nytimes articles require user acct
The Shangri-La Diet has worked wonders for me. I lost 24.5 pounds in 2010. I used oil. It's like instant willpower.
They don't even have to do that; if the scanner has any sort of data storage, you can just check that out once in a while.
I was in your boat 3 years ago. I decided on Ruby on Rails and am very fortunate I made that decision. It's really not as much about efficiency, productivity, expense, etc. as it is enjoyment of working in a language/framework that's highly elegant. Learning Ruby on Rails (or Python/Django) will far outweigh productivity gains for your first project. However, it will be worth it in the end.

For me, it mostly comes down to the fact that there's almost always an easy answer for questions in Rails. Pagination? Sorting? AJAX? There's usually a "Best" way too, that makes it easy in deciding which library/plugin to choose.
1) MongoDB - I started off using it in place of a few tables that had some varied column requirements, and I'm now in the middle of converting my entire DB to it. So awesome.

2) Kohana - I love working with this framework. I never really worry about the ugly warts in PHP, because honestly? I'm not programming in PHP any more. I'm programming in Kohana, and I only occasionally fall back to PHP for "low-level" stuff.
Twilio. Ringing phones is pure magic, and provides so many disruptive opportunities it is staggering.
In 2010 I fell in love with:

1. Groovy - a programming language, it rocks because it less verbose and more powerful than Java and I can fall back onto standard Java syntax when I don't care to figure out how to do something in the 'Groovy' way. (http://groovy.codehaus.org)

2. Gaelyk - a groovy framework that runs on Google App Engine. Google App Engine is great for launching apps. It's free until it gets traction. (http://gaelyk.appspot.com)

3. Objectify - The simplest convenient interface to the Google App Engine datastore. Takes a lot of the pain out of using Bigtable. (http://code.google.com/p/objectify-appengine)

These all pack a mean punch and let me work on my night/weekend projects quite productively after overcoming a small learning curve.

I built http://icusawme.com and http://chatroulettespy.com with all three.

I'm looking forward to diving deeper into Appcelerator Titanium Mobile in early 2011.
There's a whole lot of Lexapro at the other end of that tunnel. Get out as soon as you can.
I have to recommend ruby if only for Ruby Version Manager and bundler. Ruby also has multiline lambdas (code blocks). Python only has single line lambdas.

Disclosure: I've been using ruby (and rails) for 2 years and I am absolutely addicted to it.
You forgot

(c) don't panic and abandon your current system as invalid just because it doesn't match somebody else's system.

It's false to regard one system as trumping another. We do not regard it as a breach in etiquette when someone eats in the "Continental" way in a setting where the American style prevails. The only reason to be embarrassed about the opposite is our American tendency to assume that European manners are more refined than our own, to the extent that we feel a little guilty when we go straight home after a soccer game without beating anyone up.
'I found some potential problems in my app, fixed them and posted an update'

'Of course this was a time when Apple approved an update fast and it went out before I could test and I had not fixed all the issues.'

'I must have fumbled in the SVN check in.'
Ah, that's good to hear. Using the analog hole leaves you with a pretty poor copy of most digital files.
I have a half-written xterm color scheme generator lying around. Has this also been already made, or is it worth finishing?
The "privacy screen" is a physical polarization filter - basically a fabric you put on your screen however you like.

I don't know of any electrical/mechanical process that could shift the state of fabric to block light at most angles.

If you buy a crappy laptop from a couple of years ago, you won't even have to buy a filter to render your screen unreadable from an angle that isn't perpendicular to the screen. :)
So initially there were problems with the code and afterwards with his development process.

I fail to see what this got to do with iPhone vs. Android. It could have happened with both platforms.
Sure. You can disrupt someone on the toilet, at the dinner table, in bed, etc, etc. Very disruptive indeed.
A pg quote AND a pg styled references list? Really?

(Downvote freely)
The list of registrars is here: http://www.nira.org.ng/index.php/registrars. I looked through the list of the platinum, gold and silver levels and none of their websites support .ng yet.
Yep, most people here don't speak English to any passable level. Even if they did, though, it's a bit hard for everyone to up and move out. Many people do, but that's not a viable way of solving the problem for an entire country.
I've been using Eclipse for the last three years, more heavily in the last year (Android development). I find it to be incredibly slow, to the point where it becomes unusable. After a couple hours, switching files takes 2-3 seconds, code hints take 4-5 seconds, etc. Very painful.
+1 for Twilio. Tropo is looking pretty sweet too.
Powerful virus attacks Android phones in China
node.js was already mentioned as someone's third, but I'd like to cast a sole vote. seriously, it's awesome.
Could be an IntelliJ user like myself (when I'm not using VS, that is).
I am a grasshopper customer and met Hauser a few years ago. That guy is the real deal. If he is involved in this, then sign me up. The grasshopper service is great and Hauser is incredible. FedEx and UPS guaranty on-time delivery but they make it nearly impossible to actually get a refund -- their guaranty is a bit of an overstatement. If PackageFox can make this process easier and do the work to recover $$, then I don't know why eeveryone wouldn't sign up.
Either Python or Ruby will put you in good hands -- I suspect Ruby is probably better overall if web development is your main focus, but I have to admit that I prefer Python, just due to its amazing infrastructure (scipy / numpy, SAGE, NLTK, so on and so forth). Spend a couple of days working through tutorials in either language, and then just pick one or the other based on your gut; you really can't go wrong and you can always learn the other one later.
Linode is what I recommend to set up Python hosting, but it means you have to get your hands a bit dirty with installing packages and the like, which you may or may not be interested in doing. You can also just download Virtualbox and set up a VM locally and experiment for free.
I wonder how the HR woman ended up seeing the HN post in the first place.
There was a time in my life, where every single time my girlfriend and I were about to enjoy some adult time, my employees would call. Without fail. There has to be some sort of twillo app idea in there somewhere.
Umm, why is this sort of comment relevant or appropriate on HN?
0mq is fantastic. I just wish it had some way to put a socket in a half-open state: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3692854/how-should-a-zero...

ETA: `zmq_poll()` is nice, but some way to make it play nicely with other event loops (like libev's) would be even better.
The Year in Web
Not new, but I've really enjoyed working with Lua (http://lua.org). The C API is really nice and I like how you can start from a known-safe, minimal interpreter and add new procedures carefully.

libev (http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html) was also a lot of fun to use for multiplexing sockets, plus it has a whole pile of other useful watchers that can use its event loop.
Of course, that isn't considered a valid excuse if they engage in subpar accounting or marketing practices, so why should it be acceptable in this case?
Climate Models Miss Effects of Wind-Shattered Dust
Most (all?) of the free books are not available outside of the US because Amazon has different wireless deals elsewhere, with different cost structures. In some (most?) places, Amazon would take a loss on the wireless costs for free books, so they replace them with alternate versions which are minimally priced to cover the wireless costs.
Clojure - it's the gift that keeps on giving. It keeps getting faster and the feature set for writing robust object-oriented software (minus the broken stuff) just keeps getting better. In fact, it's changed how I assess the feature set of other OO languages old and new.

miniKanren - logic programming w/o the Warren Abstract Machine. Has opened my eyes to a ton of incredible literature on this under appreciated programming paradigm.
+1 on railstutorial.org. Great site.
Kinect Hack Turns World of Warcraft Into Full-Body Grind
Some languages have this already. Specifically safety critical languages like Ada. Ever so slowly the entire industry is moving towards what ada had in 1983. Beyond
this you can use the spark annotations on top of ada to verify code does what it's expected to.

Here's some Ada range examples
type My_Int is range 1..100;
type byte is mod 28;
type Sin_Values is digits 10
range -1.0..1.0;

Then you can query the object for its range:
z'range;
or see if it's even valid, useful for finding stray bits switched by cosmic rays - I'm serious here.
if z'valid then
dowhatever;
else
printwarning;
Discount and free shipping
Good thing we have http://khanacademy.org.
Nintendo Warns on 3-D for Children
I wish I could upvote this more times.

I love Kohana, and I'm looking forward to learning Ruby/Rails this year. I have a few small projects lined up to work on while learning, which should be pretty fun, too.
So if Cassandra writes are much faster than reads, why would Reddit go that route? Their comment server is consistently breaking on them, and it would seem that a sub-optimal choice of db might be partly to blame.
While I side with his statement, I neither like the condescending tone of his phrasing. But i believe he means advanced, 'esoteric', fancy smarty pants stuff like functional languages. One can spend aeons frivolously debating why pragmatism is (not) better than pure expressive power. And which language is what and then devolve to what is definable. mere mortals have better things to do with their finite lives.

Anyways... I can attest to F# being a breeze to get on WP7 and Scala can be wedged into android with some effort. Thats about it I think of in terms of no extra runtime required solutions.
Silicon Stockyard.
GLM (http://glm.g-truc.net/) - A C++ mathematics library based on GLSL. It's not a new library, but I didn't know about until 2010. It's really convenient to use (almost) the same syntax in C++ as you do in GLSL.
Redis. Makes working with a database fun, just like jQuery made JavaScript fun.
Nice last paragraph:

Nonetheless, I am delighted to note your ﬁrm statement that the attack will no longer work and pleased
that the industry has been ﬁnally been able to deal with this security issue, albeit some considerable time
after the original disclosure back in 2009.
I know Zed Shaw played with such things for making mongrel2. I've never needed it, so that is the best pointer I can provide, but the IRC channel for 0mq may be of help too -- friendly crowd over there.
I can only speak for Ruby - it's what I chose when I moved from PHO development several years ago.

1. I am much more productive in Ruby than I ever was in PHP because the language is more consistent and testing is built in. But it takes a long time to understand Ruby so that you can be proficient.

2. it's not hard nor expensive anymore. Dreamhost hosts Rails applications just like PHP apps. Linode.com has VPS setups and scripts to get you going. Heroku is free for small apps. Worry about building something deployable first, and then tackle deployment.

3. You shouldn't switch if you can't take the short-term productivity hit. You're not going to be as productive in Ruby right off the bat because it's new. My interns all agree that the first two weeks of Ruby with me are pretty rough, (80 hours or so) but after that they take off. But it takes a lot longer to program Ruby like Ruby and not like PHP.

4. My opinion will get in the way here, and a lot of the really cool stuff isn't really for beginners. But I am so happy I have the tools I need to accomplish the crazy tasks I've gotten myself into.

5. RailsTutorial.org is a great start - the pdf is free. Also, I run RailsMentors.org - maybe you can find someone there willing to guide you. However, be prepared to come with questions and do some work. Also, find a local user group and hang out. A lot of Ruby people love to help you get started as long as you're willing to put forth the effort.

Feel free to ping me with questions. bphogan on twitter.

Best of luck.
My list is pretty much identical to this, aside from mongrel2 (looked at it briefly though).

I'm loving flask + mongo in combination; they make prototyping webapps almost effortless.
The 1000 most-visited sites on the web
Good list. I thought all of the usual tech blogs have been very weak and most good tech writing is coming from traditional sources or individual bloggers.
I'm not sure this is _why_ there is a limit of 1000 characters, but one possible reason would be to limit the amount of unstructured data put into the assessment field. This can be a way to force people to use structured data fields and more generally to avoid excessive verbosity.

(TLDR probably applies to doctors too.)
Everything the Internet Knows About Me (Because I Asked It To)
The author says Marketplace approval is usually quick at about 2 days.

Except when you are one of the many developers whose apps get stuck in the marketplace, that never get approved or rejected because of lousy infrastructure on Microsofts side.

A developer I highly respect wrote about his ongoing struggle getting his Google Voice client out for WP7. If he wasn't already known from his MVP work, it's unlikely he would even have got those [extremely unhelpful] responses from Microsoft.

http://www.koushikdutta.com/2010/12/windows-phone-marketplac...
I pull out my keys and touch the handle with it. No more door handle shocks.

I wish I could say the same about my kitchen sink.
I'm not sure that the ability to encode arbitrary information is peripheral in the same way that lasers and welfare are.
I'm actually beginning to enjoy writing things in Haskell. It's the first statically typed language that I enjoy using (although I do still miss dynamic typing).
I've been using ruby (and rails)... I am absolutely addicted to it.

This experience is pretty common. I think that says a lot.
A bit late to the party but I finally learned and started using Ruby on Rails this year and I love it.
Solid State Discs in everything.

Ok, perhaps not what you were asking, but they made a big difference for me. I have two, raid0 in my desktop, and a sandforce in my MBP. What a difference. Compiling, linking, copying, everything not just faster, but almost instantaneous. Yum.
I think that's a bit apples and oranges. Arc is a long-term project that pg has said doesn't actually "have" to be useful to anyone anytime soon. Clojure, on the other hand, is under active, public development, as swannodette points out.
I stand (very happily) corrected.
Thanks for #1, never heard of websockets before.
or... while they're using their phone as a method of programmatic notification?
Perhaps this is a problem that the Snazzy Napper folks should jump on!
Thank you for this. I had no idea what I was missing.
His point is that Android made it easy to test multiple platforms, and Apple did not.
Very interesting how Google.com isn't on that list...
I continued to work with F#, deploying a couple of small apps.

The really cool part came when I realized that with F# I was programming at the language level -- that I could effectively and easily write my own languages. So I decided I would like rails-like entities, where the entity reads the structure of the table and then conforms itself to whatever is in the table.

Couple hundreds of lines of code later, and presto chango, I could simply say "give me a list of customers" and point it to the table and I had a list of customers. This totally disconnected the database data structure from the code. Add a new field in the database and there was nothing to change in code. Or add a new field in the type and have it percolate out to the database. Change database providers and it was only a few function changes. Very cool. The kind of simple fix Microsoft should have done with data access instead of writing ODBC/ADO/OleDb//EF/etc

Then I had a blast with mailboxes, er monads, agents, and threads. Ended up writing a small app that was purely functional and all ran in the background. It was so automatic, at first I couldn't figure out how to start the dang thing!

This led to a venture into MPI and other technologies which has just begun. I'm also trying to wrap up my language work with a full DSL sometime soon (if I have a project that needs it). Looking forward to parsing and setting up trees and walking them. I also broke out of windows and started working in a linux environment using Mono, Apache, and MySQL.

Incredibly fun stuff. Looking back, I really had a blast this past year. Next year should be even better.
Phones become contaminated with Geinimi when users download software applications that have been repackaged to include the virus, according to researchers from Lookout and Symantec Corp.

Nitpick: this is a trojan, not a virus. A virus implies self-replication.
Computers have completely dominated Chess, lookout grocery store employees, you are next.
On their mobile phone.
I think Rails is much more stable. The Python frameworks seem to release more often (for me, at least). Ruby also has good libraries for web specific purposes, Python has more overall. For example, a website might release an API and a wrapper for Ruby, Python, and Java. However, an obscure project might have an official Python wrapper but not a Ruby wrapper.
Ask HN: Why can't I read HN with my Blackberry?
Using the Blackberry browser on http://news.ycombinator.com yields "HTTP Error 400: Bad Request". I have a Tour.
My take on it is that there is a large class of people who like to be afraid. It seems to give them a sense of purpose to have an implacable enemy to worry about. I wish they would worry about something more practical, though, like cancer.
This was down voted but it brings up valid a point. There are a lot of posts asking which language the OP should learn. It's redundant and very subjective. Yet at the same time people love their languages, their religion, what helps them wake up in the morning and so these posts are very popular.
The about page says:

"Keep in mind that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that don't have publicly visible content or don't load properly, and certain Google sites."
this article via [http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/12/the-complete-joy...] via
the original at [http://www.gapminder.org/videos/the-joy-of-stats/]

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."
[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]
After checking a few registrars, I found they only sell third-level domains (.com.ng, .net.ng), not second-level domains (like "amazi.ng") which is probably what most people here would be interested in.

Example: http://www.webdomains.com.ng/myaccount/whois.php?step=1

It's a shame they're missing the opportunity to sell such a nice top-level domain - or perhaps it's done on purpose?
I'm beginning to really question Wordpress. Every few weeks there seems to be a new security flaw. I can't imagine what hasn't been discovered yet.
Apart from GM corn [I don't want] I can't think of any USA products that I come in contact with; could you give a list of the major ones or a link to such?

TBH the same is true of my own country (excepting food). Perhaps it's just that China market themselves well by ensuring China itself is a global brand (as in "China" appears on so many products).

Edit: Silly me, TV+Films+Music, what else?
I think you might be missing fogus's point to a certain degree. His point is that active, public development for a language might not necessarily mean that the language designer is keeping contact every day. You might only receive periodic updates.

I don't see cookies being all that different from Arc in that respect. Cookies doesn't have to be useful anytime soon either because, well, it is useful already.
Osmos

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

Its not exactly "online" (although I hear it started out that way) but it definitely breaks tension. The reviews aren't exaggerating, its like chill-out in a can.
Personally, I would love to see Google in the carrier business, but it would be a huge risk to their brand/image.

Most everyone loves Google right now. Most everyone hates wireless carriers. So, it sounds like it could be a good opportunity. But there are reasons people hate carriers that are either outside of the carriers' control or too costly to fix completely on a global level (ie. spotty coverage, slow connections, great expectations, etc)

Even if Google became the #1 carrier, their valuable, mostly unblemished image could take a big hit.

Google's ability to simplify/scale technology for the masses (Google search, Gmail) won't help as much when it comes to dealing with frustrated customers on the telephone who want to speak to someone right now.
SGen garbage collector explained: the nursery