skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is wrong with duplication?

In general, there are a few possible answers:

A) Duplicate code sucks up storage space, and bandwidth to transfer it around. There was a time, in living memory, when this argument was strong. But it became moot several years ago when they started giving away free encyclopedias in my breakfast cereal.

B) Duplicate code sucks up memory in running processes. This argument is still potentially strong, but without getting into the important Ruby-centric details (Can separate processes usefully share Ruby code anyway? What are the mechanisms for that? Do people really often run more than, say, two Ruby interpreter codebases on any given machine?) let's just point out that this is premature optimization -- especially in 2011, when RAM is cheap, boxes are cheap, everything is virtualized, and you should probably be running every application in its own virtual server anyway.

In the general case, it is more important that code be simple to install, correct, and reliable than that it have a light memory footprint. If you are smart enough and motivated enough to understand the need to optimize your software you have the tools to do so.

C) Duplicate code creates management headaches. You think you've updated the gem, but you've really only done so in one place. You forgot the other six places.

This is a real concern, but RVM plus Bundler represents an improvement, not a regression. For one thing: Before RVM there were several incidents where I battled the infamous `gem install` vs `sudo gem install` dichotomy. That problem -- getting every app and library to load the right library path without using RVM -- is an order of magnitude more confusing than anything in RVM.
Notability is a really tough concept in the context of Wikipedia for a couple of reasons.

The first is that notability is in no small part a function of scale. Many things that would not make the cut in a global, space-limited encyclopedia are nevertheless in Wikipedia (properly) because they're notable to some niche of contributors/readers. But once you start having articles about some episode of a 1980s TV show, how can you, in good conscience, say that an article about a selectman in a small town or an athlete at a small college isn't also notable?

And verifiability gets interesting in this context. Effectively, verifiability puts disproportionate weight on verifiability through traditional media. Thus, presumably, school newspapers and the like would be considered an indication that something is indeed notable.
Sorry, only now I saw your comment, I believe that's not the case.

The Debian Installer (I belive it uses busybox) includes both dhclient and ip.
but then your stuck using whatever version of ruby your distro is own. If your core development is ruby, I wouldn't leave that decision to someone else.
FYI the Scribd version requires a subscription for one to download the document.
for me, the key in this is to mean it. i.e. to really let yourself stop after the first line if you want to. 90% of the time you'll do much more anyway, but it doesn't work unless you allow yourself to give up after 5 minutes the other 10%.
> It's not about restraint, Malthus believed people were beyond stupid, that they'd continue to make children in the face of a dwindling food supply. It makes sense to have a lot of children in a scenario where most of them will die of disease before adulthood, or if not, soon afterwards. But in a hunger scenario, having one extra child may mean they all starve, so it's not a good idea.

Aw, good grief. Have you even read Malthus? His point is simple, that the food supply can increase substantially (in classical economics, through capital investments like clearing land for farming or constructing/repairing boats for fishing) while the population multiplies, and that people will continue to reproduce so long as their kids will at least enjoy the minimal standard of living.

Hunger scenario? Dwindling food supply? Kids as capital investments? Whatever.
maybe anyone has epub version?
Actually, it's generally not that hard to take an existing Debian package and update it to the latest version of whatever software you're dealing with, if you absolutely must run a particular version.

Also, Debian takes a lot of efforts to make different major versions run in parallel, like Ruby 1.8 and 1.9, Tcl 8.4 and 8.5 and so on.
...his point is that the difference between an obese and non-obese person cannot be fully explained by an intake difference of 20 calories per day over a lifetime...

If that's his point, it's wrong. The intake difference between the obese person and the non-obese person is just shy of 1 big mac/day after 40 years (440 cals maintenance + 20 cals excess).
It's essentially an open source encyclopedia. Would buying an open source project be worthless? Not if you're buying the brand name, search engine rankings and recognition that go with it. The #5 website in the world is worth something, and the fact that I don't know the names of any wikipedia re-publishers is significant.
" It's also probably a good idea to add some mechanism to identify users with reliable indexes and allow others to use them"

Yup, social graph wasn't the right choice of words on my part. I was thinking about something like twitters "follow". For example, you could go around a follow a bunch of well known programmers.

I don't like the karma idea, at least not at a global level. I think it has to be about trust, at an individual level. These are the people I trust, search their bookmarks.
That's exactly why I would be afraid to report something like this.
> I'm not sure software is "english-centric" so much as english being the linga franca of computing, much like diplomacy used to be mostly (if not solely) in french.

What exactly would be the difference there?
That, and Straylight. The world will have to acknowledge that it has reached The Future when the world's space agencies start talking seriously about L5 again.
Charismatic cyberpersonalities operating principally on the ‘Net live as permanent residents of no nation

Bruce Sterling has gone out of his way to become one of these, minus the calls for his arrest and other negative things. (His calls to digitize everything you own that you possibly can. His and his wife's problems with no longer having an actual address.)
The New York Times op-ed series Disunion

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/

is very good for reviewing the history. There are a lot of surprising facts in those articles.
It's not difficult to avoid, is it? Sanitize input and use parameterized statements. I'd take longer to not do those things, personally.
A being such as Wintermute would be too intelligent to let on it exists, to the point where it would be mentioned on a social news site like HN.
Can the reason also be lack of forced obsolescence?

I have a HTC Magic (also known in the US as a Mytouch 3G). It is a first generation Android phone. I thought about upgrading recently and was beginning to look around.

What I did instead was to download the latest version of Cyanogenmod (and contribute some of the money saved to the project). I can actually say that I am putting off upgrading for the second half of 2011.

Has the Android space become synonymous with Windows XP ? Because I now see people upgrade phones to play Angry Birds (which I cant on my phone).

IMHO, a large upgrade happened in the PC world around the time Doom3 and Half Life 2 were released - so instead of people lining up for Android phones, they instead line up (figuratively) for the next killer game ... it would still be a solid reflection of the platform.
Investigadores dizem que torradas com mel sao ideais para combater a ressaca
Don't worry, whomever we are fighting, someone is making money out of it.
author can't grasp the idea of a catalyst. the civil war wasn't about the extremes of secession or bowing down to the federal government, it was just painted like that as all conflicts are. state autonomy is a spectrum not a boolean.
It should instead be a strong password that you can actually remember.

I agree that in theory a strong password one can remember is more secure than a randomly generated password that you have to write down.

However in practice, people just choose easy to guess passwords, or reuse the same password everywhere. That's a larger security problem, so the random passwords are more secure in practice.
Hey, I would like to see your app, but it is not found when I use "Android market" on my Nexus One. Perhaps your app is on another market place?
other languages take that guarantee more seriously

It's more than just a feeling. They certainly do.

But: Those languages are there. They live! Perl 5, for example, is there. It has not gone anywhere. Its community would love for you to use it. The fact that some people sometimes decide to use other things tells us something about the value of backwards compatibility in uncertain times.

My impression is that Ruby does change uncomfortably quickly, but not so quickly as its problem domains are changing. The rate of change of our software ecosystems is a symptom, not a cause. My god, the things that have happened in the last decade. Cheap virtual machines in the cloud. Widespread use of distributed version control. Client-side web apps. Mobile applications. NeXT cubes in your pocket for $250.
Telling someone to FORK IT is only useful if the maintainers are so incredibly incompetent or toxic that even accepting the massive penalties of a fork (especially massive for huge commercially popular projects) one is better off with the fork.

Nowhere else. I don't want to live in a world where this is considered an acceptable response to every small and big criticism or suggestion for improvement:

"Hey, maybe we should remove that dead code."

"IF YOU DON'T LIKE DEAD CODE, FORK IT!"

"Have we considered moving to Git from our crufty old CVS?"

"IF YOU DON'T LIKE CVS UP, FORK IT!"

"Docbook really isn't very easy to contribute doc fixes to; I was thinking about rewriting our manual in Markdown since it's really not that complex a document - "

"FORK IT!"
The full sentence is necessary here; headline is somewhat baffling, since Neptune obviously has orbited at SOME point before:

The planet Neptune completes its first full orbit since its discovery on Sept. 23, 1846.
One kid's thoughts on childish thinking
Spiral Matrixes - Harder, Faster, Stronger, Better
Yup. You have to completely let yourself stop after 1 line of code every time.But you'll find that you won't.

At that time I start a pomodoro timer so that I can keep making sure it's useful progress.
I agree completely with A for most things outside of embedded systems, and even those are generally getting more and more space, and Ruby isn't really ideal for that anyway.

I disagree with B somewhat. I currently have a machine running about a dozen different Rails applications with no problems at all. I am indeed unhappy with the fact that Ruby does not share code better, because I could either save money on monthly costs or add more applications (I do know about "Enterprise" Ruby but prefer to stick with the system version). And yes, memory is cheap, but costs do multiply when you have to pay for extra ram every month (ala Linode). I also don't want or need the overhead for separate virtual servers for each and every application I happen to write unless they get big.

However, yes, C) is really the main concern. And I've found that just using system (root) level gems is the best way of keeping everything sane. I don't install per-user gems. So for me RVM/Bundler represents a real extra step and more things to know about than just gems by itself.

In the end, I use Ruby a lot these days, so I'm not unhappy with RVM. It's well done, and generally a good thing. I guess I just don't like the direction it seems to represent: packaging each thing in its own world. I prefer a shared world with divergences only where they are required.
People lined up outside my local Sprint store to get the Evo 4G, but it was nowhere near what you would see at an Apple or AT&T store on iPhone release day. It's hard to measure passion for Android phones because on one hand there is the hardware, and the other is the Android platform. Aside from the Evo with a front-facing camera and 4G, or the Moment with a slide out keyboard, or the Droidx with a 4.5" screen, and a few other stand-outs, most Android phones are pretty vanilla hardware-wise. Android as a platform is great because it is free and open source, and has a lot of apps, but it is rough around the edges compared to iOS. It is easy to see why people are passionate about iPhone, because the hardware is amazing and the OS is polished. I love my Evo 4G, but I wouldn't love other Android phones like the Hero that are just generic Android phones.
Guess my gender
From the slashdot review [1], it seems that at least some of the "facts" Robert Class mentions fall quite solidly into the "folklore" category, e.g.:

First, each Fact is stated succinctly. (For instance, Fact 1: The most important factor in software work is not the tools or techniques used by the programmers, but rather the quality of the programmers themselves.) Then the point is fleshed out more fully -- in this case, that even with all the periodic hype for some hot new methodology that promises orders of magnitude greater productivity, the quality of your programmers matters far more than anything else (and even the best new methods only offer 5-35% increases).

1. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/27/1616256
Win Landsburg’s Money
Insightful Code: Common Lisp edition [pdf]
This is how he does it:

http://www.ihas1337code.com/2011/01/guess-my-gender.html
What Americans sound like
It is a beautiful building http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadnock_Building in a city with many beautiful buildings. Some say that the coffee shop http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/locations/view/Monadnock... is the best in chicago, and i hear that the NY staff likes it as well.

There are some particular mysteries of the building that Matasano is privy to. For example the "John Malkovich" door with its own office number: http://img228.imageshack.us/i/img0226yl.jpg/. And there is the fact that we are the only office on the 18th floor of a 16 story building. (And despite First Blood trying to get me with the swimming pool, that is not part of the deal.)

And the people here are absolutely awesome.
At the very least: Diplomatic phrasing. But diplomacy is important. If I'm going to be audacious enough to ask the majority of the human race to conduct their business in my native language I can damn well try to be excessively polite about it.

But it does go beyond that. "English-centric software" could be interpreted as "software designed primarily by and for English speakers". And we wouldn't want to advocate that, because that has historically been a problem. Before Unicode, software supported English character sets much better than foreign-language character sets (and Western Europe better than Eastern Europe, and Europe better than Asia...). Even now, a lot of software doesn't support right-to-left languages. This kind of English-centrism is not good. We don't want to perpetuate it.

What the OP is advocating is "English as a lingua franca of software engineering", which is in fact a different thing.
11/11/11: The Date Which Most Closely Resembles Corduroy, Ever
Y'know, AA isn't the greatest flying experience I've had, but the differences between airlines are really overplayed. The average AA experience is probably worse than the average Virgin experience, but you can have a tolerable time or a crappy time on either airline.

People dwell on tiny little annoyances when they're flying, because they're stuck in a metal tube with nothing to do for hours on end except dwell on things. This is why so many consumer complaints and stand-up comedians' jokes are about flying.
True, but what would be valuable is a blog post describing the thought process that led to this decision and what the perceived advantages and disadvantages are. If this is an experiment, it would be good to know the hypothesis.

It would be great to see a post in a couple of months time following up on the decision as well.
I have a feeling that procrastination is very personal thing - ie different for different people. For some reason this method works for some programmers. But only for programming tasks.

I'd like to believe that this is because it's something we love to do inherently but we fear the "setup costs" involved in actually doing the task.
> The fact that some people sometimes decide to use other things tells us something about the value of backwards compatibility in uncertain times.

Java, which seems to take it fairly seriously, is way more popular than Ruby is.

I agree that the world changes quickly, but disagree that you need to radically change stuff all the time.

For instance, in Rails, they went from <%= to <% back to <%= for forms. To me as an end user, that is completely useless churn.

Like I've said, I like Ruby and am mostly happy with it, but there's a tendency to rush off after the 'latest new thing!' that at times I view as counterproductive.
Emacs is one of those software systems I'm really grateful for. My life is significantly better because I'm in a world where it exists - "better" meaning more joyful, more positively productive, and more enabled to be of service (since I use it for writing articles and opensource software, etc. Not to mention the code behind my company, so it's even helping me create jobs.)
Why Is This News – Live NYE Spotify US Launch Countdown Edition
Project page:

http://code.google.com/p/iccle/

Daughter project:

http://code.google.com/p/iccle2
that's very different than what you seemed to be implying by "with one command I can update everything".

rvm is easier than creating your own deb or rpm
Groupon Fails To Bring Happiness To Japanese New Year Holidays
While it's true that people overthink small things, I find that the difference between my favourite airlines and my least favourites is big enough to make a flight enjoyable or not, and the stories I've heard of AA flights would, if I was on the flight, have made me completely hate it.
This is kind of at odds with your earlier comment...
> It's not the sort of thing that's easy to prove empirically one way or the other

On the contrary. People on real production environments encounter the lack of compatibility guarantee all the time. Bundler is a way to guarantee compatibility regardless of actual future release compatibility.

> other languages take that guarantee more seriously

In general this seems to be true, but they do so on a best-effort basis. None of them provide perfect guarantee; that is, if there's some kind of law that would allow you to sue them $1000000 every time they break compatibility you would be VERY rich by now.

For example many people who use Python in production environments use virtualenv to guarantee compatibility. Virtualenv has a similar function to Bundler. Java people just tend to vendor specific versions of dependencies and don't rely on shared dependencies at all.

Even high-profile libraries that have extremely well-defined compatibility guarantees - such as GTK - tend to mess up from time to time. A few years ago they made a change in GObject. If you upgraded GTK then that would break the GNOME login manager, rendering your desktop useless (this problem was later fixed).

Breaking compatibility because of human error happens all the time, and often in unexpected ways. Bundler and similar tools provide protection against that in return for a bunch of other disadvantages. The point is you can't see compatibility as an either-perfect-or-nonexistant thing.
Johnny Chung Lee to donate $5k for Khan-style linear algebra lectures
out of curiosity, what other issues does RVM pose to "others", other than having to apt-get install compilers?
also, wouldn't you need compilers anyway, for a whole lot of gems that use native extensions?
I just know that whenever I wanted to use the official ubuntu repository, I ended up not being able to install a gem because rubygems was too old. Since gem update --system doesn't seem to work on debian-based systems, I just had to install it from source again
Yes, once you've gone off and created your own package, you're off the upgrade train, and so it's something you ought to take very seriously.

rvm is easier than doing your own packages, certainly, but imagine if you had to use an 'easy', but different tool for everything on your systems.

Also, 'easy' it may be, but I'm not convinced of how things will work out in terms of security, whereas I have a lot of trust in Debian and Ubuntu's security teams. Time will tell, I suppose.
HN should automagically +1 every comment containing the word "whippersnapper". If you ask me. Which you didn't, but hey.
This wasn't a problem for a long time, but then a major release of release of rubygems came out, and then the switch to gemcutter happened, etc. I've gotten around this by installing everything but rubygems from the regular Ruby packages from the Debian (or ubuntu) repos. I install the rubygems.org version of rubygems and everything works great.
Good point about being forced to make visual presentation in the form of slides. It's too restrictive sometimes. Does anybody know good presentation tool that allows creating animated presentations not in the form of slides?

UPD. Discovered prezi.com - it's amazing!
Wow! Thanks for the link to tmdb.org. Nice alternative. Clean. Easier to navigate.
My guess: New maintainers:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg021...

I like the new policy, which seems to be one potentially disrupting new technology per major release. Previously, major releases tried to do too much at once, which lead to some very unstable and sometimes alienating .0 releases.
> All that was missing was Wintermute.

I'm here!

More seriously, the formation/actions of Anonymous remind me of the stand alone complexes (more formally termed "second-order simulacra," in semiotics) from Ghost in the Shell, one of the greatest cyberpunk anime series out there. It's astonishing that Shiro Masamune was able to predict this occurence as a result of the growth of the internet, and even more astonishing that it happened ~20 years before he predicted, prior to the existence of cyberbrains or synthetic "ghosts."
It is amusing to me how cyclical these things are. In 10 years we'll be having the same conversation about Twitter, or even Facebook.

That said, it seems a bit desperate, and even pedantic in an odd way, of AOL to throw up a flag on 'Main Street' to find new talent. It reminds me of a Margret Thatcher quote: "Being powerful is like being a lady, if you have to say you are, you are not.". Same goes here; if I wanted to work at AOL, I wouldn't need a billboard to tell me so.

Maybe they could just send out some CDs.
other sysadmins - don't you hate how all your users end up using very simple or duplicate passwords on everything, causing you eventual security problems?

If so, why isn't this, or something like it, preinstalled on all the client computers you have?
Another is avoid reading books/articles about time management techniques. The first 4-5 chapters of Eat That Frog explain exactly what everyone needs to know.
Applying it may be another story though.
If your hardware lists for $1M+ per box, you don't sell that with a webpage… The appearance of a price on a webpage is a clear indication that you will never speak to anyone at that company who understands your business or requirements…..EVER.

You do realize that Sun did have pricing for almost their entire line of servers and workstations on their website years ago, right? I distinctly remember playing with their configurator to put together a $1.6M+ many-processor system many years ago - if only my credit limit had been higher…
Because most users wouldn't use it. How do you access your passwords on a computer that doesn't have Keepass installed? I think only LastPass has a way of doing this. And sysadmins don't like trusting 3rd party services.