skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have done some web development before (maybe python, maybe php, maybe ASP 1.0) go read the getting started guides and get rolling. It's a big framework and there is a lot there but if this not your first rodeo it's not going to take long to get it. You know what MVC is and rails is just anther (good) web framework with some nice code generation to start you off fast. Oh and that ORM can be handy too!

If you are new to Ruby or web dev I would suggest you first start with Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com

That will give you an idea of what basic basic web dev looks like in ruby without the overhead of a huge framework to take in.

After you have a simple hello world running with Sinatra then see about adding an external gem. (Maybe the 'shotgun' gem mentioned on the Sinatra site) then learn about bundler http://gembundler.com and get Sinatra running with that setup. Look at the template languages (erb, haml) and play with those. When you find yourself playing with middleware then maybe look at rails and see what it has to offer. At this point you will already have a felling for how everything fits together with a rack based web app (Sinatra and Rails both use Rack) at a little lower level and I think you will have a better experience with rails and be more productive because of it.

EDIT: Submissions that have links to articles with questions marks in the title are annoying. Thought it was an ask HN at first.
I would emphatically recommend that if possible you attempt to give yourself a good grounding in ruby metaprogramming before learning rails.

It will help you greatly in understanding how and why rails works the way it does.

The rails internals contain lots and lots of "magic" stuff, which if rails is your first introduction to ruby, you will find you have trouble differentiating what is ruby and what is rails's magic.
An even what people think of fair often isn't.

I wish I could remember where I heard this..

Two people have to share a cake. The reasonable person asks for half the cake, the unreasonable person asks for the whole cake. They compromise and split the difference - the reasonable person gets quarter of the cake and the unreasonable person gets three quarters.

Quite often people get more in life simply by expecting more than their fair share - and it works as most of us are reasonable.
Unfortunately, it's doesn't make any sense until it's too late.
Check out http://www.prometheusreg.com/. We moved to Sunnyvale from Minnesota and leased our apartment sight unseen. We later moved to another one of their complexes in San Mateo and they transferred the lease. They offer month-to-month leases, I think they manage a lot of corporate housing.

The apartments are a bit on the pricey side, but they're so nice. Good luck, and welcome to San Francisco!
This guy's obviously never tried posting anything to Italy.
If you're up for challenge, I'd try "Ed's Programming Contest Problem Archive" at http://www.karrels.org/Ed/ACM/, and the Baylor archive at http://icpc.baylor.edu/Past/PastProblems.html.

Both contain problem sets from the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
Macroglossa releases his own Safari Browser extension
The kind of bribe discussed in the article isn't like a campaign contribution, it's regular people bribing rank-and-file government clerks and police, which happens as a matter of course in India and many other countries.
> I think the only reason for worry is if someone decides they're an XYZ guy, and that's all they do.

That's exactly I will retract offer to this guy if I ever got such a letter. I don't really object his position to not program on a specific platform. It's themindset.
Absolutely. When I interviewed for my current job one of the interviewers walked in, looked at my resume and said "Wow a resume with no Windows on it. Nice."

Not that I'm bashing the Microsoft stack mind you, it just doesn't interest me. I'd do it to pay the bills if I had to but there's enough depth in the industry that, as you say, I'm not terribly worried by not knowing everything.
Tell HN: Google Search With "site:News.YCombinator.com" Is Your Friend
Fellow founders and developers, Google search with "site:news.ycombinator.com" is your friend. The "Search" link is easy to overlook in the footer of the Hacker News site. So create a link for it in your browser. There is no question, either business or technical, that I've had as a start-up founder that I've not been able to find a dozen good answers by doing a Google search using "site:news.ycombinator.com".
some major problems in US schools are caused by an obsession with small class sizes.

I started out disagreeing with you, but we're definitely on the same page here. In the US, there's a cult of small class sizes. It frequently seems as if class size itself is taken as a proxy for the quality of the education, to the exclusion of any other factor.

But all the literature I've been able to find is inconclusive on the impact of class size -- and the very fact that it's inconclusive should boldly demonstrate that it's not the single, overriding factor. The only thing I can find that seems to be accepted is that smaller classes can help "at-risk" generally minority inner-city students who aren't getting educational support at home. But in the general case, nobody's been able to show conclusively that it's got any impact at all.

So why do we still make this an end goal rather than a means to an end?
If you like this, searchyc.com will blow your mind.
Also, hitting control-return in the omnibox will prepend "www" and append ".com". For example, you could type theoatmeal and hit control-return to be taken directly to www.theoatmeal.com.
The author should mention that to trade on these alternative markets one must be an accredited investor (ie have a net worth of $1 million or earn $200k per year). He kind of makes it sound like any employee with equity could take advantage of privileged information.

But that's not the case, and if I wanted to buy into these companies, for any reason, I couldn't because I'm not sufficiently wealthy enough. That's too bad, because I'm certainly much more educated about this world than I am the general public market.
Are you choosing a language or a framework? You should try both and play with both of their frameworks and take the path that feels right and gets things done most quickly initially. It's not one or the other. It's have tools in your belt and know how to use them.
I developed a coded language when I was a kid, which I still use sometimes. I have looked at Ricky's notes but all I have is some theories based on my experience with my own language. Hopefully that helps.

My own language is letter-for-letter encryption, which makes it a lot easier to memorize the key (I was 8 years old when I invented mine). I suspect that is what Ricky did since I noticed that some individual characters were corrected.

Also, after almost 40 years of using my own language, I have developed "shorthand for the shorthand", so some of my words are abbreviations or shorthand for actual words - which makes letter-for-letter decryption tricky. When things get complicated, I insert a character I know does not belong in my key to indicate the beginning and end of some shorthand alteration. I suspect Ricky might have used parenthesis.

My key duplicates some characters (i.e. they mean something else depending on how they are used). I am wondering if Ricky's numbers are not always numbers. One piece that struck me, was the "99.84S2..." sentence because in my own system I don't use the number zero. So I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if Ricky thought the same way, and a period is shorthand for a zero in a telephone number?

I do not write things down in code just for the fun of it. Although it is fun trying to decipher code. I use it to write down passwords, bank account numbers, etc. that I don't want anyone to know. In other words, very precise pieces of information. The problem is, for all we know, Ricky could have been an aspiring artist and these could be his lyrics that he thought were worth millions. This is a lot of writing for one codified note. My guess is that these are several pieces of information that may not be necessarily related, such as a list of contacts or a log/diary of some sort. The note on the FBI site looks like it was all written down in one sitting. Therefore, there is a high likelihood that these notes were transferred from somewhere else (or Ricky's head) as a way to safeguard something for himself and nobody else (i.e. the law). Therefore, the diary/log idea is less likely than a list of contacts or places.

I would love to hear how this story ends.
Two books I've recently read are The Age of American Unreason by Jacoby [1] and Unscientific America by Mooney & Kirschenbaum [2]. Both are worth reading, but Jacoby gives a deeper and more thoughtful analysis and spends considerable time on historical roots and trends.

This topic is tied heavily to politics, and I hesitate to get into that here. I will say this: science is about exploring, like math is about exploring. Viewing science and math as pragmatic skills reduces them to engineering and accounting. Now there's nothing wrong with engineers and accountants and we desperately need and value their skills. But we also need scientists and research mathematicians who explore mysteries for the sake of discovery. There are a lot of subtle implications of that which are completely lost on people who think of science and math as purely functional, vocational pursuits. The benefits of science and math that have been capitalized on by engineers are spin-offs of people with curiosity exploring for exploration's sake. When exploration for its own sake is devalued, the engineers of the world find once fertile ground growing barren.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Age-American-Unreason-Susan-Jacoby/dp/...

2. http://www.amazon.com/Unscientific-America-Scientific-Illite...
I personally prefer Python and Django. Like hucker said, there is nothing wrong with the Python MySQL drivers (although I prefer PostgreSQL too). That said, it's a personal preference and Ruby on Rails is an outstanding platform. If your sysadmin has trouble deploying any one of them, hire a better one.
A year ago I would have the site pulled up daily.

These days, I'll view it once or twice a week.
Okay, that is just sexy looking. I feel like I need to make a gaming site now or something.
>Submissions that have links to articles with questions marks in the title are annoying. Thought it was an ask HN at first.

Agreed, so did I!
I'm not sure about sites that let you download all their problems in one go, but look at my list of sites of programming problems here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4697615/are-there-any-sit...
This is really ironic given http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2381608
Apple, Intel-Backed Rules on Conflict Minerals Stall Exports
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps there were other people exploiting the same weakness, and this arrogant prick was the only one caught?
I think these results will be inaccurate. How can I answer this question if I run Windows 7 as my OS, but use a Linux VM to do development work? Does Windows 7 count as my primary development system? What if I run Windows 7 at work, but do all my personal projects on Linux or OSX? Again, it's unclear to me, what counts as one's primary development system is in this scenario.

It's also worth noting that the pole permits more than one selection, which defeats the purpose of asking, "What is your primary development system".
I chose Ruby because of Heroku.
Thanks for the book recommendations, dwc!
This is a variation of the famous question used to judge the level of testosterone in men in regards to "alpha" behaviour.

Apparently most people would be ok with at least a 20% share, getting less than that and they will demand nobody gets any cake.

The more testosterone in your blood, the bigger share you demand. So for example an average guy will want 50% to 60% of the cake, whereas a more alpha male will demand 75% and get away with it because the threshold for "no deal" is 80%.

What this teaches us is: Ask for as much as you can get away with even if it feels utterly wrong.
http://www.ioi2009.org/index.jsp;jsessionid=0B6696CAD77A7898...

This is the International Informatics Olympiad 2009's page. They have PDFs. Problems range in difficulty, but it does take a lot of thought and time to solve each of the problems.
To quote Bruce Schneier:

"trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet." ( http://www.schneier.com/essay-126.html )

And that is what scares the current content industry. And that is why they want such draconian laws applied to the Internet, when such laws, as the author of the subject article accurately points out, would never fly in the non-internet realm.
I will suggest you to start with the one you are most comfortable with. Both has strong community. Being a pythoneer, I can assure that python community and IRC is very has lots of people who are really very helpful.
I dont know much about ruby.
In US Culture, there's still plenty of reason to discourage people from offering bribes. Offering bribes encourages corruption. The victims of a bribe in the US are typically everyone BUT the briber and the collector. If you're at a restaurant and bribe a maitre d' to bump up your priority for a table, he pockets some cash you get your table and all the people following the rules get boned. The briber is not being exploited at all. This scenario is probably not illegal and certainly not a big deal, but is a good example of the way our cultural rules usually work.

In a place like India, where it's typical for government workers to expect bribes and refuse service without it, or for police to hassle people about trivial things like whether the mirror on your bike is adjusted properly, it's really more appropriately called extortion. The victims are the people paying the 'bribes.' The only one who really benefits is the collector. In that case it makes more sense to focus on solving the problem from that angle.
Pretty good advice. Those tips and others were later printed in Charles J. Sykes' book "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School" (http://www.the50rules.com)

The full list of the rules can be found @ http://www.squidoo.com/50Rules
I tried to learn Ruby and Rails at the same time, but found it stressful to learn Ruby's elaborate syntactic sugar and Rails' enormous API at the same time. For me it certainly helped prototyping my application in Sinatra first and then dive into Rails once I understood more quirks of the language and it's web stack.
Honestly you seem to be focusing a heck of a lot on a <b> tag here.
It should be obvious there's a wide range here. On one end there's content that absolutely belongs on HN but nobody would ever find unless its self posted (the non-regular blogger who writes a great essay). At the other end is someone just trying to promote their latest blog post, even though their last 40 posts to HN didn't get any love.

How to get the good end only?
Forza Motorsport 4 adds Kinect features
I never want to be Sachin Tendulkar - by Harsha Bhogle
Nice roundup, good event. The Qwerly talk was not just hilarious, was really really interesting to hear their true rollercoaster ride, and see the way the changed their product over time and made it into a winner without VC (well, I'm assuming without given that they originally asked for some and got none).
Getting a business idea off the ground
I had to read the title three times to not see Mac and Cheese.
We've had several interns, most of which were from Canada (University of Waterloo apparently has strict experience requirements for undergrads). There's not too much of a challenge - contact different startups, you'll be sponsored, you'l come here and be put through some immigration unpleasantries, and go home at the end of three months or so.

Give it a try! HN is only one route to find internships - check with friends, online contacts, and your university to see if they have any placement program.
The problem is that the reporter doesn't know that the details of the breach mentioned in this article are facts. The figures, that there were 6,480 files totaling 300 GB of data likely came from the prosecution. So the reporter needs to get himself off the hook and either attribute it ("the prosecution says") or use words like "allegedly," "reportedly," etc.
MacBook Pro 13" from 2010 with 4GB of RAM. I also run Windows XP/7 and Ubuntu 10.10 on VirtualBox 4.0.

From my experience VirtualBox is faster and more reliable than Vmware.
Save money on textbooks
Many of the Mac shortcuts don't work. For instance,

F9 - Tile or untile all open windows

does nothing on my Snow Leopard. Perhaps he's referring to an older version of Mac OS X?
If your development team makes software for internal use and internal use only, isn't their primary function by definition to improve productivity of the rest of the company?

I think that needs a to be ammended to …to cost effectively improve productivity… That are lots of ways to spend X to save X/1000 500 times over. As an example…

While opening a new checking account for a new LLC I watched the poor banker enter my SSN 6 times[1]. Each time she went to a new "page" she had to enter the SSN which she had written on her desk blotter calendar. Then at the end the computer refused to open the account because it wanted an EIN instead of an SSN.[2]

There are at least three[3] problems there that slow down employees, annoy them, and led to compromised customer security. None of them are show stoppers or direct money losses and I doubt any will ever be fixed.

A wrinkle here is that it is banking software, and those handful of developer hours might also come with hundreds of hours of compliance, verification, and legal work.

[1] She typoed a digit the first time and actually hit another customer's SSN. That had to be about a 1/100 or less chance. Being a smallish town that caused confusing because it was a woman other than my wife.

[2] It was already after closing time by then, so they worked on it the next day and appeased the computer somehow. Probably an override code from someone able to take responsibility.

[3] Let's count…

• Application flow requires a SSN repeatedly to accomplish a simple task.

• Employees are writing down customer SSNs in visible locations on their desks. (If you'd ever needed to reset your online password with these guys you would faint now.)

• After seeing the SSN repeatedly it is only at the last stage that the application validates the SSN for the actual purpose of reporting tax information rather than its use as a database key.

• Bonus item: I couldn't see the screen, but she typed several times more characters than I gave her as information. That's just disrespectful of users.
This is a new posting, with some interesting data. Even so, Benford's Law has been posted here many, many times:

http://searchyc.com/benford
Microsoft undoubtedly has a lot of smart people and a lot of fascinating research. They also have a serious problem turning that research expertise into shipped product.
On a related note: Use BetterTouchTool to re-bind four-finger upward swipe to tile/untile open windows in the frontmost application, and re-bind four-finger side swipe to activate the next/previous open window in the frontmost application. The default actions for those gestures are useless, IMO.

I didn't see him mention Control-L for putting focus on the location bar in Chrome and other web browsers. I use that constantly.
I apologize. You are correct, the HP48gx is RPN only. Don't know why I thought otherwise. I had it in my head for some reason that 48 did both (it kind of does but not really) and that it gave the answer as 4.
Even better: http://searchyc.com

ADDED IN EDIT: I see patio11 got there before me - I'll let this stand, though.
Can someone help explain to me why the HN community isn't interested in the technological underpinnings of the next of wave payment technology? [I, personally, prefer cash.]
Having someone do the work and mentoring them are really two different things. I was approached about mentoring someone last year, but it really wasn't something I was set up to actually do.

I've subbed out some work to someone else recently, and we have conversations, he does the work, and he's learning, but I don't think it's equivalent to a 'mentorship' in the way most people think.
Thanks. However, I've found the community to be sensitive at times and wanted to know if there were additional implicit rules that are to be respected.
So, basically, they want privacy laws online to work similar to privacy laws offline--so that they can ignore copyright laws online that they would not be able to so easily ignore offline?
I don't believe this is particularly relevant, at least on the part of the OP.
I usually consider these exercises as fun, but pointless. This certainly meets that criteria, but I could actually see using this in a project.

It is very hot.

Are you also creating the 'Log in' button with CSS3? It's a little off on my screen. Browser is Chrome 9 on Windows 7: http://imgur.com/E9tif
Android Will Seize 45% of Smartphone Market by 2016, Says ABI Research
I'm surprised that nobody is horrified by how deceiving this is. Its definitly a way for delaware to make money. May be it's just the way law is, you can't use your own judgement on if something is fair or not.

Bringing it back to a computer metaphor would be :
Of course you should have done backup, everybody knows that ! You now need to pay 89000$ whether or not you need your data on that drive. You should have consulted an enginineer before buying a computer of course !

See... small mistake, disproportionous response.

At least think that you did nothing wrong, it's just that the law is unfair.
I don't think it's much of a leap to question the programmer rather than the compiler when "Hello World" won't compile.

Maybe it's the compiler, but there would need to be some evidence that it was so before I went with that option.
Who has ever been a part of a mass lawsuit for making a copy of a DVD and giving it to a friend?
To support his point, I registered a startup in Cyprus a while ago, we made it clear to the lawyer that we had very little money and we needed it as cheaply as possible, but he still had us register for trademark, VAT, and who-knows-what other bells and whistles we never needed. It cost us a few thousand dollars more than if we had to do it ourselves (it was about $50 and filling out two forms to do it ourselves).

When it came to dissolving the company, the lawyer quoted us $3000 to dissolve. Not trusting anyone by that point, I called the companies house and they said that, to dissolve the company, all we had to do is fill out a form at their offices, we did it and we didn't even have to pay a cent.

Many lawyers will give you advice that leads to them getting paid more rather than benefitting you.
Deployment of Django apps are becoming as easy as deploying Rails apps to Heroku. Two simular services for python in private beta are www.ep.io and www.gondor.io