skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His example is too incomplete to translate properly (since I don't know the details of other stuff he's referencing), but the basic idea is this:

A callable object in Python (e.g., a function or method, though not necessarily limited to these) can take advantage of two special options in declaring its argument signature. One is a feature shared between Python and Ruby: you can prefix the final argument with a single asterisk, which will be interpreted as "accept any number of additional positional arguments, and store them as a list in a variable of this name".

So, for example:

def print_args(*args):
for arg in args:
print arg

Which does pretty much what it looks like it should do; you pass any number of arguments, and it echoes them back, each argument printed on a separate line.

The other part is something Ruby doesn't really support, because Ruby doesn't have a true analogue of Python's keyword arguments: using a double asterisk says, essentially, "accept any number of keyword arguments, and store them as a key/value mapping in a variable of this name".

So, for example:

def print_keyword_args(**kwargs):
for key, value in kwargs.items():
print "%s: %s" % (key, value)

If you then did, say, `print_keyword_args(name='Bob', email='bob@example.com')`, you'd get back the output (ordering of items may vary with the Python implementation, but usually you're not concerned with ordering -- that's what positional arguments are for):

name: Bob
email: bob@example.com

These can also be combined into a standard idiom for a callable which accepts any combination of any number of named and keyword arguments:

def takes_any_arguments(*args, **kwargs):
...

These sorts of idioms are incredibly useful for dynamic programming; for example, I work with (and help develop) the Django web framework, and our object-relational mapper uses the `kwargs` idiom to set up query methods which dynamically adapt the arguments they accept to the particular data model you're querying against.
Another Baby | A Mom's Life
Is there anything wrong with marketing? Sure on one hand you could say they "sold out". But underneath all the open source and hackers they are a company... a for profit company at that. They are pushing a product that is superior to the current standard and are forcing inovation that might have taken significantly longer had they not become a serious threat. So if a few tactics like setting world records helps spread the word and make the internet better, I'm all for it.

I would love to see Firefox become the industry standard. It will force other browsers to start playing by the rules, mainly living up to standards and working harder to make a better product. Competition is what creates better products. When you have a monopoly or are the only major player in an industry you aren't as innovative. You don't need to be. Look at the cell phone market pre iPhone... now everything is touch screen and has internet...
is is a very short article and he only got one question on web2.0/Cloud Computing.

He should be questioned more about this. Will certainly be fun to know more.
but I'm waiting for the language that is consistent all the way down.

Newspeak is coming... http://gbracha.blogspot.com/
Lots of good reading on plover.com. Back in my Perl days he was one of my favorite writers. He's also the only person who does a clear job of explaining how regular expressions work.
He could cite his sources, but assuming he is correct, he does refute what you say. He does quote:
“Instead, they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections.”

He also notes that traffic lights with cameras have in cities had shortened yellow times, which lead to an increase in both tickets, but also in crashes.

As long as the studies' science was done rigorously, a reason why the cameras cause more crashes isn't necessarily vital - Its only important that they prove that the cameras do cause more crashes.

All the red light cameras I've seen, were setup to the side of the road and were impossibly obvious. Clearly I haven't seen the hidden ones because they're hidden, but I doubt they actually do a good job hiding them.
Stephen king
And a variety of others that I'm probably forgetting.

I personally find CherryPy to be great for writing small web-apps. I haven't used it for anything larger yet, but I suspect that I'll continue to prefer it over other python web frameworks.
Not sure I am in a position to give an ADVICE on the matter but the CHOICE I made for my free service is to roll in advertising and affiliation when I have something that add value to the user experience of the service. E.g. I love receiving Amazon's reading recommendations!
How did an "indie game designer" get $180,000 and the time over three years to make this? There is more to this story than just "a smart, brash nerd with a dream can make the best video game ever..."
Isn't that a subset relation? webapps are a subset of software. So interchange only works in a single direction.
How to select the right birth announcement cards company?
There are hundreds of birth announcement card companies that you can find online today. It can be highly confusing when it comes to the selection of the right birth announcement card company. Here are some guidelines that will help you choose the best birth announcements card company.
That's generally untrue only because the printer usually comes with a reduced capacity cartridge. Also, generic ink is pretty damn cheap.
Agree.

Community requires cultivation.
Where do I sign up? :)
I love my Canon I860 mainly because it's easy to override the nag screen, and it breaks the colors down into multiple cartridges meaning I don't have to replace the whole thing just because blue ran out. That always pissed me off.
I sympathize with the critique of GoF design patterns, but the author is seriously distorting Alexander in his eagerness to dissociate him from them. "How can you distribute responsibility for design through all levels of a large hierarchy" is not the theme of A Pattern Language, which is easy to see when you consider that the book is largely about dwellings (which don't involve any large hierarchies).

I agree, though, that the most interesting aspects of Alexander never made it into GoF. His key insight is that buildings should be designed around what makes humans feel more alive in them. Applying that to software, you'd end up thinking more about projects and teams than about iterators or singletons.

Another aspect of Alexander that's relevant to programming is his exploratory approach to making buildings. As I understand it, he never designs anything up front. Rather, he studies the site, talks to the people, and builds a little at a time, allowing the thing to emerge in a way that is appropriate.
Bad screenshot. It blends into the article so I thought it was about him & ignored it. It took a while to find wtf he was talking about in the dzone article.
Higher Order Perl is a must read for anyone working in any mainstream dynamic language (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.). There are efforts afoot to port the examples to various other languages, much the way The Little Schemer has been ported and mangled in various ways. It's just a really enlightening book for anyone without a strong functional programming background (and probably even those with a lot of functional programming experience, as it happily bounces back and forth between functional idioms and Perl idioms to produce really interesting code).

It's one of a few books that I've checked out of the library a couple of times, only to end up buying it. (Last time I moved, I had something like 30 boxes of books...I sold more than half of them to Half Price Books, and promised myself that I do not buy books anymore. But some books are just mandatory.)
Incidentally, why was the MHz race a swindle?
The Risks vs. Rewards of Cloud Computing
Intrusions hit Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.
While I consider myself a WebKit man, it's good to see Firefox competing, The competition benefits everyone.

Unfortunately, IE is still quite slow. I think we'll soon reach the point where it's not the browser feature inconsistencies limiting what cross-browser JS apps can do, but the performance difference.
Isn't that a lot of focus and traction just around iPhone applications? Android never took off. Rest of the platforms elsewhere on the web - facebook, opensocial have now become stagnant.

At least in India jobs just killed the iPhone market signing agreement with Airtel and VodaPhone. These carriers here work on greedy algorithm and play no strategies. AirTel prices iPhone 3G 8GB at INR 32K == $800 USD. Insane that too to get locked out with airtel.
EC3: Enterprise Class Cloud Computing
Ah memories! I consider myself very fortunate to have been one of Damian's students. The container box store mnemonic took me way back.

He's not overstating the diversity thing either. In those days the CS program was C, Lisp, Prolog, C++, sh, MIPS assembler, operating system design, AI, digital logic, algorithms, formal methods, and discrete mathematics.

These days, the kids I hire from the same school mostly cruised through IS style degree with only Java/C# under their belts.
Since mealtimes are usually when families get to converse, the children do not learn the art of conversation

Children learn the art of conversation from television and practice it with their friends at school. From their families, they learn the art of neurotic bickering.

If being a kid in Britain means being a chav, as I have been lead to believe, that is sufficient to explain why it is the worst childhood in the western world.
Startup PR: Tips For Getting Publicity Without A PR Firm
Limit internet
i have limit internet and it is very expensive for me . how can i make it cheap
Gotta get all this new data streaming back integrated into Celestia ( http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ )
I agree that "large hierarchies" may be an overstatement, but it is worth remembering that Alexander does not concentrate total responsibility for the design of a signle in the hands of a single architect, or even a firm of architects, but rather, involves a large number of "end-users"-- and then iterates this notion both upward (to city planning) and downward (to interior design of individual rooms), so while the "hierarchy" may be relatively flat, the problem of distributed responsiblity is a real one (and a relevant one for software).
How do the YC Series AA documents differ from typical Series A documents?
Data Harvester Firefox Extension
Am I the only one who laments the days when BBC headlines weren't as overstated as the average tabloid?
The actual headline:

Black hole star mystery 'solved'
Object Oriented Software Design and Architecture and Planning are two very different activities.

It's no wonder that Patterns in each discipline should vary so widely.

As different from each other as they are from 1920s Stitching Patterns sold in catalogs with bulk cloth.
In-Game Gold Farming a $500M Industry
I am not entirely sure what you mean, but adding or removing methods from Ruby classes is extremely simple and there are a number of hooks in place that allow you to play with the class definition on inheritance. But here is another example of the power of Ruby metaprogramming. The example is sort of nuts, but something similar is actually used in the Camping microwebframework.

Blah = {
:foo => proc { puts "foo" },
:bar => proc { puts "bar" },
:baz => proc { puts "baz" }
}

def Monkey(method)
klass = Class.new
klass.class_eval do
define_method :shout do
Blah[method].call
end
end
return klass
end

class Chimp < Monkey(:foo)
end

class Gorilla < Monkey(:bar)
end

a = Chimp.new
a.shout # => "foo"

b = Gorilla.new
b.shout # => "bar"

Blah[:foo] = proc { puts "I have changed" }
a.shout # => "I have changed"
Rob Lorifice Joined Blind : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community
Careful with that!

Displaying the javascript for an ad and then hiding it using CSS is a very bad idea.

a) adds page load time cause the user still has to download and execute the javascript to include the ad before it's hidden.

b) might be considered fraudulent to pull an ad and then hide it.

I highly suggest controlling ad inclusion directly in the tpl file.
It would be easier, faster, and less of a waste of time to just use the more reliable sources to begin with. It is for this reason that I'm surprised that truemors still gets mentioned. TMZ is more accurate, I bet.
This is the opposite of the problem.

For any non-trivial application, the user needs to understand the data model they are working with. They don't need to know the gritty details of how things are encoded and enumerated, but they do need to be aware of the entities and their relationships. This is true for any kind of user, savvy or not.

Deep usability problems happen when the application omits, hides or distorts aspects of the model that the user is manipulating. For example:

- inline formatting codes in word processors

- fake folders in filesystems e.g. My Documents

- "apply" button in dialogs

- wizards

Design should start with the user model, then create the user interface to manipulate it. The internal model can be different from the user model but they should have a one-to-one mapping.
I loved the part that said: in diversity there is power. You should know as many programming languages and paradigms as possible. And code every day to stay fit.
* Everything in Python feels like a symbol table hack.

>It isn't bad at all. (And does not really matter)

* First-class symbols.

>Ok, but python has first class functions.

* Blocks and lambdas. I've read GvR's take on this.

>GvR is right.

* Method definitions in Ruby don't need to accept a "self" argument.

>It isn't bad at all. (And does not really matter)

* Ruby has first-class Regexps. Python has an "re" library. You know what else has an "re" library? C.

> Ruby has private methods. JAva has private methods too. Therefore ruby is bad.

And so on...

p.s. And if you need oop features why use ruby instead of java?
Actors paid to queue for Poland's iPhone launch
I want an ink-jet printer with a very large ink canister, enough to print 20,000 pages. Then we could have competition to see who can make those 20,000 pages of ink fit in a smaller canister.
Cuil, the company that announced it was beta 10 months prior, refined its crawler multiple times when people start complaining, and the one that did the traditional massive PR push a couple weeks back but failed because their marketing team are just inept?

That one?
Am I the only one who considers Perl6 dead and irrelevant? I haven't seen anything approaching a usable product out of the efforts, and how long has the project been underway now? By the time it's finished, Perl5 is irrelevant as all the kids will be using Python, Java, Ruby, maybe D. Legacy applications won't switch from Perl5.
I love how it doesn't tell me anything, its for me to explore and understand on my own!

Free Play, in Ender's Game by Scott Card.
I stick by what I said.

I believe communication to be the fountainhead of motivation and inspiration in any functioning work environment.

I say that the author is in the business of telling rather than the business of doing because anyone who is doing knows that it's their relationships with those around them that keeps their limbs moving.

People were not born to be communicated to. Communication is not a one-way street. The author's strategy is optimized for telling rather than sharing, accounting in no way for the value of discussion, critique and collaboration.

A strategy of working in small teams can be great, but don't let its motivator be to cut out as many communication points of failure as possible.
Perl 6 is an academic research language, which is weird, normally languages come from academia into commercial use.
Well, except the example you've given isn't really "metaprogramming" in the sense I'm trying to get at. Here's a Python translation which shows why:

def Monkey(word):
class _Monkey(object):
def shout(self):
print word
return _Monkey

class Chimp(Monkey("foo")):
pass

class Gorilla(Monkey("bar")):
pass

c = Chimp()
c.shout() # prints "foo"

g = Gorilla()
g.shout() # prints "bar"

In other words, the Ruby code you've provided is basically a class factory taking advantage of closures. The Python example shows that a bit more clearly.

What I'm looking for is something equivalent to Python's "metaclass" declaration, which lets you completely control the way the class object is created. I've been told by fairly knowledgeable Rubyists that there isn't really an equivalent, and that after-the-fact monkeypatching or factory solutions like yours are the only way to come at the problem in Ruby.
Intel cuts electric cords with wireless power system
The first reaction I had when I read this was "This would be fantastic on a much larger scale to power electric cars".

I believe that this kind of technology would eliminate the range debate between pure electric cars and those that rely on petroleum.

That being said, the only downside I can come up with off the cuff is environmental, as in what impact would a large scale magnetic field network have on migrating birds and the associated environmental consequences that would happen as a result.

Anyone have any insight?
Co-Pays are Overrated on California PPO Health Plans
Most people focus on the price when they are shopping for health insurance. Price is important but a very important part of the buying decision is weighed upon how much it will cost when it’s time to go to the doctor and exercise the almighty co-pay. This seems to be the most important factor for some people who buy health insurance. Buying a high priced plan with low co-pay and the assumption it will cost you less when you go to the doctor’s office is a big mistake.
True, that's the story I would love to hear.
You could try implementing a network based on RFC 1149.
No it is not. You dodged the question again, by throwing a hardly related blog of someone else at it.

How many people will use yield _AND_ self.send in the same method please?! That seems like an awfully complicated and contrived example. Who the heck does this?
disposable cameras.
Talk about porting: The Little Schemer was The Little Lisper when I was in school.
One thing I dont understand is

print word

where does "word" come from?

Anyway, this setup is in no way different to ruby's super

super("foo")
super("bar")

I really fail to see the point here. What is different?
I simply do not see what the python example shows "a bit more clearly" here. I dont even get where "word" comes from.

Besides, "monkeypatching" is a deragotary term invented by pythonistas who do not understand Ruby or think that by adding complexity you can feel "meta" programming so clearly. In my opinion the metaprogramming demanding people are wanking hippos that continually feel a need to add needless and useless complexity on top of problems and in situations where there simply should not be any of that.

Both ruby and python are way to complicated. Can you believe this? At the same time, both are a LOT more elegant than languages like perl or php. Perl 6 still has not managed to get rid of the useless ; at line ends. They managed to eliminate () around if's.

Wow. I am soooo impressed. In 100 more years Perl 7 will be THE best language arrr!!!

But it is a shame that there are not more good languagesl ike ruby or python, because in fact there simply are not that many good languages existing anyway. It takes so much effort to grow a language....

And yes - both ruby and python are very good languages. The fact that there are idiots using the language who have a loud mouth badmouthing either of these two decent languages is annoying, but one can not do much about it.

For everyone else I recommend reading the "why it does not matter" blog. It really summarizes a lot of why ruby and python fill a very similar ecosystem, behaving like rivals who continually try to point out how incredibly stupid the other language is.

Grow up. Use what you prefer, and end this stupid war.
1. The example of the working syntax right now would be:

a = App("test", width=200, height=400)
a.insert(Button("close",a.quit))
a.run()

Should give you an idea of what I am thinking of.

I actually have working with wxGlade for a while, and it generates wxPython code, but I am not happy with that.

Another solution is to make windows like Django models.

2. this a python module that you can include with your app, that just calls the specific gui binginds on real time.

3. No relation with Clutter. The idea is to be gui tookit agnostic.
Looks contrived, because I dont know many ruby users who would write fun1 for a method. Why? Because in ruby there are methods. You dont find many people doing "fun" for a method - the intent clearly was a "function". But where are they? ;)

Anyway, here is the one that comes to my brain flow naturally. It seems python writers need () in order to feel happy, otherwise they think they get confused about things (hopefully they dont have a small brain):

fun1 x

fun1 x + y

fun1 x + y.foo

fun1 x + y.foo bar

What will happen in this perfectly valid Ruby code? Where do the parentheses belong? Do you know off the top of your head?

fun1(x)
fun1(x + y)
fun1(x + y.foo())
fun1(x + y.foo(bar))

Btw you omitted what x and y are. My first assumption is that these must be variables that allow the + method

It does not really make a lot of sense though, give the last example:

class Cat
def initialize(name)
@name = name
end
def foo(how = :h)
case how
when :h
how = 'happily'
when :u
how = 'unhappily'
end
puts @name+' meows '+how+'.'
end
end

y = Cat.new 'Tom'

y.foo # "Tom meows happily."
bar = :u
y.foo bar # "Tom meows unhappily."

x = '"At the end of the day "

x + y.foo bar # "At the end of the day Tom meows unhappily."

etc.. I simply have no idea what fun1 should do. Maybe it will involve Jerry mouse and return a conditional story where it is explained why Tom the cat is unhappy.

Btw this is a really contrived example because I tried to model your stipulation of the above code into this. It really makes no sense at all to use variables without any real idea why one should use that.

Why do people WANT to be complex when simplicity is so much more elegant?
This comment field is not very good, it killed my newlines! :(

I demand the pre tag or a "code" tag or something that allows us to add code nicely formatted :P
OpenBSD + dwm + vnc here

alt+1: my main coding using vim (no mouse, no arrow key)
alt+2: vncviewer to my mac mini for safari, ff3 (mouse)
alt+3 ... alt+9: almost never used

i 1-1-map ~/www/pages/webapp{1,...,n) to my OpenBSD colo
hg push/pull/update

i'm reconsidering attach/detach screen session between servers, but i can't stand emacs/GNU key-binding (even after xmodmap my caps to ctrl) ... anyone knows screen-like program that uses vi-keybinding?