skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, if you already know Python, Ruby just isn't that big a leap. You've got to jump further to find something that will be useful/mind altering.
Also I think a follow up poll to this is how much caffeine and sugar do you inhale daily.
Google Offers A Geolocation API For Gears (But It Only Works On Windows Mobile)
"[...]and the game was just a pretext."

Which is exactly the point. Without the pretext of the game, less people would show up for the gathering, resulting in a lower "resulting laughter" quotient.

As one of the "shy ones", I can confirm that having a shared activity encourages me to come to the event, and ensures that noone is "left out" (as their character has something to do, even if they personally have nothing to add socially). An interaction within the confines of the 'game' encourages more voluntary interactions, not to mention giving people a pretext for conversation, etc.
I just use Backpack as a to-do list and bookmark holding pen.
For the record, I wasn't suggesting that I would say in my interview "please pay me extra for my electricity", I was aiming more for the general feel of "how do salaries for WFH jobs typically compare with office-based jobs", and suggesting things like electricity costs as potential factors as to why I thought there might be a difference in the first place
Who Invests In VC?
Ending oil also needs to address chemical feedstocks.

http://books.google.com/books?id=xH_JyuL08K4C&dq=methano...
my final project for electronics engineering required a large assembly program. that was incredibly discipline-demanding. though nothing countless macros and subroutines couldn't solve. also met VHDL in that major

all the web things, CSS HTML, JS, PHP etc. XML things like XSLT and XQuery (both of which btw are strict functional languages), etc. both JVM and .NET runtimes. API's can be their own sorts of languages. matlab, mathematica and so on

funnily, i grew up on Java. but everything changed once i met languages with first-class functions

my current favorite languages are Lua and Arc. if Arc had a solid implementation i would use it a lot
To go one step further, to be at an "advanced level" in a language also means to be idiomatic in it.

I have a hard time believing that's achievable in a "couple of weeks", regardless of the level of someone's "genius".

(Also, just because something compiles doesn't mean you're good at it.)
The link to the download didn't work for me, but i was able to get it working through firefox's addons site. Installed, and i'm really really liking it. Maybe i can stop e-mailing myself links now?
I like how this conversation has gone on for so long, but on the whole, everyone's still polite and detailed in their responses. :-) warm fuzzy feeling
CNET Article Speaks to Widget Challenges on Social Platforms by Widgetbox Blog
FWIW, the wiki that Apple includes in Leopard Server is also written in Python. Apple apears to be making much more use of Python than it is of Ruby.
Seth's Blog: Ads are the new online tip jar
actually not really similar to betfair at all.

As far as I know there was never any betting (although since the article states that tatts owned it - it might have been planned)

For years coworkers / friends have run contests to pick the winners each week of the season.. (8 games a week x 22 rounds). I've seen various bits of specialised software / spreadsheets to track this over the years.

The site manages all of that for you - so that the IBM comp that I was in a couple of years back had about 1500 people..

I think they mainly make money from advertising - on the site and occasional emails. Off memory there was a freemium option to pay extra money to remove the ads from your office comp (or something like that)

Do you have similar kinds of sites (or offce competitions) in the US?
GREAT point, the writer clearly read between the lines here. Though I think saying he advocates click-fraud is a bit much, this is a good point in stating that advertisers are losing ROI from people clicking ads to say 'thanks' when they really don't care about the marketed product, much less would even buy it. Fantastic article, brief it may be.
Thanks man. Will certainly post more details. Drop me a note if you have any specific questions.
Google’s Swings and Misses
Then what you want is jRails, which subs jQ in for Prototype in all the Rails helpers and removes Prototype from your project. You "plugin install" it, forget about Prototype, and use nothing but jQuery from then on.
No he doesn't.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/beating-the-...
I guess my answer is a longer one than you would want, but I will put it out here anyway... I use Windows, and the first thing I do is move my home dir to C:\home\raju. This is where everything thats I will ever need to backup resides along with another directory, C:\projects.

To answer your question, my projects directory looks a lot like truebokso's, with sub-dirs language based (with does not work all the time) and sub-directories to individual projects.

Console on windows gives you the ability to wire up the console opening up in any directory, and so I use that to get to any project I am working on at a particular point in time.

I blogged about this arrangement a while back -

http://looselytyped.com/2008/05/04/windows-reinstallation/

Hope this helps.
(though my intention was not to derail the conversation. This is a niggling difference between ruby and python that irks me :-D)

Right I would be arguing as the latter.

My problem is that these small niggling differences between all the different types of callable items (including what I think is simply disgusting use of a special form "yield") confuses the whole mess.

I'm glad that all these different ways to use callables exists. That's "A good thing" in my opinion. But I can't help but feel that their quirks and differences couldn't be consolidated into a single experience.
Were this to become popular practice, surely:

(1) Overall advertising industry spend would remain constant. CPC would go down. Distribution of advertising revenue may shift slightly towards sites with more "savvy" users.

(2) If, miraculously, distribution shifted significantly, advertisers would view this as damage and work to route around it.
How in the hell is this an operating system?

Also, Java, ew.
I'll join the peanut gallery and suggest that if "irrevocably changing the way you approach writing code" is the goal, you spend a month with Lisp or C before you do Ruby.
If ammonia production is already insufficient for fertilizer requirements, wouldn't using it as fuel squeeze food production even more?
Interesting. Algorithm is king and underestimating design: those do sound like two distinctive Google weaknesses. If so, I'd be surprised if they stop. These are the sorts of things that get baked into cultural DNA early on and tend not to change.

Edit: At the same time, these have been two of Google's greatest strengths (in their core context).
"Bugs: It's hard to use this command without singing."
Two counter words: Ariane, Nuclear (as in 80%+ national electricity)... not too shabby as far as engineering goes... I would add Airbus, LHC, etc... but two are enough.
I do this already. If I see something really good I see if there's an ad to click on.
IPhone GUI PSD
Though I'm pro-Python on maintainability grounds, there's one Lispish feature Ruby has that I wish were available in Python, that's not even in the Py3000 spec: continuations. The Ruby community doesn't seem to be too enthusiastic about using them though. We're just beginning to see continuation-based web framework experiments on Ruby, in the spirit of Seaside in Smalltalk.

The continuation-based web frameworks make state management on the server transparent; but they have a scalability problem since state can't move between servers or even be taken out of memory on the same server.

Now once somebody makes serializable continuations practical - certainly a hard problem - it would be a jolt to web development on at least the same that Rails has been.
Doesn't synthetic ammonia production currently rely on petroleum?

Also, the other major use for ammonia is as a major fertilizer for food products. Your ammonia idea will spike the food prices just like ethanol except that it will strike every food product instead of just corn.

Still, I am not an expert on this subject. Information from knowledgeable sources would be appreciated.
Is Arabic Facebook's Next Language?
You can have both... Jobs
Yahoo Search brings Search Assist, SearchMonkey, and more to the iPhone
You can do exactly the same thing using Python descriptors. No advantage to Ruby here.
Admittedly, Django was what first got me really going with Python (we started using it for some small projects as a possible replacement for PHP a few jobs ago).

There are however also some great alternatives within the Python community, in addition to Django which I no longer tend to use.

Pylons, which is very Rails like including having similar WebHelpers functions, and a port of the Rails "routes" system.

TurboGears, which is currently re-tooling itself to be based on Pylons.

And a variety of others that I'm probably forgetting.

I'm admittedly ignorant on alternatives on the Ruby side, but would be interested to see what other web frameworks people have built and the pros cons vs. Rails.
They're smart though. I'm sure it wouldn't take long for them to realize they're clueless about the social aspects of the virtual world, and start hiring social media/game consultants. Look no further than Microsoft, who bought Bungee in anticipation for the Xbox.
It's the only thing I've ever been fairly good at which I can get paid for.

Being a nerd/geek became more socially acceptable in the last 10 years.
It doesn't seem to be doing that bad, actually. Their facebook appliacation has nearly 3000 active monthly users, and seems to be growing nicely.
10 Start programming on a Commodore PET at a really young age.

20 Keep going on a C64

30 Rediscover interest/passion with open source.

40 Learn lots with open source.

50 Profit!

60 GOTO 40

I love programming - what else lets you learn so much on your own? I always thought I'd go into science of some kind, but programming is way better: a decent laptop and an internet connection are all you need to do all kinds of cutting edge work. Compare and contrast to my wife who is home with our newborn, and almost completely cut off from her biotech work:-(
Seems like there's a business opportunity here. The problem they are addressing is the fact that digital storage, when done incorrectly, can be very fragile. I know several people that have lost all of their pictures due to hard drive crashes or theft. These people are now making physical copies of EVERYTHING and putting them in safes and safe deposit boxes.

The currently accepted solution is to copy everything up to "the cloud" where things are backed up and redundant. While this is a good solution for a lot of people, it's not for everyone. I get the feeling that there's a group of (mostly older) people out there that would want (and be be willing to pay for) a longer lasting, physical storage medium like this. A long-lasting write-once medium like this might be a good compromise between digital (easy to store a lot, fragile) and analog (harder to store a lot, longer lasting).

The main issues with this type of medium, though, would be price and compatibility.
What the hell, they're only karma points:

I lived with Python for 4 years before I lost an argument at my own company and had my project moved to Ruby. I've since moved in with Ruby and haven't looked back.

* Everything in Python feels like a symbol table hack. Private methods? We have those! Just exploit this bug in the class symbol table lookup code!

* First-class symbols. There may be little difference under the hood between a Ruby interned string and a Python string atom, but there's definitely a difference syntactically. This is a difference that is hard to articulate, but if you've written much C, it's like having every "enum" you could ever want predefined for you, and completely eliminates "magic numbers".

* Blocks and lambdas. I've read GvR's take on this. I know he thinks a named function is just as good --- maybe even better! --- than an anonymous function. I had nested named functions/functors in C++ and Java. Even Tcl "uplevel" is better than Python's castrated lambda.

* Method definitions in Ruby don't need to accept a "self" argument. Again: all of Python feels like a symbol table hack to me.

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

* I haven't found an expression that is better written as a list comprehension than as a map/reduce/select expression.

There are painful things about Ruby:

* The FFI is immature. Outside of Common Lisp, Python ctypes may be the best FFI out there.

* I never got Python to crash on me (at least, not where it was Python's fault). I crash Ruby once a week.

* Ruby is palpably slower than everything. If performance matters to you and you don't know C, you may be better off in Python.

* The community is led by the nose by Rails developers, which can at times feel like a worst-of-all-worlds grab bag of methodology programmers, web designers, and dabblers.
How Did You Get the Confidence to Start Your Business?
I switched over when I recently got a new job. I need to be up at 5:30 to get to work on time, and if I don't got to bed by 10, the next day sucks. Friday, and Saturday though I tend to stay up later.
Creation. Transforming thought into action with a few keystrokes (or a few million...but who's counting?).

I enjoy creating other things as well; programming has such amazingly instant feedback, and the results generally do interesting things. My next favorite form of creation is glass blowing...and while controlling heat flow to make something beautiful is deeply satisfying, the result just sits there, unable to be debugged or extended or tweaked.
6% is 1-3 rock stars --- your best lead developer, your CEO. It only seems small when you're just getting started. It's a very significant amount of equity. Yes, companies trade 40+% for VC all the time. But they're also buying a guaranteed 2 year runway and a war chest to offer those same rock stars 150k-200k in year 1.

I'm not making a value judgement here --- maybe YC is worth that much for you.

(I read the article, I know "6%" isn't really the point here; it's just the one nit I have with the discussion.)
From my observation, the ruby community is heavily skewed by the recent influx of Rails programmers, which is web dev and younger. Old-school ruby folks (the guys who were ruby gurus when Rails was still an infant) have different characteristics: older, less confrontational, veteran programmers, Matz-like. A generalization for sure but my impression.

The python community has done significant development in science/math so they have stronger libraries in those fields. Python has had an influx of Railsy people due to Django and might get a shot in the arm from Google App Engine.

From a language perspective, I like the wealth of libraries for python. I like that many reference/experimental applications on web stuff is in python. The whitespace issue for me has disappeared and I'm actually leaning toward liking it more than ruby's block delimiters. The template/erb issue can be diffused by looking at HAML. (That's a cool way of incorporating pythonic indentation to templates.) Unicode is solid in python.

Ruby is a better choice if you like to reshape the language into something that could potentially look un-Ruby. It's possible I haven't gotten far enough into python yet, but I can see why metaprogramming and DSLs are more prevalent in ruby than python, and it's not just "one way" culture. (Ruby's optional parentheses for method calls is an example of a language feature that fosters DSL use.)
I didn't say that it would change the way you write code, I said it would change the way you approach writing code.

I'm fairly confident that it did. Once you've really learned it, Ruby creates paths in your brain that you will try to follow forever, even if you're not coding in Ruby anymore.

If it didn't, then you never gave Ruby a real chance.
How can the oil speculators be responsible?
There has been a lot of noise (in Washington, in the media, on reddit, and everywhere else) about speculators being responsible for the rising price of oil. Of course, it is true that speculators help set the prices. But, I cannot imagine how the world's consumers can be tricked into overpaying for the liquid supply.

There is one obvious way this could be accomplished: but, it doesn't seem practical for speculators to take physical delivery of a meaningful amount of oil and drive up the price by restricting supply.

So, as far as I can tell, if speculators drive up the price of an oil contract beyond the natural price point they lose -- not the consumers.

Am I missing something?
I agree that Lisp would have as much of an impact, if not more. I never said it was mutually exclusive with anything else in this benefit.
You don't think it's nitpicky to suggest that C++ gives you automatic memory "for free", as long as you don't ever use it?

Garbage collection is not an "order of magnitude" more heavy than reference counting, and there's more than one axis to measure memory management on --- in fact, there are several axes for allocation transactions alone.

Just as importantly, if you go to Google Code Search and randomly select ten C++ projects that (a) have more than 10,000 lines of ".cpp" and ".i" file code and (b) use shared_ptr, I'm betting you're going to find that 8 of them rewrote some of the memory allocator for performance reasons. All the fancy template BS in the world doesn't save you from the fact that "new" is just "malloc", and there's no one allocator design that works for every program.
Intel introduces programmable matter / wireless power
Pastebin the way god intended it be
Listened to this the other day. If you're interested in learning more about what CouchDB is and what it can do, its worth a listen.
Most of the ISP's in the middle-east are govt. run and hence heavily filtered & moderated. I am currently in Dubai and sites like Ning, Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed are blocked, facebook is not ...yet. Once the content that can posted on any of the blocked sites moves to facebook -- I am guessing then facebook will be blocked as well.
That was a very long read and a had lot of interesting stuff too. The lack of recursion in the Pirahã language may probably have a connection to lack of the numeric system (yes, they don't count !!), though the author disagrees with this angle.

Some things seem conflicting, though. The author says the language lacks numeric system (which involves recursion) and quantifiers, but the people are involved in trade (Brazil nuts for consumables) with other groups (river traders) and believes that they have been doing so for a long time. Puzzling how they could have done this without quantifying !

So I don't think that the fact that they lack numbers is attributable to the linguistic determinism associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, i.e. that language determines our thought—I don't really think that goes very far. It also doesn't explain their lack of color words, the simplest kinship system that's ever been documented, the lack of recursion, and the lack of quantifiers, and all of these other properties.

.....

The Brazilians the Pirahãs most often see have boats, and they just come up the Pirahãs' river to buy Brazil nuts. In exchange, they bring machetes, gunpowder, powdered milk, sugar, whiskey and so forth. The Pirahãs are usually interested in acquiring these things....They don't accumulate Western goods, but if you've got consumables, the Pirahã might buy, say, two pounds of sugar, pour it in a bowl and eat it all at once. They're not going to put it on the shelf and save it; they'll just eat it when they get it.

Also, I don't understand the "they were sent away" part, in the quote below..

The crucial thing is that the Pirahã have not borrowed any numbers—and they want to learn to count. They asked me to give them classes in Brazilian numbers, so for eight months I spent an hour every night trying to teach them how to count. And it never got anywhere, except for a few of the children. Some of the children learned to do reasonably well, but as soon as anybody started to perform well, they were sent away from the classes. It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board.

Who sent them away ? Why ?
Counter-counter: Podcast Producer is a Rails app. I think Apple is just letting their employees pick their tools (at least for server apps) as they see best, rather than arbitrarily enforcing the choice of a single language.
Make Data Not Look Like Data
About 6 months ago I decided to learn either Python or Ruby because I wanted a language to write webapps and simple computergames fast.

If you're after writing simple computer games fast, then you might have a look at Pygame: http://www.pygame.org/news.html

There are also a number of visual effects companies (ILM, Dreamworks) that use Python as their system scripting language. I don't know if it's because of that community, but I find a number of graphics/games libraries in Python: http://www.vrplumber.com/py3d.py and
http://vpython.org/

Blender the open source 3D modeling program used Python as it's scripting language last I checked: http://www.blender.org/

I don't know if Ruby has libraries like that or not. I've only used Ruby to mess around with Rails.
Indeed. Whenever I'm waiting for Ruby to finish something that Python would have done faster, I like to imagine that it's taking a long lunch in a Parisian cafe, smoking clove cigarettes and picking up women.
Don't use a screwdriver to open bottles; use a bottle opener: http://tipjoy.com
I have to agree. Ruby has incredible flexibility, but how it's been used by "the kids" in things like Rails (and especially Rails extensions) makes my skin crawl.

This also bugs me to no end: nil.to_i == 0, 0 evals true, but nil evals false.

Python's lack for me is anonymous functions. It's cumbersome to set up 40 slightly different named functions and a hash table (or some "factory pattern" thing) to do the same job as 3-4 lines of Ruby. Symbols are nice too.

But for my personal work I choose Python for the libraries, cleanliness, and performance.
I found Xobni's stats feature useful - especially the data on what time of day specific people have written or responded to you before. I've used this feature to optimize the timing of communications with clients and bosses, but other than that it doesn't really solve the email overload problem. Yet, I hope.
For me, it's neither the geekiness or the pay. Neither are present in excess anyway. I do it for the view. The mental view. I do OOP and visualize buzzing, moving, clicking, rotating little mechanism that do orchestrated work. And join powers to create biger, more complex mechanism. And I get to make it (design/write), adjust it (debug) and see it work (run). Hellboy II's intro comes to mind.
I'm all for launching early, but Google could have afforded to keep this internal for awhile. Why release something that the lead engineer admits "is not as complete or polished as planned in designs"?
Seems somewhat similar to scrapbok http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/
Indeed, that would be great. But just the act of simplifying the docs to a standard set of usable (because they're balanced) documents is a major step forward.

Kudos to the YC team for another innovation that is sorely needed. This should have a great impact well beyond the startups that they fund themselves.