skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are workplaces that are shallow in their standards, and simply trust buzzword-compliant, shiny pieces of paper, so a good school can certainly help acquire "more jobs". But as we know, more isn't better. Any intelligent person needs to see such crap as a big, giant red flag and run far away. Any employer not willing to dig deeper and find out who you really are, and what you're really capable of, is not worth working for!

Take a counter-example. I've been to interviews where an entire day was spent with me, sending many different people my way. This was real effort on their part, and it felt good. I had a chance to meet many potential colleagues, and they explored several different ideas. I could see that they weren't stupid enough to just trust what I wrote on a couple of pages, they really wanted to see what I was capable of. My university is very good, but certainly not well known in the U.S., and the fact that it isn't Yale had no effect on the interview. That's as it should be.
Ruby's lambda is worse than Python's.

Can you elaborate on why you think Python's lambda is castrated?
Looks like I'm the only desktop developer here then.

I'm sure it's because you imply that the only installable software is on the desktop. You insensitive clod. (I'm kidding, of course, but I also build non-web-apps and also found this advice only marginally useful, though I do find that having users from very early in the process is vital.)
Ok, now I'm not sure I follow. Apart from the performance issues, why can't you replace every method that "yields" with a method that takes the explicit block parameter, and .call() it?
A company needs to increase its profits or it will die. This is self-evident. Your italics seem to imply that increasing profits by itself is unethical? Didn't expect to read that on HN.

You're claiming Brother isn't innovating. As far as I know printers have gotten cheaper, faster, more accurate, lighter and produce less curly paper. Sounds like innovation to me. Did you just make that no innovation claim up - or do you have supporting evidence? [%]

Your misconception is that when you buy a toner you somehow pay for an amount of ink. You don't. The guarantee, when you buy a toner, is that you can pay 3000 or so pages of text before it runs out. If you get your 3000 pages you should be happy. If Brother uses a page counter to brick the toner as soon as I hit 3000 pages I wouldn't be outraged. After all, that's what I paid for.

You're not buying milk here. Milk you buy by the gallon. If you get less than the advertised weight you feel cheated. But here they don't even advertise the amount of powder in the toner. It's not relevant. It's pages you get. [^]

If brother would improve the efficiency of the printer by 2 then they could halve the fuel in the toner (without lowering the price) and you'd get the same amount of pages per toner. You'd be OKAY with that - because you're NOT PAYING FOR THE AMOUNT OF INK. You're paying for a (lower boundary on) pages you can print with a single toner.

If you want to buy ink in the same way you buy milk (which makes sense in a way, because some pages use more ink than others) then you'd be right. If you buy a 10 ounce toner you deserve 10 ounces of fuel. But that's very clearly not the case here.

The waste argument is valid, but it's simply an unavoidable result of our economy. Appliances are simply getting cheap, so waste becomes the rational attitude. Dishes dirty? Buy new ones. Dropped the coffee pot? Buy a new machine. Washer broken? Guess what? New one. Fan in computer rattles? Oh yes. Dell.com to the rescue. I agree that waste is bad, but toners are insignificant compared to waste in the general sense.

[%] Aside (and may not apply to you): people tend to make up arguments to support their position if they have made up their mind "intuitively". Rationalizing if you will. If you felt intuitive outrage on this toner issue, step back and re-evaluate. You might still come to the same conclusion, but you would definitely use different arguments.

[^] They do say "assuming 5% coverage", which is a bit of a slippery slope
I have my beefs with Mozilla, but to say they aren't focusing on code is crazy. The stuff they're doing (especially with the native JS compilation) is very difficult stuff that honestly has a chance to change all browsers for good.

I have good friends on their *Monkey teams and can say without a doubt that there's a lot of impressive code going in there. Stuff that someone absolutely needs to be doing-- and it's all available for free.

I agree I'm also annoyed with FF memory consumption and some stability issues I've had lately, but I can't disagree more firmly on the quality of the code they have. Without much research, you can find code at Mozilla that's better than what major for-profit companies are producing out of their R&D-- and it works across a dozen platforms.
Of course electricity production needs to come from zero carbon sources or else there'd be no point. I just think this system is the best because it involves doing the least.
The parens thing is unfair; obviously, without parsing strings (avoiding which is the whole point of metaprogramming), you can't express assembly in Python.

But isn't it surprisingly annoying to do method_missing in Python? Again, you have to catch the exception case to the symbol table lookup, and cons up a callable that knows to catch the arguments the right way.

Here's the entire method_missing call I needed to make x86 work inside a Ruby block:

def method_missing(meth, *args)
k = Rasm.const_get(meth.to_s.capitalize)

# If it's a class, it's an assembly opcode;
# else it's a register or operand.
if k.class == Class
@insns << (k = k.new(*args))
else
k
end
return k
end
Felix's 10 Commandments For Getting Rich
Geez, that's a lot of ad hominem. Did I accidentally murder your dog or something?

Nah, that's pretty much tptacek's commenting style, I wouldn't take it personally.
That's exactly what I was thinking when I read it. But Cuil was trying to pull off a bigger sting than most.
Exactly. Microsoft need to keep people from thinking & making decisions about OSs. Forget that there is a choice.
Number of times I've been bit by global namespace pollution in Python or Ruby: countable on 1 hand.

Number of times I've been bit by forgetting the right import statement for a piece of Python library functionality: considerably worse.

I know, "plural of anecdotes" and all that. I think it's hard to argue that Ruby isn't easier to use "out of the box" than Python is, though. How do you say:

3.days.ago - 2.hours

in Python? Because, yeah, "days" and "hours" on Numeric? Shit's all crazy! But totally worth it.
Indeed.

I recently bought an HP D2400 printer at Big Lots for $30. The color/black cartridges come out to around $40. Go figure.
Well, Python has the * args and * *kwargs thing too. So "knows how to catch the arguments the right way" isn't any more of a problem than it is in Ruby. I'm guessing you don't know much about Python; you keep saying "It must be hard not to be able to do X" when in fact you CAN do X.

No, it's not surprisingly annoying. You can override just about anything within the rules of the Python syntax. You can override what << and + and | all do. You can override [] and ().

You just have to live within the Python syntax, which unfortunately for DSLs is stricter than Ruby syntax. But when you're not doing DSLs, that stricter syntax is usually a good thing.
A Google reader full of smaller blogs and the mindset that I DONT have to read everything. 3083 unread, as of right now, in fact.

Smaller blogs are generally one-man shows, but that's what makes them special to me, they aren't out to make money, and their opinions (about generally geeky tech things, in my case) are priceless. I don't care if they are the wrong opinions, or daft opinions, just that they are alternative opinions. It helps me see different angles of new technologies, languages and startups.

I love sites like Hacker News, they filter out the good stuff, but at the end of the day its a group opinion, and sometimes even upvoted due to the title or subject, rather than the content of the linked to article.
More of the first. Some of the second. But the latter with a sort of sly smile.
If only they came with a free sample dvd.
This is a huge achievement for the future of the web. While the basics of what we're doing now are very simple, the ability to have code be compiled on the fly is exactly is needed to get JavaScript near pre-compiled code boundaries. I do yearn for a world where our biggest successes are much bigger than forums that graduated into social sites.

As gruseom stated, interacting with the DOM and rendering as still significantly slower than iterating through an array. I believe tracing very well could be the key to unlocking advances in that area s well.
The practice of charging more for the media than the device is not uncommon. Example: Polaroid.
"The mission is to end oil" vs "Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road (wired.com)"

I don't wonder why this thread gets more attention than the earlier same story here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280245
I missed this comment because it's 4 days old, and I waste too much time here so that's like 5 clicks back through my comment history. But here's the answer to that: the first time you connect to a site, your browser has no certificate to "remember". People are unwilling to accept a security model that doesn't protect their first access to B of A, especially when a security model that does is available.
I think it is due to the statement/expression dichotomy that Python exhibits.

Python's lambda doesn't allow the use of statements (correct me if I'm wrong I haven't written Python in a few years and they may have "fixed" this).

Meanwhile Ruby only allows expressions too - the catch here is that everything in Ruby is an expression.
Numbers not needed to count
sigh yeah... you could do that, but you often times you have to deal with methods that aren't invoked that way.

http://blog.sidu.in/2007/11/ruby-blocks-gotchas.html

is a good run down of some of the problems here
yeah... cause you know... I never forget to include 'gems' because gems has to monkey patch the include function so that it can get at my installed libraries :P
Good sir I do say... that was quite the pun :-D

takes his hat off
You touch on an interesting point (implicitly) that there is a large pool of folks at tier 1 schools that are tremendous workahols. The thing that isn't clear to me is how large a subset of those folks are also intellectually creative? It's not obvious at least to me that the number of such folks is particulaly large
Curiously, given the points on your comment, comments about comments about karma ARE ok.

I motion that ALL comments that distract by talking about karma are voted down. I guess that includes this comment about comments about karma.
Another factor that pushes python forward among people for whom programming is a means not an end is that it is a primary scripting language for Ubuntu and is heavily used in the Red hat descended distros as well...

On some level choice of programming language is irrelevant, since any specified functionality can be written in any turing complete language. Arguments about programming language are arguments about style rather than substance.

I suspect that the python vs. ruby debate is like arguing about whether keyboards or guitar are superior musical instruments. They both have their place and the world would be sadder and smaller place if either one went missing.
Looked more like a question to me.
Stumbleupon

though, I only actively seek things when I have time to kill which isn't often at all. Usually its just YC News.
Ah, Freud.
It's always fun to ponder what we don't know we don't know. That's how we progress, and it's how visionaries' minds work.
are you trying to say that starting a company is an irrational act?
Ask YC: Ask.com -- Why don't we use it?
I recently rediscovered Ask.com and wondered to myself what I found unappealing about it all. After all, as nice as it looks and as functional as it is, I was still loathe to adopt it.

But then I realized why: I use Gmail. I don't like having to go to a different site to use my mail. I also use iGoogle and read my news. I can't get out of using it all.

So that leads me back to the question, why don't YOU use it? Same reason?

Why doesn't ask.com start providing email services and personalized accounts?
Liberals and Conservatives Neurochemically Different
Neurochemically? Really? The string 'chem' doesn't even appear in the article.
This is so true. When I first bought my printer 3 years ago the guy at the store told me the ink cartridge was a small one so it was going to run out fast so I should buy an extra. my low ink light has been on for over a year now yet the print outs still look great.
I would love to read pg's thoughts on this question.

Actually, I would love to read more of pg's thoughts on Ruby, what I have read of his thoughts on it has been brief yet highly positive.
Male enhancement!

Seriously it was the same thing ivankirigin said - what's the worst that can happen?
Well, you did specify "online" but what got me out of a very similar rut is . . . reading good books. I read on my machine 99% of the time, and I even use the browser to read said books quite often :)
> … what's the point of optimizing function call and loop overhead? For what real-world apps will this make a noticeable difference?

It will make a difference in real-world apps which are currently impossible because they would perform poorly. It will become reasonable to start putting real number-crunching into browser-side JavaScript code—things like crypto, physics calculations, etc. As one example, JavaScript games are going to get a whole lot better in the next couple of years.

(Not to say that they shouldn’t be optimizing DOM access, or scrolling speed, or whatever.)
Your profile says you are 20 and you have concluded that you are too old for that "shit"?

A. You are not too old.

B. The problem is your attitude. You just referred to programming as "shit". Your tone implies you are referring to something you dislike.

Now, I am not trying to flame you or put you down man, but come on . . . it's your attitude that is not right, not your age.

Personally, I can't NOT program/study programming . . .
Yea thats true, but if buying a polaroid camera and getting say 10 pictures with it included was cheaper than buying 10 of the media seperately it would be a bit crazy, and thats exactly what I've seen with some printers recently.
Having an untenured advisor is not necessarily a bad thing. An advisor trying to get tenure is going to be very active and focused on their research, because their own job is literally on the line. Although a more senior professor might have a more established reputation and more grant money, they might also be less involved in the details of the research their students are doing. That said, all this depends on the nature of the particular advisor -- and I would certainly agree that your success in graduate school has a lot to do with the advisor you choose.
+1 for that. You can spend practically infinite time reading interesting stuff on the internet. Take some time and do something productive. I promise you won't be missing anything by spending a couple days away from HN, etc.
Well, to answer your question, not much.

3 out of 4 days Im home around 530. I skateboarding or play basketball with friends for about an hour, eat dinner around 7.

Ill then get down to writing code til around 10, then troll blogs/yc for 15 minutes, shower and end up hitting the sack around 10:30 - 10:45.

Then there is pillow talk with my gf, which probably the pinnacle of my 'social life'. Then Ive got the weekends to hang with friends and stuff.

Does that satisfy your curiousity?
I've tried various gems and plugins and kept having issues, eventually giving up on AWS (that was several months ago).

Can you offer any tips or suggestions for a successful rails deployment?
The terms were that I get a toner cartridge that I get to use as I see fit. Nothing more, nothing less.
You're not alone, I develop for the desktop too.
Milk I buy by the gallon. Toner, I buy by the cartridge. There is no contract I sign when I buy it to leave 1/3 of the toner in the cartridge, and no implicit agreement.

The only reason people don't yell about this sort of thing more is because they don't know about it.
I think GitHub did a free beta launch, followed by a few iterations with feedback, and then they started charging users.

That's reasonable for beta users, especially if they get a discount for their feedback.
Smarter and more ambitious.

I went to Amherst College. Students there are very, very smart - in many cases, probably equal to the students at Harvard or MIT (a bunch of my friends got into those too). But culturally, students at Amherst and other top liberal-arts colleges aren't all that ambitious. The normal career track is to graduate, work for a couple years at a financial or consulting firm, go to Harvard Law or Harvard Business School, make partner or upper management, and then coast and enjoy the good life.

I'm finding that it's hard to recruit cofounders from among my college friends, simply because so many of them have other opportunities that don't entail the risk and hard work that a startup does. When you've been accepted to HBS and basically have a guaranteed $200k/year salary after graduation (as happened to my former cofounder), do you take the bird in hand or hang in there for the 5% chance of a bird in the bush?
I completely agree. I didn't want to reply to karma stuff, but I did just as a personal message to the op. I thought my message was going to be scored negatively but anyway, who cares?
Thanks for the response. I wasn't curious for specifics, I was thinking about the tradeoff between productive and being social in general. That by optimizing your hours for productivity you might lose out on a lot of other stuff.

Glad it works out for you.
http://www.boingboing.net
http://www.kottke.org
Yes, people would yell more about it if they knew. But it would not be the rational thing to do. After all, the only thing it would accomplish is that Brother will put less ink in the toner (or they'll lose money) and the last 300 pages or so will be of lower quality. That way the toner will be -empty- after the 3000 pages. Somehow, that's "fair"?

Customers will get an inferior product and they'll definitely be happier. And if you ask them: if you can get a cartridge for the same price that doesn't print faded pages in the end, would you buy that instead? You'd hear "Yes!". But as soon as they hear there's free toner left after 3000 pages, they'll get outraged again.

Irrationality at its best.
Gmail: Love It Hate It Love It Hate It
You're right. But once you get used to it, it's not so bad. Also I'm not sure there is another language with all these features + speed.

I do rendering engines so I really don't have a choice.
Judy Estrin: We have a serious innovation deficit says Silicon Valley
Red-Light Cameras Just Don’t Work
OK, show me how -- in Ruby -- to define a class, such that the class and all of its subclasses will have some special non-standard behavior (say, gaining or losing attributes or methods based on other things in the class definition)... without re-opening the class after its original definition or otherwise monkeypatching it once it's defined.

In Python you can fiddle with the machinery that creates class objects and use it to do whatever you need. In Ruby, as far as I know, that's simply not possible.

(and, yeah, you need to look up the attribute hooks in Python, because it looks kinda silly when your cherry-picked examples are of things you actually _can_ do in Python)
I wrote a custom system, if you're using rails let me know and you can use it.
> That restriction tends to improve readability and reduce bugs at the cost of making it harder to have a truly transparent DSL.

I used to think this too. But, then I actually learned ruby, and it turns out to be pretty easy to discern method calls from local variables, unless you are working with horridly long methods, which is a separate issue.

Remember that an instance variable is prefixed with @ in ruby, so if you see something that looks like it could either be a method call or a reference to a local variable, it's pretty easy to quickly examine the local scope to check. It's usually so obvious that you don't need to, though.

There are definitely some potentially tricky situations (closures, etc), but in over a year of working with ruby full time, I have yet to encounter one.
My coworker is currently building what should be the highest yield Farnsworth-style fusor in existence.

You may have read the article about the home chemist earlier, but there is also a whole group of "home nuclear engineers".

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121901740078248225-email.htm...
remember when creed from the office dyed his hair w/ the office inkjet?
They don't plan to fix this, it's part of the core philosophy
There are two basic problems with people who give you advice based on their own experience.

1) It may have been correct for them to do whatever they are advising you to do, but incorrect for you to do it.
2) It may have been incorrect for them to do whatever they are advising you to do, but they did so many other things correctly (including, but not limited to, being in the right place at the right time) that they succeeded wildly anyway and therefore don't recognize some or all of their mistakes as such.

From a lot of the advice I've read of his, I think it suffers from a little of both.
I do have a contradictory view :)

While a lot of becoming rich may be "chance and randomness" like you say, there are certainly patterns and other statistical data that shows different mindsets, beliefs, and character traits between the super-wealthy and the rest of us. You could increase your chances of becoming rich by inheriting certain traits of those who are already wealthy (and became so on their own. No inheritances or royalty here).

I would argue that becoming wealthy is less chance and more personal character traits, while the degree of wealth is mostly due to chance.

There can be only 1 Bill Gates, but for every one of him, there are thousands others who are successful, but on a much smaller scale. That's my view. :P
Eh, not all self-help books are that way, and a lot of the ones that are even contain nuggets of wisdom you can learn from. There are a lot of people who can help themselves, and the first step is often realizing that other people know stuff they don't.

How To Win Friends and Influence People is a sterling example of a good self-help book. Also, How To Be Rich by J. Paul Getty sort of changed my life.

The main concept was that to become rich, you have to work for yourself. Otherwise someone is essentially taking a cut from the profits of your labor.