skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What difference does it make? Sure, on one Groupon promotion a few unused coupons can mitigate losses on the deal overall, but make no mistake about it- businesses use Groupon because it is a cool, hot, marketing play that allows them to be lazy and bring in a ton of foot traffic.

The root of the problem, and the reason Groupon's model is unsustainablem, is that most of these businesses are not producing a product that is different or so unbelievably valuable that people are going to continue to come in and buy it at a price that is profitable in the long run. People go to a coffee shop because it is close and convenient. All coffee shops serve a commodity that is in a price range that varies by only a few cents. Their only way to differentiate is with location. Period. With restaurants it's a little different because food costs and quality vary a bit more, but I still maintain that the only people who regularly buy Groupons are deal-hunting cheapskates who won't be back regularly. All businesses would do better to focus on their core products and pricing, and let word of mouth do the rest.

For a coffee shop owner to run a Groupon promotion to bring in foot traffic thinking it will pay off is lazy, stupid, and shows very poor business acumen.
I sure hope you can buy these that work inside the US :-)
Valuable morsel: Ctrl-F "ergobiblio" and just keep reading his replies. They're the only ones worth bothering with.

Useless opinion: Not to throw in my lot with the most downvoted (and barely visible) of comments here, but seriously, these "Ask us anything about our product!" AMAs from big companies are uniformly marketing chaff. Total yawnfest since no one dares answer challenging questions for fear of running afoul of their legal team (or, in fact, the legal system down the road when their words can be used against the company).

This rigidness makes this sort of "community outreach" exceedingly boring. In my terrible, stupid opinion, companies worth asking questions of never have time to get a bunch of managers, a PR/marketing person and a single engineer together to answer only the most sycophantic or safe questions (again, I don't blame them for being concerned with self protection).

Give me email responses from Gabe Newell to completely random gamers any day over this sort of canned interaction.
There is longevity in nodejs. As long as Javascript remains king on the client-side, you can pretty much guarantee nodejs will have a future.
Don't forget that some companies have already shipped rootkits and viruses on their hardware before (Sony, Creative, I think even Apple had an incident with their iPod?) So the war between corporate lawyering+tech and the free world began a while ago.
Can you elaborate more on why Rails might be a better option than ASP.NET MVC for creating "the next hipmunk"?
That quote sounds deep, but it reduces almost exactly to:

"Almost everything is possible."

More precisely: "If a distinguished but elderly scientist passes judgement on in idea, it is probably possible. Only ideas whose possibility are not judged might be impossible."
So aside from the "crash"...How many of you sold at $30 and repurchased at $10 only to sell back at $25?
I unfortunately had nothing to reinvest otherwise I would have been all in on that ride.
Interesting TED talk by Emotiv founder: http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_br...
If you want stagnant frameworks there's plenty to pick.

There's a difference between stagnant and growing in the right direction. I think the author believes that RoR is moving away from what many thought was one of its core pillars: The ability to go from nothing to an up and running web app quickly.

Lots of things aren't stagnant -- few things move in the right direction. I'm not saying that RoR isn't moving in the right direction, but I think you've created a strawman of sorts.
That's fair -- my anecdotal evidence isn't very scientific.
They are essentially defacers, though instead of (just) defacing they go for a press release / dox drop. Defacers do it for the attention. You'll often see reasoning on defaced websites such as "We did it for the glory of Iran" or "Maybe you should secure your users data better!" as if to suggest a greater purpose for the actions, but when you string together all of their targets the reasoning almost always falls flat.

Lulzsec may have given some people the wrong impression by hitting Sony and thus suggesting that they were activist minded like the AnonOps program they grew out of, but they'd always been honest about the real reason from day one: "we do it for the lulz". The lulz in this case are inexorably intertwined with the attention seeking.
Given some of the teachers I've had, I could probably contribute a lot to the exact opposite of such a site...

huh.badlyexplained.com -- Let's share the deep huhs? that prevented us from understanding an idea: convoluted diagrams, false analogies, cooked-up examples.
RDS works fine with heroku, and I think there's a heroku mysql option in the works as well
Salix Ratpoison 13.37beta1 - A mouseless Linux desktop distro
That wasn't the argument I was making. My argument was if those are the new technologies you want to play with, you don't need a major new Rails release. Since the opposing argument seems to be that Rails needs to keep breaking compatibility in order to keep up with the latest technologies.
RescueTime Launches Introductions, A Carfax Report For Top Job Candidates
You have misunderstood my meaning, which suggests I could have phrased my comment better. Of course I believe that Western countries are less repressive than the likes of North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, etc.

The internet offers people an unprecendented ability to communicate with each other. This is causing big social changes, and big social changes always create winners and losers, so that some people who are currently powerful, but who these changes will make less powerful. For example, repressive regimes, or the copyright industry.

The attitude of the USA and other Western countries is inconsistent. They welcome the changes the internet is bringing when it hurts incumbents they don't like (e.g. repressive regimes except those ones allied to the West), and want to stop they changes when it hurts incumbents they like (e.g. major political donors such as the MAFIAA).

So on the one hand they're trying to make the internet more locked-down, and on the other hand they're trying to make it more free. It's obvious that they won't succeed in doing both, and it's also obvious that they are going to be more successful at doing anything if they have a clear goal of what they want to achieve.

My view is that the national interests of Western countries lie in making the internet as free as possible. Yes there will be costs -- e.g. Wikileaks will embarrass Western leaders from time to time, and file sharing will hurt political donors. But these are harms to the leaders of Western countries, not to their populations.
"Otherwise why have APT, CAPM, covariance matrices, factor models..."

So are you saying you consistently outperform the market? If not, what are you 'modeling'? In 'science', a model is considered useful in how well it predicts the observations of some experiment, especially experiments on effects which were not known when the model was created. What do your bragged about models predict? What are they good for besides talking about with other quants?
http://redditincident.com/
Networks Are Smart at the Edges
Related: http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox_DIY
On DNS, if you squat on someone else's trademark, ICANN will give it to its rightful owner.

The only difference is cost and delay. That is to say, due process don't come cheap. On Twitter, the seizure happens instantly and no one pays legal fees. Within ICANN arbitration, it can get bloody.
You can use a spoon, but yes you have to extremely precise. What matters is that you exactly reverse your forward motion. It's an entirely geometric effect though, so it doesn't matter how fast you go forward and backwards as long as you stay slow enough to be in the Stokes regime.
Clearly it's not that easy unless you plan for it from the beginning. One benefit of Erlang is that you have to structure you code like a distributed application. You can mess that up, but it's harder.
Those are good points and I agree that there are numerous reasons why it isn't a correct sample. What I'm trying to say is that it's hard to get a correct sample for developers and that if someone is curious about the subject matter it's worth keeping this data until some clearly superior data comes along. There are plenty of datasets that are worse than this, either by having fewer data points or by being even more biased.
For those wondering what is meant by Antidesktop in this context: http://freshmeat.net/articles/the-antidesktop

I got pretty far down this path a few years ago with ruby-wmii & a careful selection of keyboard-driven apps including Vimperator for Firefox.

Then someone gave me a Macbook!
The problem is not that rails has gotten too difficult to pick up (although, I'd agree it's not as easy as it once was). The problem is the documentation is lagging behind the development - in some cases pretty severely.

But what do you do? Slow down? Not sure that's good either.
Surely there's some middle ground though, no? At what point do you have a stable core and then you just bolt things on?

Very true. Frameworks should strive for a solid API that makes it easy for people to write add-ons, and avoid adding anything that is not essential.

Of course, one hacker's essential is another's bloat, but developers should give things a long hard look before adding stuff.

It's the reason I like Ramaze so much. Has what's needed, gets out of your way, it's easy to evolve or extend if you know Ruby, and it respects your opinions.
People have always been content to let parts of the development ecosystem be someone else's problem. It's only the boundaries that have shifted over time.

Today's webdevs consider the webserver and database to be black boxes that are just "there" to be used. The people writing those webservers and databases in the 90s and 00s usually considered the OS and compiler to be black boxes that were somebody else's problem. The people writing those OSes and compilers in the 70s and 80s considered the hardware to be a black box to be trusted (at least at a high level; they knew processor architecture, but I doubt very many thought hard about how to build a flip-flop, NAND gate, or multiplexer). The people designing those chips in the 50s and 60s considered the vacuum tubes and silicon wafers to be black boxes; you don't think very much about how your silicon gets out of the ground, but that's a pretty huge project on its own.
The article doesn't say that much, but I do like the (supposed) fact that the best restaurant in San Jose at the time was a Sizzler.
You're missing my point. I was assailing your (poor) logic in my reply to your criticism, not making a point about Groupon.

You were saying that I was wrong, just look at their revenue. I replied, revenue doesn't mean anything, it's easy to build a giant revenue machine. Your point was crap. Now you are coming up with all sorts of other facts and analysis, which is certainly much more valuable than your original "just look at all that juicy revenue" argument. Again, I was pointing out how terrible and stupid the 'look at all that revenue' argument was by showing I could create another company with even more revenue that is even more worthless. If you have an issue with this, I would stop using revenue as a basis for anything since it is a shit indicator.

Again, GM has MASSIVE revenue, that has no bearing on how good of an investment it would be.
Assuming that's "<$1,000"?
It's more productive. You get more done in a shorter amount of time. Not trivially either. Its more about the language (Ruby vs C#) than the Frameworks (in that all the cool shit the Framework lets you do is thanks to the language).

If you knew C really well, and someone said "Hey, you can be more efficient building a website in C#/ASP.NET", would you have that hard a time believing them?
How to use CQL with PHPCassa
I do agree that defaulting to have SASS and Coffeescript on unecessarily increases the learning curve for new adopters. Along with HAML they're fantastic technologies but in many cases you're asking people to learn Ruby, Rails, HAML, SASS and/or Coffescript all at once now.

Make the base setup as such that it minimizes what they have to learn to achieve some success, and let them turn on technologies such as HAML/SASS/Coffeescript later on once the cognitive load of switching to Ruby and Rails has decreased.
They have wifi sync come this fall.
The Supreme Court has the power to rule on matters pertaining to pornography and obscenity because that's not protected speech either. Their resolution to the obscenity cases was to implement a non-ban ban on such material, relegating decisions pertaining to what's obscene to "community standards".

Characterizing satellite photography as protected political speech sounds like a stretch to me. I'd be surprised if it passed judicial muster. If it's political speech, what's the political position? That Israel or the Palestinians are bad? That their borders as drawn are right or wrong?
I see the "sharing code" claim a lot but I haven't really seen it substantiated. Seems like you write a few little functions but it's not like you sharing the same framework which would be the real benefit.
It never ceases to amaze me just how often I see sentiments like this expressed. It seems like most people think that programming is a fairly easy activity that could be learned by rote if only we current programmers didn't make it so difficult with all our jargon and complicated tools. Programming should be like painting a fence, right?

Except programming obviously isn't like painting a fence. To stretch the homebuilding analogy a little, programming (even at its simplest!) is more like plumbing or wiring up electricity. It requires a real understanding of what you're trying to achieve and more than a little bit of creativity.

Most people are happy to pay their plumber, electrician, or car mechanic. I really don't understand why so many people think that computer programming isn't in a similar category of "skills you pay people to have". And, of course, I'm probably smart enough to do my own plumbing, or wire up my own electricity, or fix my own car. But I'd rather pay someone who specialises in doing those things to do them for me - if only for my own peace of mind.
You never can tell with some sites, but I wonder if this is something that vodo.net will evolve into? At the moment it seems to be fairly 'generic' as far as 'investments' are concerned (I don't really know... I don't have a membership) but I do agree with you: I'd love to be able to put some cash towards a particular genre or something similar.
It's not cause it's hard. It's because it's a pain the ass
I think it's better to turn them on by default. Rails gains enormous benefit from the fact that nearly all rails sites are running the same stack.

Try learning spring mvc to see what it's like to give lots of options.
I think the difference with Rails is it still provides defaults. Out of the box it's a full stack ready to go. Customization is not required.
Over time, Rails changes to make it easier to deal with the complex needs of web applications.

Why? Why is Rails changing to handle this, instead of add-ons, plug-ins, and gems changing?
ahh, that's interesting I didn't realise that!!
I dunno, I kinda got from the OP that is was more about moving too fast than moving in the wrong direction. But, OP aside, I get what you are saying.

IMO, as long as Rails is being driven by real application development, I'm happy. Compared to "enterprise" frameworks which are built in isolation from the real world, Rails movement seems more grounded in pragmatism.
Yep, it was 'homemade' - in brief, I first made a list of the facts that I want to show (eg. amount of tea imported), then did about 2 days of research. Then I used photoshop, and traced outlines of images found from images.google.com.

If you want a full version, I'll happily write a slightly longer how-to type thing?
Keep in mind that's, $9 x 20+ million subscribers a month.
Indeed.

As a front-end developer with little back-end experience, I was able to get the basics of Rails with just a few hours working through Hartl's tutorial.
Tumor Growth Driven by Cancer Cells That Accelerate Aging and Inflammation
I've been coding in Rails since pre-1.0, and while some decisions have annoyed me, I am ultimately happy with the direction Rails has gone. It keeps Rails at the forefront of web technology.
Last chance: send your name to mars
Ask HN: Best Web UI Designer Available for Contract Work?
Who is the absolute best web designer out there taking contract work?
Must-have data center utilities: Picks by IT pros
FBI 'domestic terrorism' probe targets labor activists
This sounds like an old person ranting about the good ol' days
when it's probably a personal phobia against change.

Crafting software requires a fine balance between getting stuff done with what you know and losing productivity because you're stuck with older technology.

Some of my best decisions as a software craftsman required change. Subversion to Git, PHP to Ruby on Rails, VPN to Heroku, all helped me build great stuff far more effectively. And some of my biggest problems came from attempting to adopt new technology x instead of building something great quickly with what I already knew.

I don't have a simple answer for maintaining that balance. It's hard. Being aware of needing that balance is a great first step. Complaining about change, though, seems to be the least productive response. Can I build something great right now? No? OK, can I learn something new right now? No? OK, then some downtime might be my best choice.

For right now.
The death of email is greatly exaggerated
I'm confused. Rails 3.0.8 is the current version. Rails 3.1 is still in beta. What's in the beta release of Rails 3.1 that caused you to leave? A couple of defaults have changed, but valid Rails 3.0 applications can be upgraded to 3.1 with a minimum of effort.
Why is this supposed to make me feel better? A freshman congressman still makes $174K a year, has no oversight and there are no performance measures.
The problem with Rails is not the pace of change so much as the wild changes of direction it takes, sometimes introducing serious performance degradations into official releases. Sometimes it's hard to see a guiding core philosophy other than the fact they want to be on the shiny edge. It's nice that they aren't stuck with bad design decisions forever but when you go in for an upgrade and you depend on some unpopular plugins, you can bet on pain and even performance problems.

A major issue with some parts of the community is that some programmers think that being rubyists automatically makes them elegant programmers even if they don't have a clue about proper algorithms and that's probably why others call them "hipsters". The general disregard for improving performance, inherited from Ruby, is also something endemic from a while back. Sure programmer time is important but how many successful companies have started with Rails only to end up with a patchwork of Java, Scala, C++, etc. after lots of downtime and growing pains.

Getting your app into production is also another pain point with the all the dirty tricks you need to master, not to mention an array of lackluster choices be it nginx, passenger, unicorn, rvm, REE, bundler, etc.

So with that background, I think the author's gripes are understandable but it really doesn't touch on the undercurrent of discontent surrounding the current ecosystem.
This is awesome. Add a simple iPhoto replacement app for camera syncing and basic editing and I'll donate $100.
They buy more US military hardware than any other nation out there. More than a billion dollars a year on average since 1987(or so says Wikipedia.)
Node.js gets name-spaced EventEmitter with EventEmitter2
hmm… there's no ads shown. The design will look really different once the ads are placed.
Actually, yes. The path you take to stir the fluid would be your key which would be verified by getting back to the initial dye state. The key size would be ideally infinite dimensional (the dimension of the path space), but practically bandwidth limited by your ability resolve the dye pattern.
I agree. I buy several items per month, and other than the Kindle store, I never realized any of those seven top items were on the front page anywhere. I'm as surprised to see them as anyone else even though I visited that page yesterday, today, and probably several times last week.
Where's the JLS gone?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder :)

I would look around on Dribbble (http://www.dribbble.com) and find someone that fits the style you're looking for. Not everyone there is available, but a lot are.
What's happening to Rails? DHH is adding some new APIs, and he's suggesting new programming guidelines and conventions.

This is nothing new. He's been doing this every 6 to 12 months since Rails 0.13 (at least). Here are some of the bigger disruptions:

- Rails 1.2: Rewrite all your controllers to use the new REST model. (This was annoying, but the results looked a lot better.)

- Rails 2.0: Change from ";" to "/" in standard resource routes, and rewrite controllers to use respond_to.

- Rails 3.0: Deal with bundler, ActiveModel, Arel, a total overhaul of ActionMailer, etc., etc.

By historical standards, the asset pipeline is a medium-sized change, and certainly much smaller than the Rails 3.0 changes. And unlike the Rails 3.0 changes, you can turn it off in about 2 minutes.

Personally, I rather liked most of these new features at the time: They addressed my day-to-day pain, they made my code cleaner, and they helped me keep in sync with other programmers. Rails is optimized for a certain set of opinions, which overlap about 80% with my own, and that's usually good enough for me. If your tastes diverge from DHH's tastes to a greater extent, it won't be as much fun.
The two year time frame is kind of harsh. Things need time to grow. See: Chrome, Android. Both were released 2.5 - 3 years ago, but have only really started hitting their stride in the past year. Give Wallet, Music, Chromebooks, etc. time to grow.
I'm not certain if you're trolling, but IBM stands for International Business Machines.
Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters
>Using the same language at both the client and server end has some serious benefits.

The functionality implemented is mutually exclusive. This canard needs to die.
There's some serious FUD going on here. Not only are valid CSS files also valid Sass files, but CSS files in the app/assets/stylesheets directory are served up just fine. There's no need to learn Sass right out of the gate. And Haml isn't even included in the default install, so that's a complete red herring. Finally, JavaScript files in app/assets/javascripts work fine as well; as with Sass, there's no need to learn CoffeeScript right away.
Hatsune Miku - Crazy Popular In Japan & Coming To America
6 month lease isn't bad. I moved around a bit too but in all honesty, moving sucks. Hopefully you're not looking to do a lot of that.
This is definitely more ambitious, but basic multi-column text flow is already defined in the multi-column layout module: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/

CSS columns as defined by that module have been supported by Firefox and WebKit for some time.

Here's a good example/explanation: http://www.quirksmode.org/css/multicolumn.html
While I won't bother bringing this topic onto the forum, you should be intelligent enough to know that this is an exaggeration and slanted view of the more complex reality.