skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
programmer happiness is a great idea, it's just that Ruby fails it completely. do memory leaks make you happy?

the biggest thing that ruby and php have in common is that they're both hamstrung by their terrible interpreters.

the second biggest thing is that the languages were conceived and championed by amateurs whose proposed philosophies are just fine (though vague), but the execution is horrendous.

example regarding php's philosophy: about all php has going for it is how easy it is to get started. that's it, and it hasn't even done that right. php has a rich history of horrible decisions made in the name of being easy - register globals, magic quotes.

two failed implementations of a vague philosophy - ease of use & programmer happiness. brought to you by php and ruby.
Actually, this is CSRF (and it's pretty smart - smarter than your average XSS attack).
IPhone 2.2 Update Now Available
Check iTunes. The associated SDK update is also available from developer.apple.com
I don't know, but if the secret to PHP's enormous success is its foolish philosophy then the Ruby community needs more fools.

There is one thing to observe here: Ruby will not become as widespread or as popular as Perl, PHP, or Java without also becoming as unfashionable as Perl, PHP, and Java. When an invention becomes successful and established, eventually everyone comes to take its good parts for granted, while its flaws become famous and are an eternal topic of discussion.
you're right, I shouldn't have said foolish. more like vague. it's the implementations that have been foolish.
25 bid that a high-ranking federal official cites Chrono Trigger in a speech before 2030. The question is: what will he pull? Let's see... how about "power is beautiful, and I've got the power"?
You don't seem to understand that "language design hasn't changed" tends to preclude "progress made on the interpreter".

Python's warts have been fixed and will continue to be fixed. I cant really say the same for Ruby, especially for MRI.
Anyone got a link with a list of the update features?
I'm not sure how my post is self-indulgent, to be honest.

Most people would consider black humour regarding a suicide that basically just happened as inappropriate and immature. After a certain period has elapsed, some venues will allow for such an expression. (The fact that the parent is a -50 in rating as I write this confirms this social norm.)

People who make inopportune remarks tend to be those that are either not able to properly grasp the magnitude of a situation and deal with it in a dignified and respectful way; or even worse, can't pick up on the general consensus of others as to the degree of magnitude.

How well a person can read social situations is by definition, maturity.
You're absolutely right about Ruby & Java being a great Odd Couple

What I find interesting is that most of the JRuby users are first and foremost Rubyists. The JVM users seem to gravitate more to Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Rhino, etc.
Finance's Quant(um) Mechanics
Vietnam Travel Guide Online 24/7 - vietravel247.com - Largest pagoda of Vietnam on the way
FirePython == Python logger console in Firebug
This reminds me of something that happened to me after 9/11. In my teenage immaturity, I made a comment insinuating that America got what was coming to it. I'm not sure why I did that (the mind is good at rationalizing behavior after the fact, so I can't trust my own memories on the matter), but I think it was a reaction to the complete unanimous sorrow going on in the forum. Everybody thought that the attacks were a horrible thing, that the deaths were such a tragedy. It might have been that I was struck by the complete irrationality of their reactions -- people don't feel so angered about annual traffic accident fatality numbers. After their angered reactions, I apologized and gave an excuse somewhat like the parent comment.

Having been in this situation, I'd say that tdavis probably posted that under the same state of mind as I did. And now that I look back, I can't help but conclude that taking that state of mind is the right thing to do. After events like these, certain ideas become treated like "correct viewpoints" that good-thinking people have to have. Such as that America is the good guys, or that this event here was so tragic and that you should be mournful. And now that somebody has come along with a different attitude on the matter, we get to witness a hailstorm of people who don't simply disagree on the matter, but who hate him because his reactions are different to theirs.
These guys are not entrepreneur. They are executives(read PHB's). They might not even be good leaders. Henry Ford would have done things differently....
Your response is to the wrong post. There were no broad claims about the Ruby community in general in mine. But if it's just passive aggression, change the record!
It might not be so much as allowed as it was never explicitly disallowed.
That's an excellent idea. And, as an aside, I hope one day that I'm as interesting a writer as you are.
I think it's very unfair of him to be criticizing and writing off Rubinius. "Rubinius looked like the light and hope of the Rubyverse, but their team has been slashed..."

Just because it was financially responsible for Engine Yard to cut back from 6 to 2 fulltime developers does not mean that Rubinius is dead. Rubinius has as and always will be a community project.

Furthermore, the author states "But the problem is that [ruby is] essentially stagnant." Because of Rubinius, Ruby finally as a proper spec. This means we will see an "arms race" as he calls it, and it's because of Rubinius. PLUS, 4 implementations under active development (Rubinius, 1.9, MacRuby, JRuby) hardly seems stagnant to me.

Bottom line: this is FUD.
YouTube - Podcars: Using networking ideas to transport people.
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To answer my own question (I wish I'd been able to copy from the iTunes window :( ):

This update contains many bug fixes and improvements, including the following:
* Enhancements to Maps
-Google Street View
-public transit and walking directions
-display address of dropped pins
-share location via email
* Enhancements to Mail
-resolved isolated issues with Schedule fetching of email
* Improved stability and performance of Safari
* Podcasts are now available for download in iTunes application (over Wi-Fi and cellular network)
* Decrease in call set-up failures and drops
* Improved sound quality of visual voicemail messages
* Pressing the Home button from any Home screen takes you to the first Home screen
* Preference to turn on/off auto-correction in Keyboard Settings

...

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222
What about things like Hadoop HBase or Bigtable? Surely those are aiming to replicate an RDBMS like environment but on a massively more scalable platform.
Enhancements to Maps
- Google Street View
- public transit and walking diretions
- display address of dropped pins
- share location via email
Enhancements to Mail
- resolved isolated issues with scheduled fetching of email
- improved formatting of wide HTML email
Improved stability and performance of Safari
Podcasts are now available for download in iTunes application (over Wi-Fi and cellular)
Decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
Improved sound quality of visual voicemail messages
Pressing the Home button from any Home screen takes you to the first Home screen
Preferences to turn on/off auto-correction in Keyboard settings
Globally, Now 400M Broadband Subscribers
Perhaps the most frustrating part about Ruby, to me,
is the outrageously outdated state of the current Ruby interpreter.
<snip>
I wish we could change all that. I wish that we had a new,
exciting Ruby engine that began to rapidly iterate, was extensible in Ruby itself,
and really started to live the dream that Smalltalk failed to achieve in the enterprise:
being both cutting edge and mainstream.

I agree with the above sentiment. A good VM is 'the' need for Ruby right now.

This is where i think Rubinius holds great promise. When Engine Yard started supporting it officially, it started looking like we would finally have a good VM 'soon', eliminating the single biggest issue with Ruby at this point. With the recent cut-down in the size of that team, we are kind of at an infection point. Either this project would flicker out (i really hope it doesn't happen) or the community kicks in a big way to help it pick up pace.
You know what really bothers me about ruby? It seems like it's the smaller companies who are behind it - like EngineYard and 37Signals. None of the heavyweights seem to be interested in Ruby.

This seems to me to be a bad thing for the long term prospects for the language. Big companies think long term, small companies tend to change their focus often. If I'm going to invest my time in a language, I want it to stick around for long.
"Minority Report" interface (video)
The most important one: over the air podcasts. Sweet!
And is it similarly irrational to mourn your Father's death more than the death of some random guy in a hospital you never knew?
It doesn't seem like it has propagated through their CDN yet, I get the updated page every few page views. In the meantime though, its been copied to here:
http://hotiphoneapps.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/apple-releases...
How You Can Make Your Debt Consolidation Work for You
Jury is still out on GP-B

http://einstein.stanford.edu/
Microsoft pays John Lam and the DLR team to work on IronRuby full time. Sun pays Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work on JRuby. Thoughtworks pays Ola Bini to work on JRuby as well. So there are some larger companies that are investing in Ruby implementations.
My comment was not about the question of which views are correct or rational or make sense.
I can't believe I spelled "except" "accept". I need to get some sleep.
Title should read: 103 years later, Einstein is finally corroborated.

Science doesn't actually prove anything - especially when the research is being done with computational simulations. This research gives another form of evidence for Einstein's famous equation other than atomic bombs and nuclear reactors.
Need advice on how to spend ad budget
We have just launched our site and have a very small budget for marketing (About $2000 a month). We wonder if anybody can advise us how and where to wisely spend that money to promote our site.

Here is the URL: http://www.buzzup.com

Thanks a lot for your help.
This is such a compelling demo because it's based on common technology available to millions of people. Doing it with Flash and a webcam was a stroke of genius.

When stuff is in a lab it's less compelling. I saw one of the Microsoft multi-touch tables recently. My first thought? "Oh, it's just a giant iPhone" Apple's made multi-touch everyday, that was the hard problem.
Don't Bailout U.S. Automakers. Untie Them.
My version uses both touch and proximity. The point was to prove that you can unexpected things even within the limits of the data you have available.

I don't really know if you could remove the touch component and use only proximity without using a private API, but neither does John Gruber. Some really smart people work at Google, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they had figured out a way.
FlickrBrot: Happy 84th Birthday Mandelbrot
One sentence summary:

Every successful business connects its customers with a solution to their problem.

So just make sure you're solving a real problem, and you have a way to reach your customers. Or you can keep reading Seth Godin, master of the obvious.
Several things:

1. You can opt-out, unless I'm misreading this:
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/publisher_library.html#o...

2. How is this any different than web search? Google indexes the contents of websites and displays a snippet of relevant content based on what you search. What makes book search different from a legal perspective?

3. I highly doubt that Google would have continued to pursue this course of action if it was as open-and-shut as the attorney you quoted seemed to think.
"They want unions to cut them a break"

Sort of. It would be at least as accurate to say that the UAW wants the US gov't to hand over $25B (or $50B, or $75B) to the big 3 s.t. all 4 entities (Ford, GM, Chrysler, UAW) can carry on with business more-or-less as usual, and stay out of bankruptcy court. Chapter 11 would likely mean bad things for the UAW.

It seems (and, of course, w/o seeing the books, it's awful hard to tell) that the big 3 just can't make money - despite making some pretty nice cars - due to labor costs that are perhaps 150% of market, and a bloated dealer infrastructure that can't be trimmed due to franchising laws. Plus, a lot of b------t mandates (CAFE, etc.) to make products people don't really want.

The Detroit bailout isn't about saving the jobs of the executive teams (who can always get other jobs, and hell, who tend to be highly incentivised to stick around through Chapter 11) or saving the US manufacturing base (it's not like all those factories will go poof overnight, or all those cars will stop being built and sold) or avoiding shocks to the economy, or preserving shareholder value (which has already been largely wiped out). It's about propping up an uncompetitive cost structure in order to serve special interests, with a side-order of do-gooder power-tripping meddling.

And none of it has a g-----n thing to do with how the big 3 CEOs travel around the country.

Sorry about the rant. But the idea that the unions are gonna get all huffy about the private jet angle, or indeed that this is some sort of "suits-vs.-line-employees" drama strikes me as wrong-headed; if the bailout doesn't happen, no one is going to be more unhappy than the UAW.
My Public Apology
I would like to take a moment to publicly apologize for what I said in the Justin.tv thread. If you've decided to hate me forever, haven't read it, or simply aren't of the opinion that it's a big deal you may stop reading now.

Upon returning home, I read a message from Dan (my co-founder) stating that, in hindsight, he felt it was a bad thing to say and, quote, "I feel sick to my stomach." I knew then that no matter how serious I felt the infraction was, I had try my damnedest to clear it up.

First off, I'd like to state that I take full responsibility for what I wrote. Even if it's a single person, I do not want anyone to think negatively of Dan, TS, YC, or anyone else they may feel was tangentially involved.

I realize that I essentially made two mistakes here,

1. Instead of expressing my view of the article in question properly, I instead made an inappropriate joke.

2. I did this without considering how someone's views of me could affect their views of those connected to me.

To those of you who were offended, I am sorry. I have a history of complaining about poor comments/submissions to HN and I have since made one that I should be complaining about. Not only did it contribute no meaningful dialogue to the discussion, it was not in the spirit of this community. I consider HN one of the last bastions of social news discussion and it was quite wrong of me to tarnish that.

In a frail attempt to justify my initial comment, I posted a follow-up. A couple of members got the point I should have made in the first place, but at that point I still considered myself in the right and I once again made a horrendous ass of myself. I should have realized by that point that I was obviously not in the right and an apology was in order. I wish I could apologize for my bullheaded nature, too, but I don't think I'll be fixing that anytime soon.

I hope that you do not feel negatively about our company; one that I work on each day because I want to make it better for our users. And, if nothing else, please do not think poorly of Dan, YC, or anyone else. If you want to hate someone, please simply let it be me; I'm much better adjusted to it. Seriously. If you want me to never contribute here again just say the word, if that will be sufficient for you to absolve everyone else.

P.S. I post this as a submission because it's slightly less likely to be destroyed instantly.

Reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=371255
I don't understand why this is any different than web search, which has repeatedly won in court. Can someone explain it to me?
I see that GM paid out a dividend of $0.25 per common share just a few months ago on 05/14/2008. The problems were well underway by then, yet they chose to piss away about $140MM in cash. That alone should disqualify them for a bailout, at least as long as the current management and board remains in place.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=GM&a=04&b=14&c=2...

At least Ford had the common sense to cut off dividends in 2006.
I have since apologize for this stupid comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=371638

I didn't reply here because I doubt the down-vote wave has crested.
My advisor (http://pariveda.com) put Grizzly Short - GRZZX - into my account a couple of months ago. That one went up > 5% today, and over 100% since we bought it.
Fascinating! However, I meant errors to do with the typing process.
He'll never get anything done. This is not a good thing, people.
Weebly launches re-designed site
Yes. WebKit invented <canvas>.
I didn't see your comment until you posted this up. I agree: it was pretty immature and uncalled for.

Since I've been part of Hacker News, though, you've almost always been smart, courteous, and you almost always add to the conversation rather than detract from it. And it's easy to go wrong and say something stupid, and at least you're owning up to it.

I hope people don't hold a grudge against what you said, and I'm glad that you apologized for it - even if it wasn't excusable.
You are doing this because you don't want it to impact your business.

Shame on you!!
If there's anything I hate more than petty semi-scandalous incidents on the internets it's the meta discussions about such incidents...
Some might criticize you for not apologizing immediately; I for one think that a longer apology which shows reflection is far more valuable than a quick one.
You only get votes when another user votes on something you post. The original source of all votes is an administrator/editor with unlimited votes. If there were rampant hoarding, maybe some sort of stimulus package would be in order, like giving all users free votes, but I have no plans for that.
It seems like this public apology will actually do you more harm than good. The best strategy is probably to say nothing (i.e. delete this) and wait for it to blow over. In a week, nobody will care.

The problem is that apologizing like this will draw more attention to the initial act. People are more likely to think "man, that really was horrible" than "well, that was horrible, but he apologized, so it's okay". Basically, the less exposure, the better.

Also, don't worry about it. I've found that when I (frequently) mess up, it's optimal to make a mental note of what I did wrong, adjust, and then not think about it again. It would be a bad use of time to worry about every little mistake.

Personally, I understood where you were coming from by making that joke. I don't care about political correctness. If I kill myself, I really hope that people joke and laugh about it. Being "all serious" about situations like that is what makes people cry for reform, legal action, etc, and behavior like that is almost always detrimental.

But most people's beliefs are aligned with the social norms (by definition), so it will tarnish your reputation to publicly say alarming things. So again, in this instance, it's probably best to not draw attention to it. (For evidence of this, check out unalone's comment in this thread -- he hadn't seen your initial comment until you posted this.)
Now I'm intrigued whether you'll regain the 83 karma points you lost in that thread with this post ;-) I think you might!

That aside, the egregious downvoting of your comments in that post showed a real lack of HN voting standards (that is, not going crazily low unless the comment is spam or totally irrelevant) by many users, no matter how misguided your comments.
I've got a lot of empathy for you, Tom. We all say dumb stuff, and the web makes it very easy to screw up without thinking through. Kudos to you for the apology and the transparency. First time I'm checking out Ticketstumbler, BTW - looks interesting.
I for one don't think that a self serving apology is in line with his posting history.

A unsubstantiated comment, on the other hand, is in line with yours.
I think that it also exposes some of the crazy group think going on here, so maybe it wasn't all bad.

I mean, You're an idiot isn't supposed to be a +5 comment on this site.

And reasoned discourse like It doesn't really matter what the Justin.tv CEO said. He pasted some boiler plate because there's nothing more to be said; the deed had been done. What do you want? An apology for not finding the video? For not policing the Internet? Prosecution of anybody "egging him on?" Come on.

Someone broadcast their suicide. That fact doesn't make it any more tragic than any other suicide. It also doesn't mean anybody more than usual was responsible. There's really no story here which is why I chose to make a comment that didn't acknowledge there was. shouldn't be -12. At least not in my mind.

Not to mention all the equally pithy and/or distasteful rejoinders that were upvoted.
Your post would have been easier to read (for someone not entirely familiar with English curses at least) without the ----.
It has some fixes for the Japanese market that might really help its adoption. Emoji input is now supported and emails from non-iphone users containing Emoji now display (at least the text displays, not sure about the Emoji). Before the text was not even readable, a massive failure, considering it means most people could not read a large portion of their emails.
A guy can start a company. A CEO is a worker, too, in a sense.
Kills my browser (Chrome and Firefox), which seems to happen often now that I upgraded to Flash 10.

Note to self: Never upgrade to the next version of Flash plugin before it has been available for a while.
That reasoning is true until it isn't. If you sweep things under the rug, the public eye generally moves on to the next thing quickly, and nobody cares or realizes it happened a week later. If you apologize prematurely, then you draw attention to it, and people remember. But if you don't apologize, and it actually is a big deal, then people do remember and you look like a horrible person.

It's the same debate that centers around when you should write a blog post about downtime. After 10 minutes? Probably not because you've draw attention to the downtime, that wasn't really that severe. 1 hour? Maybe not, people will probably forget about it, and the Internet will have no record that it ever happened. But never post about downtime and users feel ignored, and people get really, really mad at you...
Maybe it is FUD, but that is because I am experiencing Uncertainty, Doubt, and at least a little bit of Fear on the subject of what high-level dynamic language I am going to work with next. I certainly have carried a lot of water for the Ruby team, and I'm worried what I'm going to do with all my free time if I don't have a language to idolize! ;)

I don't want to have to write off Rubinius, and I have a lot of respect for Evan and the members of his team that I know. But can we be brutally honest for a second? The only independent Ruby implementation to have delivered goods, of any sort, is JRuby. I will trust Rubinius when it is publicly released. Until then, it's just another one of several projects claiming that Christmas will bring me a new, faster Ruby. And I've been hearing that same promise before, again and again.

And saying that the Ruby spec is somehow unbroken Ruby stasis? We damn well better have a spec! Ruby has been essentially unchanged for at least 2 years. Saying, "Well at least we have a spec now!" seems like the lowest possible bar for success.

P.S. MacRuby is fascinating, but let's see it on more than 1 of the Big Three before we start saying it's a serious competitor.