skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rails 3.2.3 is compatible with Rails 3.1 and later versions. The main difference is a change in the default security settings (made in the wake of the recent GitHub mass assignment vulnerability—and, IMHO, long overdue).

If you want to get started with Rails, I suggest reading the Rails Tutorial, which I just updated to use 3.2.3:

http://railstutorial.org/book?version=3.2

If you're going to be working on a Rails 3.0 project, you can use the first edition of the book instead:

http://railstutorial.org/book?version=3.0

Screencasts for the 3.0 version are available at http://railstutorial.org/screencasts, and I'm planning to start on the 3.2 screencasts later today.
I think that Bitcoin payment services hold the most promise in third-world countries where credit cards haven't really become the de facto payment standard for non-cash transactions. Any company that could tie Bitcoin with low-end mobile systems available in these countries would be of great service.
Your comment here is a bit terse, but I'm going to read it as promoting having options and agree with you based on that.

I think that it is quite possible that Agile doesn't serve the best interests of introverted programmers, but I disagree that this is a bad thing for programming as a whole.

There are plenty of introverted programmers. If the dominant office/workflow structure of the day makes them less productive than they would be on their own, that creates a huge opportunity for an office/workflow structure that makes introverted programmers more productive than they would be on their own.

On the other hand, I think that some percentage of introverted programmers who don't take a shine to Agile could search forever for an office/workflow structure that they like and never find one, because their issue is mainly with collaboration and exposing their work to criticism while it is still in mid-process.

This group of malcontents can be subdivided still further into those who can make it on their own and those who really would benefit from the sort of collaboration and criticism that they resist. It is this last group that aren't merely introverted, they are also faint of heart. I spend about 40-50% of my time in this category and it's real bad. I take solace in my relative youth and inexperience, I need to know that I won't be this sort of introvert for long.
Give everybody a website & fool them into believing their sales will increase. First it was for small businesses now music. Is that all that google tries to do? Play catch up with facebook, itunes, iphones..etc etc.. (facepalm)
The correct link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rznYifPHxDg
Good God do they ever hate this. haha
MIT CSAIL PhD vs. Promising Startup
I am a type of person who loves both academic research and startups. For a long time, it has been my dream to work on deep scientific problems. On the other hand, I am also equally interested in building something tangible for the society. In a perfectly ideal world, I would expect my PhD work to translate into a startup but I know the probability for such a thing is very low. I will probably be 27 ish when I finish my PhD. According to the HN community, what are some of the pros and cons in going to MIT vs. a startup.
I haven't used Swype regularly. is Swype massively actually massively faster when it comes to two handed typing?

I can easily see the performance difference for one handed typing, but I'm having trouble seeing power users reliably typing emails realizing much faster results with Swype.
Just figured that out. You have to disable MapsGL for that to work.
Replace Snow Leopard Exposé (terrible) with old Leopard-style Exposé (amazing).

http://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on-...

Unfortunately it won't help those of you who have "upgraded" to Lion...
As an outsider, I don't see why reading "TKAOEUPL" instead of "dime" would be an improvement (except for checking precisely what you wrote) for even professionals. Is there a reason why these machines don't convert the roughly-phonetic words into English words? I would think it wouldn't even be too hard to program, even with those 'little spin's, considering how far we've come with grammar checkers and gestural keyboards like Swype.
They were preceded by a generation of single-core Android 2.x tablets, which were terrible. And that includes the original Galaxy Tab that was sufficiently Google-supported to get access to all the proprietary Google apps and the Marketplace.

The best devices of the Honeycomb generation are pretty compelling, especially after getting an upgrade to ICS.
I've been usign Moom for about a month now and I can't count the number of times it's saved me from my old gripe with the 'zoom' button.
Yesterday story about Gwen comes to mind:

http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story
Reims, France
Why does a scala centric company publishes such a poor flame bait article against scala? I think this is just a joke and not to be taking seriously in any way
a few typos:

in the header, should be files not file.

Sending a file[remove s] with DropSend couldn't be easier. Just drag n' drop the file on your contact[add ']s photo and voila, it's sent. (love this way of sending btw!!)

Sending a file with DropSend only require[s] 1 click. Yes, It's just that easy and it's Free!

Your file[s] are encrypted from end to end and are never permentaly stored on our server.

You might want to put up launchrock or mailchimp so we can be notified when you launch!

What city are you guys in? We're working on http://joinastartup.org/ at the Austin one :)
I think it was the hard work of those who made browsers a viable alternative to Flash more than Steve Jobs' nyet. Without their work, not even the mighty Apple could have said no to Flash forever. But still, it was a good call by Steve Jobs, no doubt about that.
3 Things Every Startup Needs to Prove
Video tut: How to back up your Windows 7.
Tired Of Straight Tech News? Check Out Techcrunch.com/Drama
I'd like to hear a little how these pros operate, if you don't mind sparing the time. It sounds quite fascinating.
Notch Announces 'Mars Effect,' a Free-roaming Space Sim
Scala has been on my mind this week, so it was interesting to see this article pop up. I've started to dive into an existing code-base, and I honestly just can't grok what Scala is trying to be.

I think my biggest issue is that the language is so syntactically flexible (verbose?) that I simply have no idea what is a language construct and what isn't.

For instance the code is littered with stuff that looks like:

val something = some_obj open_!;

Is open_! just a method (literally some_obj.open_!) or is "_!" some sort of language construct, because underscores are special sometimes, like with unary_ for instance (or not.. it really just depends).

At first glance the 'almost any method can behave like an operator' stuff is really cool, although as I learned about alarm bells where ringing all over the place. In the hands of even an actually competent programmer it's going to be abused well beyond the utility you get out of it.

It took 30 seconds of looking at existing code to find obvious examples of it. Why is it so evil to clearly denote a method as being an actual method?

Then there is the whole "is this functional or not" madness. It reminds of PERL in that respect. You can accomplish the same tasks in a bunch of different ways.

I guess I'm not terribly impressed. It actually makes me long for the simplicity of C. If you want static typing Scala (and readability adverse type inference system) seems like a really bad choice. At least at the point I'm at about a week into this stuff.

At the end of the day give me the beauty of C, the explicitness of Python, or a much more complete functional language like Clojure. I don't want a hybrid of all of those that seems to create a whole new set of weaknesses and big-time issues. It really seems like the language designer merely looked at Java and tried to create an interoperable language that was as "un-java-like" as possible.
Five Reasons Why Developers Need To Be Wary About Android
well it does say "happy april fools day the end" :)
The App will acually be available in the next 24H. This landing page was just set up to validate our marketing ( Lean Startup yadadiyadada ) .We change the "error" page accordingly.

Cheers
Tumblr Community Guidelines
It's more likely you'll be doing a startup after 27 then doing a PhD afterl 27. If you think you might be unhappy not having done one of them before you die, then go for the PhD first. There will be plenty of opportunities to start/join a startup later. I've done exactly that and don't regret it any bit.

PS You'll find a PhD is a great way to network with people as well.
The issue with big backups isn't that these people aren't using their own software, it's that they are big companies who consider disk space to be essentially free.

Why would you delete possibly old data if you are so rich the price of keeping infinite amounts of data doesn't even register? (or is less than the cost of losing data)
Electronic medical records means less testing, study finds
San Francisco got a few little landmarks...

Sutro Tower: http://i.imgur.com/1CUY1.png

Ferry Building and (I think) the Google SF headquarters: http://i.imgur.com/VmC2D.png

Alcatraz: http://i.imgur.com/FkFf1.png
March 31, 2012: Facebook Timeline for All Pages Goes Live
Question perceived wisdom
Yeah, but... it's not funny. It seems like some of it might be true.
Also, I finally think it's working.

I see you've already anticipated my response. Beyond that, it seems like every six months or so I'll discover that some of my settings have been mysteriously reset during a site update or that the introduction/consolidation of new features results in a regressive behavior that I have to explicitly disable (since it's on by default).

Facebook privacy requires regular maintenance.
I would like to see a major player accept bitcoins as a method of payment.

Just imagine for a moment, Google accepting bitcoins as floating currency, to be used in its Google Play service, or with its Android devices with NFC enabled Google Wallet. That would blur the line between digital currency and digital/real goods and services.
Harry Potter should not be "free", but as a common cultural artifact it should be available according to the contract between the society and the author. For example, author is entitled to a share of profits from any distribution or derivative work, but the author is NOT allowed to decide who to allow and who to deny to distribute and derive it.

These days it is clear that copyright should only be granted by society in exchange to obligations to make the work available to the society at reasonable terms; as time passes the terms should be more and more permissive.

The copyright owners should not dictate their will to the society which empowered them in the first place when it's clearly hurts the society.
if it operated as a node in a meshed Wifi network, and bypassed the operators and the government.
I miss the "other" option. In my case: if its programming environment was awesome.
The guy's look at the mention of pull request at 1:24 is priceless.
I have tried all of the projects mentioned in the comments here.

To me the most simple & quick was this bookmarklet.

https://github.com/christiangenco/Coursera-Video-Downloader-...
This is a really nice idea. Reminds me of Guy Steele's 'Growing a language' talk (http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415) and generally of building a formal system by combining primitives.
that's my point is not funny at all and as serious criticism is pointless and destructive
Big picture they are trying to kill flash! I just don't think that this particular story is that big of a deal because it really only affects linux firefox users. So it's sort of a neat way to for them to re-prioritize on maintaining a product that they anticipate deprecating in the long run.
It's really a shame that FG's comments were downvoted here... Can anyone shed some light on what happened?
Sorry, didn't mean to call you names.

It's just that I have heard the 'people dont want to pay, period.' argument made before and I think its not true. I think there are multiple reasons why people download illegally and being cheap or being unable to pay is just one reason.
You'll catch a bit of unease with that motivation from some quarters, for what it is worth, but I generally applaud people making microecon 101 work for them.

There are two main branches of Rails in use today: 2.3.x and 3.x . Many of the idioms involved in day to day coding are strikingly similar, but the internals are incompatible in many ways. As a workaday Rails programmer you'll typically spend 95% of your time working far away from the internals, so a solid background in MVP design and Ruby / object oriented programming gets you pretty far on both Rails 2 and 3. Their magic incantations for doing some things are different but they can be cheat sheeted or Googled at need.

In general, you would expect greenfield development to be on Rails 3 but a lot of the money in the ecosystem is still in Rails 2 apps.
Stalkers and rapists don't need these tools to ply their 'trade', they're fine with existing resources. New resources such as the app in question do not magically turn normal people into stalkers and rapists.
Scraping FFFFound for a digital photo frame
Kotlin M1 Candidate
that seems what most people miss out on

not all startups are created equal...not all of them will have an early Google atmosphere...plenty of them are started by corporate drones

so you get a bad work environment, paired up with a company that still hasn't figured out how to become profitable
And now I'm left wondering how this comment relates to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3777709 from yesterday...
Why Amazon Can't Win a Tablet Price War Against Google
I made the switch from iPhone to BB.. iPhone was my first smart phone. Yet BB is better in so many ways that works for me. One most important feature that I need is over-the-air battery life where iPhone sucks. I still use iPhone for gaming though.
No. It's not really an article to learn things from (if only because it's dated). It is, however, an entertaining read. Treat it as such: huddle up on the couch with it and enjoy.
Youtube turns lights off for Earth hour.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf by Guy Steele is a little like that.
Look for secure microSD cards: they are smartcards with a microSD form factor and a couple of GB of normal flash storage. You can store private keys in there and negotiate certificates with a PKI server, resulting in a full-fledged S/MIME-compatible mail in your pocket. Take the card off: without your keys the BlackBerry cannot decrypt anything. Steal the phone unlocked: you have three attempts to guess the smartcard PIN. As far as I know, BlackBerry devices are the only mobile platform supporting such local hardware keystores natively.

It has taken years for Apple to implement on iOS half of the crypto available in BlackBerry devices, and they are still knee-deep in badly implemented security. Android and Windows Mobile are not even trying.
Note: For the purposes of this discussion, "accessible" means "accessible via mass assignment". See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3781317.

The change in Rails 3.2.3 that will likely affect the most people is a new default setting in config/application.rb for newly generated applications. By default, Active Record is now configured to throw exceptions any time an attribute not included in attr_accessible is included in a mass assignment:

.
.
.
module SampleApp
class Application < Rails::Application
.
.
.
config.active_record.whitelist_attributes = true
.
.
.
end
end

(Exactly what this means is explained below.)

The model generators have also been updated to include an attr_accessible line. Unfortunately, if you include all of the attributes in the call to rails generate at the command line, they will all be accessible by default, which kind of defeats the purpose. For example, if you type

$ rails generate model User name:string admin:boolean

you'll get

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :name, :admin
end

which probably isn't what you want: chances are that the admin attribute shouldn't be accessible. To prevent security holes, I therefore strongly recommend writing explicit tests for all inaccessible attributes (see below).

To see the effects of the new default, consider a User model with an admin attribute not included in the attr_accessible list:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :name, :email, :password, :password_confirmation
.
.
.
end

With the new default configuration, code like

User.new(admin: true)

will raise an

ActiveModel::MassAssignmentSecurity::Error

exception. You can test for this (in RSpec) as follows:

describe "accessible attributes" do
it "should not allow access to admin" do
expect do
User.new(admin: true)
end.should raise_error(ActiveModel::MassAssignmentSecurity::Error)
end
end

For more details, see the latest version of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial (http://railstutorial.org/book?version=3.2).
I recently switched from a BlackBerry to iPhone. Aside from my device being broken, I primarily switched due to the app ecosystem developed around Apple. As an (aspiring) UX professional, I felt I was missing out on a lot. I think the app eco system is a key point for most (and for a lot of consumers I think the difference between Android and Apple is negligible). Going from a BB to iPhone has me missing some of the "power user" features a BlackBerry affords. Maybe I should have gone Android

Some things about BlackBerry. The keyboard is superior to any other keyboard out there. The BlackBerry is perfectly adequate for lightweight users and IMO a much better messaging device (not strictly because of BBM, but because of battery life as well). RIM is in a weird place due to their enterprise service offerings, software and hardware. wrt Messaging, I think RIM missed out on an interesting acquisition opportunity. Instead of embracing and potentially folding in Kik to its BBM offerings, RIM decided to fight them. Folding in a service like Kik could have been great, I think.
More than semi-interested, because you're more than semi-funny.
Something about using a language that is essentially syntax sugar for a different language just doesn't sit right with me.

I'd much rather they fixed javascript, than use coffeescript.

Although this might be unfair to coffeescript, I haven't given it a proper try-out yet :)
I cloned it in Wordpress https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle
I agree with the points in the article that brainstorming is unhelpful and pair programming can be useful. I have yet to attend a meeting at work with more than one person that has yielded anything useful. In those meetings the extroverts take over and the introverts are left in the corner twiddling their thumbs. If we were given access to the meeting agenda beforehand, and were given time to work on the points individually beforehand, the meeting may actually be productive.
Good apps, good OS
World News Hours: Ticket won $26.5m Lotto Powerball prize
Yet all backup software I've mentioned target home users and small companies. By using it themselves I meant that the developers would actually use it on their machines at home.

Acronis etc. might be large enough that feedback from such testing isn't of interest, but if that's the case that's just sad.
I have a G2, which has a pretty decent physical keyboard as well as Swype. I can see how you might get pretty quick with Swype, but if you're a good typist, I think the keyboard wins out every time. If you are used to it, you get a sort of psuedo-touch typing ability going with it that I don't think you can yet duplicate on a soft keyboard.
For example, I believe that every song recorded before 1997 should be available for purchase in any music web store (some regulated part of the revenue should still go to the musicians if they can be located, which is what recording industry association can do)
And all of those songs should be free to derive and cover (some small regulated part of the revenue on derived song should go to musicians via the same mechanism).

Or else old people would tend to become unavailable at all because you can't locate original authors. And music becoming available is very bad. Much worse than "scary criminal pirate" bad.
They're as closed as their systems. The information is out there. Now wonderfully creative folks have found a way to make the information more transparent.
That's how the best jokes are made :)
I love this kind of thing. I tried something similar a few years ago, after visiting Turkey and seeing their language. I'd had a single character for each sound, though (i.e. 'å' instead of 'ei' for the 'a' sound in 'late').
Other than local universities, where would you look for a mechanical engineer?
I have an invention that I want to build a prototype of. I need someone that is well versed in heat transfer and general ME. I have posted on CL, put flyers out on campuses and reached out to entire ME departments (spammy I know but I believe in this invention).

I need more ideas where to look.

Thanks for the help.
"Verbal and situational irony are often used for emphasis in the assertion of a truth."

Did you ever mock something or exaggerated a fact to make it funny, but in reality, you meant it like that? ;)
I think as an outsider to Adobe, logic dictates what you say. But here is Adobe's thoughts on Flash and their platform: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/articles/recent-up....

The section on Flash player for desktop does say they are keen on making it better, especially with on the multimedia front (I have to admit there are some pain points they do solve for multimedia).
Nevertheless, I am with you in predicting that this is a sure sign of their slow but sure move towards killing it. I just hope people read it faster than we can and not pour money on building flash based solutions. (A lot of enterprise still use flash).
We used an agency to buy are last car and the process couldn't be any easier. Not sure how much better we could have done on our own but we trust the agency we used and compared to prices we where seeing online it seems that we got a very good deal.
i'm sure right after this carefully thought, polite and welcoming comment, he'll most definitely stop what he's doing, and do what you suggest.

(disclaimer: i'm just generally against comments like these, my apologies to other readers that didn't have to read this)
I hope the bitrot doesn't happen as fast this time as it did the last time they dropped support for the Flash version of Linux. The last time they did this, it was right before everyone starting using ALSA, so we were stuck using Flash with horribly broken audio for a long time.
You're not allowed to point out deficiencies in something you like and advocate? That's a fairly dense position..

The nice thing about Open Source is that it tends to be a little bit more immune to that corporate drum beat since there are less full time salesmen and marketeers. The void seems to fill with fanbois though.
What Not To Do When Teaching Creative Writing
As most of the comments pointed out the problem is not with agile but rather with the tendency to only have one way to solve a problem and mostly ignore that we are individuals with rather different needs.

With respect to brainstorming I had session that worked fantastically and others that don't, and in my opinion in session that don't work there is someone that has power over the majority of the group and is simply dictating what happens in the brainstorming session.
PHP: nophptags (PHP proposal for PHP without tags).
Zoom in on London and you'll find a bunch of landmarks