skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You do the Ruby community that you seek to improve a disservice when you use a title that troll baitish. In fairness, you're not the only one I see doing this. There are many bloggers who use the same tactic. I have occasionally been guilty of this in the past though I cautiously avoid the practice now.

More specifically, have you attended any regional Ruby conferences? It is almost certainly a community unto itself: those developers who take the time away from their jobs and families to attempt to better themselves by learning from others. The (Ruby) conference-going community is demonstrably better than at least two out of your three arguments.

As for the Pareto principle, it seems unfair to paint the "Ruby community" with such a broad brush while then going on to say the same of the OSS community at large. It's a universal problem. It should not have been raised in the context of your post.

Finally, you provided no constructive advice in your blog post. How was this post supposed to be helpful?

I for one am tired of the negativity.

This post, by providing only destructive criticism, ironically only serves to exacerbate the public image that some paint Rubyists with.
Taxis are expensive and severely supply side limited. Interesting things happen when things that were previously limited become much less so. People had "internet" when they dialed it at 56kbits, but things like youtube were impossible. I'd guess that self driving zip-cars would be at least as big a paradigm shift.
MEDIA MUGS, INC.
I need startup capital for the development of inventory of my product.
This reminds me of how Facebook was having issues with apps sending message spam within Facebook, so they prevented apps from initiating messages and instead forced apps to spam outside of Facebook (by just asking for and using your email). Out of sight, out of mind!
Does anyone else feel that e-mail is not broken, but task/project management systems are?

Fundamentally, doing "productive work" boils down multiple individual tasks which some humans are doing, while at the same time referencing and updating some store of information/documentation/metadata to find what to do, and say when/how it's been done. Computers should be great at assisting with this administration - the bicycle of the mind helps get you where you want to go.

The fact that email is used to move tasks between people, as the place to create new tasks, as the place to discuss tasks, as the default todo-list for a day unless you go out of your way to move information elsewhere, is all not a failing of email or behaviour, it's a failing of project management and shared todo list and documentation systems. They don't do it, so email does.

If you had a place where that kind of stuff was tracked /well/ it would be trivial to use it to do all this stuff and email would fall by the wayside because it would be less good. Email would become for personal, direct contact, and notifications of things that you request be sent to you.

Too much work should not build up in individual inboxes, it should build up in shared project management system - and a company can then choose to allocate more people to it. Asking one person for information because it isn't documented and searchable should not be the norm. Asking one person what needs to happen next because it isn't tracked shouldn't be normal. Emailing prototypes to your colleagues because there is no centralised storage that works nicely shouldn't be the default.

It even seems tantalisingly easy to build - tree structured projects with nested tasks, granular user permissions, a designed UI to answer questions like "which bits need work", "which bits need questions answering", "which bits are underplanned", "what should I be doing". Templates of procedures so you can set regular patterned actions in motion.

It sort of exists. It's sort of in CRM and Sharepoint workflows, it's sort of in individual task lists, it's sort of being made real. But not yet.

Normal cars are no good at moving lots of goods. The way to fix that is not to make family cars with reinforced axles and tractor tyres, and it's not to teach people to drive slower so they can balance things more carefully. It's to invent vans and trucks and trains.
In much of the country, it's not a big problem. I live in NJ and bike to work every day. It's rarely over 80 if I leave at 8am.
This guy is talented! He needs to get on kickstarter and finance his own project.
I understand that there's more to the Comcast /Netflix dispute, but soon or later the "dumb pipes" are going to want a cut, especially for heavy usage.

Until that's solved (lobbyists are rubbing their hands!) speed etc are irrelevant. Who cares that you can download at 50mb/s when the limit is reached after a few minutes /hours of full usage?
A lot of that includes suburbs of Houston though. Fort Bend County largely consists of Katy and Sugar Land, two major suburbs. Harris is mostly Houston though much of it doesn't really qualify as urban.

A lot of the oil companies are starting to move out of downtown. Exxon as always been up in The Woodlands, ConocoPhilips is out at Highway 6 and I-10. Shell is moving a lot of people out to their west Houston facility and BP recently opened a huge new expansion to their campus in the same area.

Now, urban Houston, which I would say is anything inside the 610 loop, still grew by a large percent though I'm not exactly sure what that is.

I'd also argue that there's never been a better time to live in Houston. Growing tech sector, amazing healthcare sector with some of the best hospitals and research institutions in the world. Also a food scene which is possibly the most interesting and innovative in the nation right now.
What's totally bizarre about the publishers pricing is that other goods that have gone digital have benefitted by lower prices, or at least, temporary price drops. My knowledge is particularly in video games, but those Steam sales that keep popping up are not through the goodness of Valve's hearts. Publishers are doing gangbusters on those sales, and consumers are buying far more games than they'll ever play.

They screwed up. The agency model wasn't necessarily bad, it's that they used it to screw the consumer to pay higher prices. Had they used it to lower prices, they wouldn't have this problem now, where they forced themselves into wholesale and let Amazon marginalize them further.
I used Altavista when the most famous "Larry" amongst geeks was still called "Leisure Suit Larry".
Cocos2d: past, present and future
Yeah as mentioned, Flickr was/is basically a more complicated version of Instagram without the hipster tinge.

Also, pretty sure PicPlz came before Instagram, and for a long time had more users (must suck to be those guys right now).

I kind of figure they had simplicity on their side, combined with an initial target market of niche/boutique/hipster/grunge/retro, and the cherry on the cake was Facebook seeing them as a growing competitor in the photo sharing biz (that would have also added a threat to the value of their upcoming IPO). /2c
A useless form builder with Meteor
Ask HN: Why did Instagram need to raise $57M?
I'm having trouble getting a good answer as to why Instagram found it necessary to raise $57M? Please enlighten me.
I am pretty sure dumping is only considered for international trade where an item is exported at a lower cost than it is sold domestically. Another example of selling below costs, is in the console industry where Sony and I am sure other companies as well have sold consoles well below their cost and make up for it with game sales.
Please post more about why you feel this way. I know that Jesse Noller and some of the other organisers would be interested in feedback from first time attendees.
NamelessApp, putting a name to every face in the world #swbayMEGA
> As a former Houstonian (and Montrose denizen), the one problem here is that there is a very good chance your job will not be in Lower Westheimer or Downtown. Which means you could very well be spending an hour on I-10 headed out to the energy corridor to work for one of the Big Oil companies.

Absolutely. Fortunately my new employer is in the middle of downtown but the fact that the big employers in Houston are leaving the 610 loop does skew the population distribution.

I've read elsewhere that the statistical center of the Houston region by population is almost at Highway 6 and I-10 now, largely due to growth in Katy.

Given that Katy ISD is opening five new high schools in the next few years at 3.5k students each, it's not really surprising.
Honestly, the magic thing is really overstated. The most magical thing in rails is that methods are defined on your models based on the framework reading your schema when it launches, which granted, is pretty magical, but ActiveRecord aside there isn't much else.

I spent some time doing ASP.net Webforms, now THAT is a magical framework. To the point where I would say only around 1% of the people who used it had the slightest clue as to what was actually happening. Rails doesn't hold a candle to webforms in terms of magic, but for some reason it is always referred to that way, and I have never heard anyone say anything like that for webforms (or seaside, or lift, or yesod)
Pedantic, I know, but: Source code. Not source codes.

Seeing this made the author lose credibility on the subject.
More like Facemash for puppies.
Self folding inkjet printed paper
Other way around. Vayable was founded in 2010, and has been online since early 2011. We're also bigger and in more places -- hundreds of cities, worldwide.
Another sunday wasted by nerds in dungeons circle jerking themselves over stupid shit. LETS ALL BLOG ABOUT IT!
"And there's almost always a way to monetize a product that is important to someone."

There's almost always a way to monetize a product that is both important to someone, and difficult to reproduce. If Instagram ever started charging for their service, a newer, "hipper", freer Instagram clone would have popped up overnight and it would have gained a lot of traction just by being free.

Of course, there are other ways to monetize a service other than directly charging a user, but given the nature of what Instagram is, most of the usual suspects (targeting ads and collecting user data, etc) are potentially much creepier than usual.
Asimo - All New Features 2011 [video]
Not to mention at the end of the series Chandler and Monica move out to the 'burbs to raise a family.
Frankly, I am getting tired of this "ideas are worthless, execution is golden" mantra. Of course, "let's build a online shop" idea is useless, but it's not really an idea to begin with. An idea that is worth discussing with others would typically include some minimal validation, an execution and marketing plan and, in general, some amount of thought put into it. Because otherwise it's not an idea, but a random brainfart.

Moreover, the value of a good idea is in that extra thought that was put into it, something that is well worth a bit of protection. This is not an abstract MBA point. I am involved with a project that can be fully described in just 4 words, and these are plenty sufficient to tip off the competition and loose the first-to-market advantage. Should we not have been careful with how we talked to other people about the idea, we might've lost it to the established players already.

(edit) I am not disagreeing that a lot of people asking for an NDA upfront are lunatics, because they are. It's the black and white take on the value of ideas that I have an issue with.
I also was on ESTA, and had no local address.
I haven't tested it with infinite scroll but essentially it'll be a race. If the user can scroll to the bottom of the page before infinite scroll is able to load new content, the 100% event will fire. Otherwise it'll just register the previous scroll event (75% or a specified DOM element).
FWIW, I just signed an employment agreement with a major development firm which included similar clauses. I was about to reject it and ask them to send one without such onerous restrictions when I got to the end of the section which included a large caveat "This section shall only apply to work performed on company time with company equipment," just in more legalese.

As a graduating college student I've heard others getting similar wording to allow for the employee to work on personal projects outside of work and retain ownership. Maybe things are getting better?
The thing that confuses me about all this is that an NDA is a non DISCLOSURE agreement, not a non COMPETE agreement.

Therefore and NDA is pretty worthless when it's at the 'idea's stage. Most people seem to think it will prevent you telling anyone about it AND copying it. Or am I missing something?
Listen to audiobooks. Better than listening to the rubbish on the radio, and no more dangerous. Really good way to do something you enjoy while driving. Find a good book. Either fiction or self development or what ever and I find myself looking forward to car time because I can relax. My audiobook player is the best player for iPhone that I've found.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-audiobook-player/id4593930...
Let's you play downloaded books.
Maybe not just the ruby community, I feel the same about the node community, from my rather short experience, most of the time I see a lot of them praising ruby/node/etc as the ultimate solution to everything, and that makes me run from those communities and consequently the languages/frameworks, and that is the main reason I dont have much experience with ruby/node the community ends up making me avoid the technologies that may be good or not, I'm not going to argue that.

Looking into other communities, specifically Java, C# and PHP I don't see this kind of behavior, yes sometimes someone like that shows up, but from my experience it's less than the previously mentioned.

Please note that this is merely my personal experience, but I would like to know other people experiences with these communities.
"Codes" is common in some sub-disciplines (eg HPC). Still sounds weird to my ears though.
great. we'll never be able to do business with you since we can't disclose information about our customers to 3rd parties without one. way to limit your options.
You forget your keys, the super doesn’t let you in, you’re locked out. That’s the equivalent of a syntax error.

On another topic, this isn’t really a technical issue, it’s a people issue. Everyone understands what the JS interpreter’s behaviour is, what Bootstrap.js does, and why JSMin doesn’t minify it. What is being discussed here is what choices people make to please themselves and others as opposed to the compiler.

If @fat didn’t care about people, he’d use semicolons and JSMin would compile Bootstrap. If Crockford didn’t care about people, JSMin would compile Bootstrap just the way it is. When we’re talking about multiple ways of writing code that does the same thing, it’s almost entirely about people and not technical considerations.
That blog post they cite includes this:

My advice on JSLint: don’t use it. Why would
you use it? If you believed that it helps you
have less bugs in your code, here’s a newsflash;
only people can detect and solve software bugs,
not tools. So instead of tools, get more people
to look at your code.

Unless I'm missing something, that easily qualifies as the dumbest thing I've read on the net in the last week--and I've been to /r/politics.
How to stop headphones from tangling
A few weeks ago someone said the ranking algorithm may silently disregard votes for directly-linked pages -- is this true?
6½ Fundamental Principles of Cognition
I love this: boy it's true...

It’s a well documented phenomenon how idea-havin’ first timers just need a programmer to bring their vision to life, as though the idea is somehow half the battle (or 90%, as folks like me often get offered sweat equity deals–10% seems to be a popular number).
That article is about the old encoder, though, and it's almost two years old. It ends with an update from a year ago in which he mentions that the new (at the time) encoder in libwebp should beat jpeg.
"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

Its like the golden rule for software. It generally stops nonsense like this cold.
I don't think that's true. See this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?page...):

----------

During a half-hour drive beginning on Google’s campus 35 miles south of San Francisco last Wednesday, a Prius equipped with a variety of sensors and following a route programmed into the GPS navigation system nimbly accelerated in the entrance lane and merged into fast-moving traffic on Highway 101, the freeway through Silicon Valley.

It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road is included in its database, and left the freeway several exits later. The device atop the car produced a detailed map of the environment.

The car then drove in city traffic through Mountain View, stopping for lights and stop signs, as well as making announcements like “approaching a crosswalk” (to warn the human at the wheel) or “turn ahead” in a pleasant female voice. This same pleasant voice would, engineers said, alert the driver if a master control system detected anything amiss with the various sensors.

The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first.

----------

Also, the Wikipedia page indicates the same: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
I could put it in a single sentence: because I don't want to increase my exposure to lawsuits.
This seems wrong. If they're using code to arrive at their findings, it should be high-quality, no less so than their lab technique. One can lead to bogus results just as easily as the other.
Were you guys on stage last year at startup school?
Did it really not occur to you that an overly-dramatic lament, with f-bombs and references to cancer, might give a bad impression? There is really very little excuse for Rubyists to have so little awareness, especially if they hope to overcome the stigma they are so worried about...
I've seen it, it can do this. I've seen it first-hand navigate it's way around the Google campus, go into a left turn lane, turn left into one of the Google buildings. The entrance has a prominent bump, and the car slowed down so as not to hit it hard.

Of course, it may have been pre-programmed, but I don't believe so. What I don't think it can yet do is navigate arbitrary systems like drive-thrus.
Affiliate Marketing Strategies
On a freeway drive, I assure you, energy spent maintaining speed is the primary investment by great lengths.

This is an over-generalization. Yes, city mileage is generally lower than highway, and yes, it is because of stop-and-go. But markedly different? My old car got 32 freeway, 29 city. My current car gets 27 freeway, 25 city. Cars with a large difference, like your BMW, suffer either from poor aerodynamics or engine configuration. (That is to say, the particular engine setup operates very inefficiently when accelerating from a stop) Now, the most damning evidence of all- the Prius gets 40 freeway, 44 city.

Automating drafting is an interesting suggestion, but anecdotal evidence from hypermilers suggests that even when drafting close behind a big-rig, you typically only net a few percent. In addition, to get any kind of measurable improvements from drafting behind a regular car, you'd basically have to ride their bumper. It seems unlikely we will permit computers to try this any time soon.

In the end, my point is not that improved traffic flow is worthless- it is a win in nearly every aspect- but that it is a small, incremental win. It is not going to reduce our energy consumption enough as to obviate our dependence on cheap energy, which ties back in to the earlier point this discussion spawned from:

Suburbs are built on the principle that energy is cheap. That is no longer the case.
“Amazon wants the price of books to be very, very low — lower than the publishing community can support,” said Curt Matthews, IPG’s chief executive. “Making a book is still a craft industry. Books need to be edited, to be publicized. Someone needs to say this is good and this is not.”

Publishing industry: You should pay us 80% of a book's price to decide what's good.

Amazon: We'll let the customer do that and give the extra money to the author, thanks.
We started a petition for Comcast to comply with net neutrality and apply caps equally, or not at all. Please sign if you agree and share: http://pblk.dm/IVLlza
Investing with Stock Options
My version of Programming Clojure has:

P3.0 printing
Top Atlanta public schools' average SAT scores (http://www.city-data.com/forum/atlanta/1382712-top-10-metro-..., http://www.ajc.com/news/top-25-georgia-high-123297.html) top out below the level where top public schools for major California metropolitan areas start (http://projects.latimes.com/schools/sat-scores/ranking/page/...).
You sound like you're describing the LA area (with the exception of the city center gentrifying).

It seems that what has happened is that, for the majority of American cities, they grew as an either/or option: you're either in the city, or you're in the suburbs, and the car enabled that in cities where it could. The cities which were geographically constrained, such as NYC or SF, were unable to sprawl outwards, and have commutes within reason, so the middle-classes stayed. That means things like good schools are able to exist because the demand was always there from the middle classes that didn't leave.
Clickable: http://timeforzen.com
Just use a fucking semicolon. Seriously, it's like people are embarrassed to write JavaScript. If you ever work with other people this shit doesn't fly very far.
Couldn't the 'onClick' case have been solved by allowing either a statement or an expression to appear there?
The number of responses here talking about how cool this is disturbs me.

Yet another reason to use ScriptNo (Chrome).
What's Not wrong with the London startup scene 
This is pretty good, on the UK startup space, and how it's build on trust and passion, yet always gets a bad name online.
Tell Comcast to Stop Violating Net Neutrality
Is one of the four words "awesome"? But in seriousness, I agree with you that in many endeavors the ideas are as important as the execution. Hell, in software, much of good execution is just good ideas on a smaller scale.
Anybody know of a site where I can browse and read novels published and sold independently by the Authors?
I started mobile photo sharing site Mobog.com in 2003. Instagram was executed about 10,000% better.

http://mobog.com
Now that you mention it, every language should have a "Zen" statement, or if you don't want to call it that, a short description of its philosophy. This in addition to the concise problem/solution statement that probably every piece of software should have.
45 minutes round-trip: 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back, 5 minutes at the store. With only moderate traffic, of course, rush hour (which in the DC suburbs extends from noon to 9 pm) can easily extend this to an hour.

Compare to Chicago where running out of contact solution means taking the elevator down 28 floors to the 7-11 in my building.

And I don't know about So-Cal, but Nor-Cal "suburbs" are far denser than in DC. People call Silicon Valley a bunch of suburbs, but as far as I can tell its a series of small urban centers connected by a highway.