skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I almost wish it were April Fools Day...

For someone who loves Merb and had decided to leave Rails behind (as much as possible), I have very mixed feelings about this. If this means Rails will start to feel more like Merb, fantastic! Otherwise?

I have a feeling it'll be a long while before I really know how to feel about this...

It'll be interesting to see how well this merger actually works in practice. It seems like when large companies merge the results are often underwhelming. Can a merger of large open source projects work? Will the different cultures clash?
Hey there, were you a coworker of Kyle's at EA? A fellow game graphics programmer from Rockstar Games here.

I remember Kyle mostly from his days as a comic artist at my alma mater, Univ. of Virginia. I was a comic artist and editor several years after Kyle graduated but I still remember his work from my freshman year. It was a comic called Drool and was a very morbid comic but hilarious if you're into that kind of thing. It was much better than most of what comes out of xkcd and other fluffy nerd comics. I believe it was canned after Kyle ran a Jesus joke that rubbed some people wrong. The artwork in World of Goo comes directly from his old work.

I would point you to a URL of his stuff if it weren't for the fact that our school newspaper's website hasn't been fully functional since my roommate who maintained it graduated :(
So Microsoft is planning to make software that's targeted at popular hardware? And then promote it?

Is that supposed to be surprising?
Me too, and Debian runs great on it; suspend/resume included.
I think this is great confirmation of Dan Dennett's "becoming famous" model of consciousness, that various "threads", much like program threads, are happening and competing all of the time in the brain, and the ones that "become famous", i.e. a thread that can be seen or accessed by broad areas of the brain, is what is consciousness, i.e., a famous thread does not correspond to consciousness, but rather is consciousness.

In this case, the thread of the visual stimuli became only famous enough to control the subjects feet and so forth to help him avoid the obstacles, but did not become sufficiently famous to be recorded or reported by the subject as a "conscious experience". This is because the visual stimuli did get passed to the extrastriate visual cortical areas but not to the primary visual cortex.

So this perfectly fits Dennett's model: a signal becomes famous enough to control muscles, but, because of injury, does not become so famous (or so globalized a thread, in programming terms) that the subject is able to report an experience of it.

For my money, qualia does not exist. It is a remnant of Cartesian dualism that has no place in the 21st century. Here the subject did not "miss out" on some hocus pocus qualia, rather, the visual stimuli simply did not become famous enough to be able to be reported by him, but, it did become famous enough for him to be able to avoid the objects in his visual path.

Dennet 1; Dualist Philosophers 0

:-)
PlentyofFish's revenue numbers aside, one really has to be amazed at their sheer traffic numbers. If the market share stats are to be believed, Match.com and eHarmony are getting trampled on despite their outsize national advertising budgets, deep-pocketed investors and clearly more polished products.

I'd really be interested to know how PoF is pulling so much traffic.
How Much Has Harvard Really Lost?
Sounds like they smelled some code duplication and committed to a cross-project refactoring.

Exciting to see some smart people uniting over respect for a common problem.
I'm still tripping on this. Not sure what to think of it yet. It sounds like it could be quite awesome.
We're open to discussing scenarios for the right candidate. Send me an e-mail if you'd like to discuss further.
Which seems the most "readable"? I think the Ruby one might be.
Some techies consider the possibility shipping thier software to millions of people "the chance to make it big". Microsoft offers that.
More links:

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/12/23/merb-gets-merged-in...

http://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/

http://rubyonrails.org/merb

http://merbist.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/

http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/12/23/merb-is-rails

http://loriholden.com/archives/2008/12/23/16-merb-is-rails-3...

http://mornini.wordpress.com/2008/12/23/rails-2x-merb-1x-rai...

http://splendificent.com/2008/12/the-merb-rails-merger-annou...
lol @ Rails being called "the Establishment"
When something becomes boring and meaningless, whether it's a dull job that should be a source of joy, or the globetrotting you thought was what you wanted, you do something else.
What's your feeling about this, qhoxie? I remember from your earlier posts that you recommended merb over rails. Are you confident this merge is going to be the best of both worlds? I don't know enough to have an opinion.
Wow, completely unexpected! Very exciting!
My girlfriend is bipolar. I met her when she was going through a medication change, which was not fun, and she recently had to take a year off from school to deal with her condition, which was hard. She seems to be doing much better and things have calmed down with her.

I've heard some people say that it's not worth it, since those kinds of things "never go away", but she means a lot to me. I feel that mental illness is only one aspect of such a person, with pluses and minuses (one such plus being that it makes her a stronger person).

A huge number of people at my school have Asburger's, and many are on meds for it. I've seen a lot of them become much more stable and balanced people, mostly because of increased exposure to people like them as well as normal people.

Personally, I've found I've developed a very high tolerance to people with personality quirks.
The xbox360 is an amazing machine. You guys need to be more positive!
"Easily recovered" translates to "minor pain in the ass"

Lot of build up for the pain body, bro.
How can the Ruby community splinter between two competing web frameworks? The entire Ruby-using population does not need to agree on a web framework. There can be smaller communities around various projects and frameworks within the Ruby community. In fact, I would think that it would be vital to Ruby's advancement and evolution.

You mention that Rails being the dominant web framework is a strength and in the same sentence remark about how with other languages there are multiple competing frameworks. How, exactly, does this negatively impact developers? On the flip side, how does a merger between Rails and Merb positively impact developers? Developers who don't like Rails had an alternative in Merb and vice versa. How is the elimination of a choice a good thing?

The way I see it, competition here is only a good thing. Why would anyone want Rails to be the only option-- or even the de facto standard-- when it's been shown to be exactly the wrong tool for the job in several high profile scenarios? Don't get me wrong-- I'm not bashing Rails. I'm just saying it's a good thing to have a few more tools in the toolbox. When your only tool is a hammer everything starts looking like nails.
I was in a similar situation. I took college calculus in 8th grade, and linear algebra and discrete math in 9th. I was still a high school student, though, and my high school expected me to spend ridiculous amounts of time on math I'd learned years earlier. Ditto for science, English and history. My choice was

3) Do the minimum required to stay eligible for sports as an underclassman and then drop out once I was old enough to do so legally.

I've never regretted the decision since.
I think you're right.

TL can be a fair point to make, but DR usually means you shouldn't post a comment at all. How can you add value to the conversation if you haven't read the thing?

The principle of brevity is only violated when length exceeds scope. I think it's easily worth filling several pages to explain how to launch a product. Having actually read the article myself, very little came across to me as superfluous.

Of course, value to the reader is subjective and depends on where you're at. If you already know everything he's talking about, then it's your fault for wasting time reading it, not his fault for writing honestly and thoroughly about a useful topic.

I didn't realize how awful the font colour was on the website version, though, since I got mine in an email. I just opened the link now. Ouch.
Low Ambition - Ideas For Breaking Even
Let's hypothetically say you ran a website with which your goal was to break even after hosting costs and personal time spent maintaining and coding the site. The site could be something you run just for the fun and joy of it, and all you want to do is not be in the red every month. What are some ways you might generate, say, $50 a month with a site (or group of sites) such as this?
If you live in a state where medical marijuana is legal, you might talk to a doctor about seeing if this can help you.

I've had a friend with a similar problem with anxiety and panic problems, and this really seems to help her. (She tends to do it in the evenings when she can't shake that panicky feeling, but not while working.)
Continuations are really neat devices. You can make any kind of flow-of -control construct out of them. IIRC they were originally invented to formally model the GOTO. However, in their full glory they are mind numbingly difficult to understand and probably to debug. Basically in the Swarms model you are passing around a chunk of program state to do the computation, and with it, all the problems that data encapsulation is supposed to solve. I thing debugging would be hugely difficult. Contrast this with message passing where only the relevant values are sent, not the whole computational state.

The article says that 3.5% of instructions cause a continuation to be sent. That's a huge percentage. A program would spend all its time marshaling and unmarshaling.

One of the things that you want to do to increase efficiency is to promote and exploit locality. You want to cluster the closely related objects on the same node to reduce network traffic and latency. Constant moving of objects or a bad distribution strategy is going to hurt that. I once worked on a distributed database with automatic replication to ransom nodes. Performance was killed by constant network chatter. The design goal was 1000 nodes, in reality it maxed out at 16.
I have a lot of experience with considering the tradeoffs necessary to do click analysis on a decently large scale (and the results of that will be shown, provided I can finish VisTrac).

Analysis and collection presents a very interesting problem, given the mass of data being collected. Determining how much depth will be provided and how/when to aggregate is really important. I'm not advocating premature optimization, but this stuff requires a lot of structural consideration.

The biggest hangup I've come across is filtering data by things like location/browser, and similar, as they would require aggregating data in many permutations...at least, as far as I've found. In the long run though, it seems that those levels of granularity aren't as important as they might seem and can often be dropped (as it will be, to an extent, in my case).

(Random side-note : I'm potentially looking for a second brain to work on VisTrac with, as I haven't found one yet.)
the problem of too much choice: http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/barry-schwartz-on-why-too-m...
To me, insanity refers to a judgment of the rationality of an observed behavior.

Who is to say whether an exhibited mode of behavior deemed by the observer to be irrational is the product of a mental disease or the rational course of action given a more complete understanding of the world?
Well, Rack is really changing a lot already with Ruby frameworks. Sinatra is becoming more popular for highly specialized apps, and now you can embed Sinatra and Camping apps into other Rack apps, which includes Rails edge apps.

Basically what's happening is that everything in Ruby is already becoming more modular, shifting toward organized APIs, so this helps move in a direction where you can basically build a customized framework like legos out of a bunch of gems and specialized apps without spending an inordinate amount of time trying to patch things to work together.
Who cares about the 360? This time around Sony and MS came out with a more powerful 'same thing' while Wii innovated and made something really interesting. Why, my wife is even considering letting me get one of those. :)
>>> o rly? Only half the system's resources to sit and do nothing?

If Windows 7 will really run swiftly on 1GB RAM and Intel Atom, that's actually a rather big thing, strengthening the MSFT domination in desktop OS's even further.

Taking different perspectives into consideration, it still seems to me that Steve's remark was spot on...
I like the Ruby one most. But "readable" is matter of taste (or programmer's background: I consider

while (*to++ = *from++);

to be a readable C code (not that I'll recommend it)).

It is wrong to judge a language by tiniest code examples.
Innovation won't stop. It will just have a different name and perhaps some different principals.

That's exactly my hope.
From jm4:

"Compiz and Beryl. Beryl forked from Compiz and, if I remember correctly, relations were very sour between the two projects. Several months later they merged into Compiz Fusion."
because I can't assume that the questioner is someone as enlightened as you

But if they aren't, I don't really want to work for them. My being genuinely philosophical is often off-putting to people as overly smart-ass-ish or academic. I realize the dark side to this is that it limits my selection of jobs, but it makes for good conversation when I find a job I like.
I must agree: I don't get it.

You say every platform has a preferred language which should be used instead of others because they would be "limiting", and that Python is a categorically bad idea.

But the original poster didn't indicate which platform he was choosing. What if his platform of choice is Pygame? What if it was the .NET CLR (which effectively "comes with" languages like Boo or IronPython)? Wouldn't Python then be the ideal choice?

And before you dismiss Pygame as too limiting to be a platform, note that one of the games in the article is flOw, originally written for the even-more-limited Flash platform.
I hope the result ends up being mostly merb. It is just so much cleaner...
I liked the clean design but I didn't understand why, after I logged in, I had a random link to a Forth programming website already stored in my links page. A little strange. The idea of only having 4 links per user is a good solution to the quotas imposed by Google App Engine, on which you are hosting this project but, from the user's perspective, this does not make the site very useful. It's your first Django project, so congrats on getting it up and running. Now, maybe you can add a Firefox toolbar or any number of other features that existing bookmarking services offer. Also, consider allowing users to have public and private bookmarks with tagging so that there is some interaction among the users on the site. Take a look at StumbleUpon as probably the most effective implementation of this type of service. You can learn a lot from their feature set. Then you need to think about how you can set yourself apart. Nice start, though.
Rails: Merb, _I_ am your father.

Merb: Nooooooooooo!
This guy is 4 times smarter than you.

Depending on the measure, probably many, many more times than 4. But it has nothing to do with his title, which is what I was poking fun at ;) The implication he wasn't smart because of his title was out of line, good call. I apologize.

Since I'm sure he doesn't really care much about his title, I guess I'm making fun of the people at Microsoft who decided that motivating people with four-word titles is a good idea.
Ramaze
That's a completely valid problem, but at best it's debatable whether it applies to Ruby web frameworks. There's not exactly a plethora of mature web frameworks available. Rails and Merb seemed to be the most firmly established frameworks with a few others like Sinatra, Camping and Ramaze sprouting up.

I think the too much choice problem applies much more when you're installing a Linux distribution and you have to choose from 40 different text editors or IM clients. Who has the time or the inclination to evaluate each one?
In my experience when the outcome of something is a lot of money, some people do whatever to make it happen.

I wouldnt bet anything against Google or PoF not messing this
Do tech jobs discriminate against mental illness? By saying they couldn't possibly be competent? I think some jobs discriminate by default, by looking at someone's CV, which could be tainted by periods in hospital. Myself, I have a mental illness and haven't been able to find work. It's up to me to sell my own software to make a decent living.
Online v. print reading: which one makes us smarter?
That's definitely true for many (not sure about "most") of the blind, but it depends on the source of their blindness.

Circadian rhythms are maintained by the Suprachiasmatic nucleus (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gray773.png; the SCN is in the dark region below the chiasma). If light/dark information reaches this structure, then circadian cycles will be maintained.

Remember also that most of the blind still perceive some visual information. They still see light and dark, or large shapes.

Mind you, this is a completely different phenomenon from the blindsight that this article is about.
And I wish I had a silent bicycle...
The article discusses Harvard's investment shift away from American stocks and bonds, into real assets such as timber forests, real estate, and stockpiles of oil.

While these assets may have lost even more than US stocks this year, it's not hard to imagine that this strategy still makes sense in the long term. It really depends on whether you think this is simply a cyclical recession in the US or whether there is a risk the US will continue to decline relative to other nations. If the latter happens, commodities may regain value much faster than US stocks.
The purpose of the comment was not to be cynical, but to poke a hole in the logic of the article. Humans like to believe we can explain everything, so when we cannot predict the success of startups, we look at already successful startups, analyze their history, and create a story for why they became successful while others did not.

In reality this narrative we create is not a product of facts, but a story we use to make the world seem more understandable than it really is. This concept is discussed in The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb.

I guess my point is, if you want to start a company you should do it because you have faith in your ability to provide value and execute on entrepreneurial opportunities, not because a few companies that started with bad ideas managed to succeed.
Can you just say "can't say no to pretty girls"? So, you reveal a maybe real weakness, but it is totally outside your work field and yet doesn't affect your hiring.

So, I still think this question is dumb.
Sounds like something worthy of a completely new name. That would go for both projects.
Thank you. This is why I often skip straight to the comments.
Will Rails go the Struts 1 way ?
you are assuming all great companies that you want to work for, have only excellent people.... wrong. Even good companies, have bozos inside. You don't know yet who are you dealing with.
If the guy is asking this question, there is a great chance that he is a bozo. Yes. I have been asked this question before, and during the conversation I could tell the guy asking was not a good engineer.
probably something like "will it blend" where i get to destroy things creatively and document it.

preferably with fun stuff like thermite or sparkler bombs...
It's really great!
http://www.railsgeek.com
the rule is: if you're not adding something to the conversation, then don't post. "+1", "lol", and other "attaboy" type comments, including yours, should be expressed with an upvote.
i cry foul. at no point is a puppy weighed against the netbook :|
I'm pretty sure you're right.
Having received the results of this article, I have ordered a printing of the internet.
uh, suspend/resume works fine on both my laptop and my netbook under linux...

But keep telling yourself that Windows is the future; it's part of my competitive advantage ;-)
Tweet A Last-Minute Gift To Charity
Just FYI, but you can buy the toilet seats (which are where all the goodness is) in the US, if you live near SF, LA, or NY. They cost twice as much here, though, so you're better off picking one up and putting it in your luggage the next time you make a round trip.
Python-like F# version:

String.Join("\n", Array.of_seq (seq {for foo in mylist do if foo.Description <> "" then yield foo.Description}))

(String.Join should have an overload for string IEnumerables / seqs and not just accept string arrays.)
[T]alented engineers forced to go into management for raises was really hurting Windows. Sinofski shook up the rules and let the engineers quit management and go back to engineering at the same pay.

While this sounds like a smart move by Sinofsky, it's even more revealing of Microsoft's cultural deterioration.
What Will You Do Differently Next Time?
I would imagine the following would be of help:

1) think positively

2) set some goals for yourself

3) direct your energy towards those goals

The first step is the key. Without the right attitude the rest of it would be difficult. If you can bang out 2000 words in 30 minutes, then you have a talent that can be used to help others and yourself.

Thanks for sharing - I wish you the best!
I find the best solution to avoiding procrastination is to simply figure out exactly what the next step is that you need to take to be one step closer to being done. Once you've figured that out, picture yourself doing it and then think about how you'll feel when the completed action is just a thing of the past. Rinse and repeat.

We set ourselves up for procrastination by not thinking about the next step and instead only thinking about the end result.
Certainly there are cases such as you describe. But when I am working on a team, I would prefer not to do so with 'four hour work week' types. I know a loafer when I see one. ;-)
Does your buddy need to travel back to consult with customers in the US (assuming that is where he is from)? Was he an established consultant before the move?
I agree that you should start a company because of a core belief that you can do something unique and interesting in the world.

I even agree that you should completely believe in your idea -- you cannot use this as an excuse to not be passionate.

However, I see many would-be entrepreneurs stiffeling themselves with doubt. In fact I almost didn't start Smart Bear because of such feelings.

So, although I agree this is NOT a reason to start, the point is that such doubt is not reason to NOT start.

P.S. Also articles like this are IMHO most powerful when they are one-sided. There are always many facets to any point, but prose can get watered down in the hedging and exceptions, and I'd rather try to inspire.
Where is this article originally from?
VIDEO - Old Xmas-y IT Administrator / Geek Song "My Favorite Things"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Favorite_Things_(song)
Which is a rather bad sign.
A Guide to The Contextual Web
Oh man, this is great.
so much for "no code is faster than no code"
The cited example shows a neuroscientist talking like an American teenager. As this is probably not intentional, the most likely explanation is a cultural disconnect. If anything, it's a counterexample of extreme fluency, since a native speaker in her position wouldn't intentionally say that.
Population growth speeds up Evolution
Can't wait for Zed to weigh in!
Hmmm, HN could use a suggestion engine for related news... there are 4 articles on the homepage about this.