skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably the biggest downside is that you'll incorrectly assume that some parts of Rails are actually part of Ruby. Then you'll miss them when they're not there and possibly feel a small amount of sadness. Oh the humanity! :)

The big one is ActiveSupport. There are many extensions to common Ruby objects like String, Enumerable, Hash, etc. For example. In Rails, you'll use something like this quite frequently:

some_string_var.parameterize

The parameterize method is part of ActiveSupport::Inflector. As you start to write Ruby outside of Rails, you'll come across occasions where you'd really like to use ActiveSupport methods like these, but fortunately, RubyGems and Bundler make that easy.

EDIT: My last paragraph isn't clear enough that you can use ActiveSupport outside of Rails by simply adding the gem to your Gemfile and requiring it in the relevant location. The downside is that you create a dependency. If you are writing ad hoc scripts, this can be an annoyance, but if you package all your scripts as a Gem using something like Thor, dependencies won't be a problem.
Inform, Inspire, Instruct
I agree to a point but I believe everything should be project base so people are given problems to solve in all subjects.

The reason for this is people get a better understanding of how to manage something properly and something that people can get stuck into rather than knowledge just being thrown at students without learning skills required to actually put the knowledge into action.
Why Paul Graham's Letter is Wrong
Online Classes See Cheating Go High-Tech
I think it's necessary to draw a distinction between book-learning, standardized tests as a means to test book learning and the absolute focus on standardized tests that followed the NCLB Act.

Book learning is indeed essential. But standardized tests are far from a necessary component of that. They just happen to be the cheapest/least-offensive devil-we-know for judging whether a student comprehends a passage.

And the alternatives to standardized tests are far from a panacea. For all their desirable traits, they suffer heavily from problems of subjectivity and bias.

But the emphasis on standardized tests, particularly as a follow-on from NCLB is something the country really needs to re-examine and discuss. And this discussion should (ideally) be utterly divorced from whether we need book-learning and even from whether we need standardized tests in some capacity.

Complaints about NCLB and what it's done to our schools and students need not be an assault on testing and book learning. And defenses of testing and book learning need not be defenses of NCLB and its effects.
This isn't really a commentary on Linux itself though. Optimus can cause issues on Windows, too. It's new tech and Linux support is at the bottom of vendors' "todo" lists.

The problem here is twofold, though I'm not necessarily saying these comments apply to you, you are apparently willing to endure some inconvenience.

First, people should always check hardware support before buying a laptop if they intend to install Linux. I'm not trying to be a neck-beaded dick (although I do need to shave), I'm just pointing out that many of the problems people have with Linux stem from well-known incompatibilities that could have been avoided with different hardware choices. Which brings me nicely to the second point...

There is a communication issue in the Linux community. We (I'm including myself here) need to stop over-selling Linux. It is not a computing panacea for everyone, and so long as hardware support lags behind Windows "selling" Linux as a drop-in Windows replacement isn't a good strategy.

Getting someone to install Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE isn't a victory for the community if his hardware isn't compatible and things don't work right. It would be better to tell him that he should think about purchasing a Linux-compatible computer in the future and perhaps directing him to a list of compatible hardware.
You could organize one in Morocco. Everybody is free to organize an extreme conf.
Last week, the world was abuzz with the news of a computer virus more complete and sophisticated than any the internet has seen before.
I came here to post a grumpy dismissal of all this tinplated ritual but I'm happy to see that every poster in this thread has beaten me to it.

Good engineers are instantly suspicious of this kind of ceremony because it's almost always an excuse for an insecure project manager to draw enough attention to him/herself to justify the office and salary. Certifications with vaguely mystical Eastern sounding names count -2x.
It isn't unknown, or even bad practice, to have string values with dots in them when needed in Java to avoid collisions. For example, the package names of Android apps use that format, even though the dots in them mean nothing. Often a constant in a class will have the exact same String value as it's location:

package blah1.blah2;
class Blah3 {
private static final String BLAH_KEY = "blah1.blah2.Blah3.BLAH_KEY"

Which helps a lot when you see the value somewhere else as well. Often if you are told to put some String keyed values into a general purpose message container going to another program, the string keys you use again use values to look like that to avoid collision, as recommended by the Android documentation itself. Similarly used for persisting application values to a single XML file. Then of course we also have technologies like GWT, where programmers write in Java, and it is compiled to JavaScript. I could easily see that generating property names with packages in them.

So anyway, you see dots for sub-objects, but you also see dots simply as part of a way to avoid name collisions, as in Java package naming and sharing String key namespace best practices. Just because it isn't used for sub-objects or method calls or properties doesn't mean it is wrong or bad.
I think in cases like what Wine is trying to do (reimplement/reverse engineer) you want "clean" engineers, not "tainted" ones. So I think that having their devs look at the windows source code might be the last thing they want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Dr. Temple Grandin, an adult with autism who became a successful engineer, academic and speaker, believes that her disorder is an asset. She once famously called NASA a sheltered workshop for people with autism and Asperger Syndrome. She believes that people with autistic spectrum disorders are the great innovators, and "if the world was left to you socialites, nothing would get done and we would still be in caves talking to each other."
Facebook's product is ultimately their users via their ad platform. Their users don't really make them any money, it's the advertisers who are paying FB.

In terms of having a Product That People Really Want (ads), it appears there's mixed emotions about that currently.
Since when are "zero tolerance" policies a good idea. They always end up marginalizing someone.
Good idea but i think for those extreme cases where you really have use for this you might as well go with a specialized protocol, which can be based on json if you need it.

I had to do this for an application which streamed several hundreds of data points per second to a browser-client. Both data-size on the network and parsing time in the browser was my biggest issues. Since it was a html-app i had to use either JSON.parse or custom parsing written in javascript, the second option being too slow to be viable. I ended up with something based on almost only json-arrays and then the client would know what the different items in the array meant. With his example it would only look something this: [7, ["programming", "javascript"],["Peter", "Griffin", "Homer", "Simpson", "Hank", "Hill"]]

So in other words it's just enough overhead to make it parsable by json.parse but otherwise you only transfer the actual data.

Note that I wouldn't recommend this option unless you really hit a wall where you realize that this in fact is a bottleneck.
Travis CI now supports multiple JDKs
I think the gp had tongue firmly in cheek.
You're both right.

I think arturadib was talking about the user-base BEING Facebook's product.

You are correct as well, when you say that the user-base is their competitive advantage. It is a competitive advantage in the production of their product... a centralized pool of users.

You are mistaken, however, to categorize the UX as the product. The UX is simply a clever widget used to build the product... again, a centralized pool of users.
Will Parker & Fanning's New Start Up (Airtime) Fill Gaping Hole?
Wifislax 4.1 - security and forensics tools live CD
realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized test scores.

Note that this phoniness about living in one place being a guarantee of a child's school success is so ingrained among real estate agents that they still talk like that even in Minnesota, where there is statewide public school open enrollment, such that the school district where I live has students come in from FORTY-ONE other school districts' territories, including neighborhoods with radically different socioeconomic characteristics. Parents are always looking for some easy proxy for school quality. Power to shop here in Minnesota is helping somewhat in focusing parents' attention on what really matters. (For example, there are more and more school districts now that are adopting the Singapore Primary Mathematics series

http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39....

as elementary mathematics textbooks.)

What's really difficult today is finding out which schools offer genuine added value above what any child could get from an involved set of parents who value education. (This is why I homeschool, even in my apparently very desirable school district, which we live in for employment-based reasons irrespective of the school system.) The interesting article that you kindly submitted here makes the case that young people should do more in youth than what can boil down to answering pencil-and-paper questions on standardized tests, and I agree, and that is another reason we homeschool--to have time for more hands-on, constructive activities. But I will point out that is not an either-or forced choice, as several other comments have also pointed out to you. Indeed, sometimes open-ended projects favor children from wealthy families much more than student evaluation based on learning 3 R subjects that can be tested by standardized tests. The people in my generation in Taiwan were very proud of their standardized test system. When I first went over to Taiwan in 1982, several people pointed out to me that the president's son failed the college entrance exams--in other words, the examination system was above political corruption, fairly administered to all. It certainly served as a path to higher education for many young people who grew up in third-world poverty and had little by way of spare resources for doing projects with anything but school resources. (There IS project-based learning in all the schools of east Asia, contrary to the impression of many Americans, but rather than an either-or forced choice, those schools have a both-and of projects for all, and rigorous standardized tests for all.)

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Make the tests relevant and well written, and accurately scored, and make the 3 R's learning in school efficient enough to allow time for challenging projects. And if the school is resistant to improvement, promote power to shop on the part of parents to nudge schools to do better, and meanwhile get your own children a good education however you can, even if it means that they learn outside school.
Well of course retail sales are down, I don't remember the last time I bought a PC game in a store. I got a free trial in a box at PAX last year, but everything else I've played has been an internet download.
Nmap 6 Released - Network Mapper
I liked this part. What a great class, wish I could attend.

"PayPal, at Luke Nosek’s urging, became the first company in the history of the world that had cryogenics as part of the employee benefits package. There was a Tupperware-style party where the cryogenics company representatives made the rounds trying to get people to sign up at $50k for neuro or $120k for full body. Things were going well until they couldn’t print out the policies because they couldn’t get their dot matrix printer to work. So maybe the way get biotech to work well is actually to push harder on the AI front."
Good call. I would think there should be a way to specify it... Something to look into I guess.

EDIT: or as a comment above states, compress (gzip/deflate) it yourself. Not the most elegant, but if space is an issue.
Don't get trapped by cloud vendor lock-in
I've always found APL really intriguing. A professor of mine told me about how one of his students used to be able to solve ACM competition problems incredibly fast by simply not having to type very much. There are some insane videos on youtube of people solving problems in APL [1].

But, you know - it's write once, read.. never again.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
"Girlfiend" ??
As a Python guy I never had any reason to need to learn Ruby. And even now that I'm playing around with it it's purely out of professional curiosity.
I think you are unwittingly peddling an insidious idea that may be just as bad, if not worse, than standardized testing.

A "highly qualified education professional" is a disinterested drone whose only accomplishments were meeting the arcane state requirements for a teaching certificate. If you're really lucky, they might have been adept at stringing together a bunch of useless "research" conclusions into incoherent prose in order to impress an academic who hasn't taught in any meaningful sense for decades.

The qualities that make for a good teacher--intelligence, patience, curiosity, and creativity--are diametrically opposed to the qualities of a "highly qualified education professional."
E3 2012: a closer look at Xbox SmartGlass
Curioos rolls out lower prices and iPhone cases for their digital art store
Yeah, I saw that - some great stuff in there, particularly on the history of Solaris. It's great context for understanding what's going on in the Illumos world.
Here's the times: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Tra...
Ask HN: Backordering a domain?
There's a domain I'd like to own which is currently registered, but expires soon. There used to be a site up, but there's no longer anything there, so I'm hopeful that the current registrant will let it expire. Has anyone had any success using a backordering service? Any suggestions on which one to use?
Shunned by investors, gadget makers hit Kickstarter - Jun. 4, 2012
Lawyer up! Lots of lawyers would take this one without up front payment. Settle and move on with your life.
Oracle entering cloud race
"The microscope lens should initially be placed close to the glass slide: C. To avoid breaking the glass slide when adjusting the focus."

Incidentally that statement only sense if you know which direction to turn the focus knob, and you recognize the fact that the hypothetical microscope is capable of crushing the specimen. I had one when I was a kid that was incapable of doing so.

I answered the question correctly, but it only due to my cynicism, not my reading comprehension.
"Recruiters have noticed that the mental qualities that make a good computer programmer resemble those that might get you diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome... an addiction to repetitive tasks"

I think someone is forgetting one of the three virtues of programming: laziness.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris
I saw that too. It doesn’t change the fact that understanding of the domain strongly biases the result of answering the question. What you’re saying is that it is possible to answer the question while staring bewildered at a device you have never seen or interacted with. What I’m saying is that it is much easier to answer the question if you have hands-on experience.

And I think what the author is saying is that we should spend more time giving kids microscopes and testing what they see with them.

TANGENT ABOUT BIKE SHED COLOURS:

Questions like this remind me of questions about OOP. First the preamble: “Organize objects into classes to create a hierarchy of abstract types....” Then a question: “Classes are used to (a) provide a constructor for objects, (b) to promote reuse of behaviour, (c) to model a type hierarchy, (d) to facilitate modular software development.”

You ask someone to build a model in their head, and then the most successful strategy for answering the question is to turn the model off and use brute force to scan the exact words of the question, because the more knowledge you have of the domain, the less likely you are to answer the question correctly from your experience.
I, too, was fortunate to have woodworking, mig welding, electronics soldering, combustion engine repair and a little aircraft building as a part of my middle-high school education. I enjoyed it a lot and I learned a lot of stuff that I would have not learned by reading books and taking exams.

But I guess American kids won't need any of that since everything is manufactured in China these days. You just need a lot of lawyers to keep the Chinese from stealing your intellectual property.
There are SO MANY people affected by these freezes: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video...

12.04 release quality is the poorest since I got introduced to 8.04. First zenity problems, apd and synaptic is crashing several times a day, freezes that make you hard-reset the machine. It is overwhelming. I switched to XFCE (xubuntu) for now but otherwise mentally preparing myself for Fedora. So far no freezes with XFCE.
Space Shuttle Collides With Bridge In New York
SnapNames gets 90% of expired domains, so you should backorder from the registrar of record AND snapnames.com.
hey, I'm the author of the article. I didn't write that using dots in the property name is a bad practice, but rather that other parts of the code let me assume that they didn't know a lot about js
Linus Torvalds finds GNOME 3.4 to be a "total user experience design failure"
I agree, but assume standardized testing takes a full 2 days / year and you either do it every 4 years (3th, 9th, 11th) or every year. Well every year costs an extra 2 days on 3 / 4 years and assuming 180 school days a year that's (2*3/4)/180 = 0.83%.

So, yea it's probably not that useful, but if you want to get upset over something focus on the terrible quality of textbooks or something that can have a slightly larger impact. Even the school lunch program has a larger impact on student performance.

PS: Or just mandate that standardized testing does not count as part of the minimum required instruction time per year.
Ground Floor: the startup-building board game
I'm sure the special needs teachers who made that possible, and the taxpayers who fund them, are delighted to hear that. Maybe the socialites would still be in caves, but the "aspies" would be outside starving.

The symptoms of Asberger's are so indistinguishable from "being a dick" that they might as well be synonymous.
My experience with my kids education (Oregon, 4th and 6th) is that there is some standardized testing but there's a ton of hands-on project work. In fact, I think there's maybe too little rigor and too many poster boards and research projects. They definitely learn how to develop ideas, research and present them, that's great.

An area that's underdeveloped is teaching to sift through available information and figure out what's signal and what's noise. I don't know if standard tests could help with that but encouraging close reading and deep thinking about very specific questions is definitely a worthy goal.
Any gem can use ActiveSupport as a dependency, just like Rails does
If these scientists are right, and I think they are, the most advanced civilizations in the universe have transcended biology and moved on to a post-biological phase of their evolution. If we want to become an advanced civilization and colonize the stars, this is what we must do.

I don't disagree with the premise, but I always find the narrative odd. If and when machine intelligence transcends human intelligence, it's not "we" -- it's us and them. One species will cease to be at the other's expense.
I've noticed increasing use -- on sites focused on revenue. E.g. web page version of "traditional" press publications, who now link to Scribd instead of directly to a PDF.

I don't have an analysis nor experience for an informed comment, but it seems to me that Scribd use is all about attempting to gain some revenue from the content.

A year or two ago, I had to help someone with their Joomla site (personal obligation). Many formerly freely accessible references that were cited in older comments online, I now found "locked up" in Scribd. One/some of the core authors of this documentation appeared to have made a concerted effort to remove the "plain web" versions and relocate them into Scribd.

Fine. Their content. But if you're asking what Scribd is about, that's my impression.
Yeah that whole computing services/cloud thing is pretty behind the times...
I really do think that a StumbleUpon for ads would be great. People willingly tell SU what they like and don't like (which is what Facebook and Google are doing, but without explicit, up-front, opt-in consent). SU has millions of users, including me.

By telling them what content I want to see and what I don't want to see, I'm pretty happy knowing that I'm seeing exactly what I told them I wanted to see. Advertisers could do a lot in this space, and it sounds exactly like what you described.
Smarterer gets richerer, pulls in $1.75M from True Ventures, Google Ventures
I wondered if it was April Fools day... Really, JSON is lightweight enough that it doesn't need compressing. We're not dealing with XML here! This just adds another point of failure.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that this whole native app market is going to implode in the next few years. Even the "high quality" iOS app store is stuffed to the gills with junk apps now and the majority of the few apps that are making real money are trading on gimmicks that are bound to exhaust their novelty soon enough.

I'm actually rooting for Windows phone though because if it gains any real traction and people have to start maintaining three separate code bases for every app the balance is going to tip decisively to the mobile web.
Agreed. And in Malaysia, the mostly the only way to obtain that score is brute memorization of facts.