skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why not just use cron for this? Yes, the syntax for this does look a lot cleaner, but cron really isn't that hard to use. Why add another layer of complexity (which may break and be difficult to debug) when you could simply add lines to a crontab?

Bonus feature: "USING THE "—write-crontab" OPTION WILL COMPLETELY OVERWRITE ANY EXISTING CRONTAB ENTRIES!"

Wow. I like Ruby but many in the community's obsession with reinventing the wheel (with slightly more syntactic sugar and a hip github page) is pretty difficult for me to understand.
Wow, Zed Shaw basically described what my friend I wanted to build and applied for VC from. Except we had (independent) labels on board to give us a catalog of about 200 (minorly) successful artists and a fanbase.

Too bad we got rejected. =(
Yes, but perhaps philosophy is too far to the non-experimental side. Experimental and theoretical philosophy can coexist. But philosophers should be careful to not let experimental philosophy take over; they should learn from the experience of psychology.
Email in profiles is private - only PG and company can see it.
Facebook Opens Up Its Terms Of Service To Input From Users
I work at a defense contractor now (and have worked in a tech shop and corporate IT before).

The main problem I've found in defense contracting is that it isn't flexible, and (in my opinion) too many design decisions are made at too high a level. Details that don't really matter (what implementation of X we're going to use in development, for example) are decided (and made effectively immutable) before it makes sense to do so by people not actually doing the coding. To be fair, I've only been around for a month (and this is just my experience with one contract), so take it with a pinch of salt.

Corporate IT, in my opinion, is pretty boring. There were two of us supporting ~500 users across the world (offices in Chicago, NY, LA, London, etc), and I still had a lot of down time. We had some simple tools that took care of 90% of our work (re-imaging, backups, data migration, etc), and the rest were a lot of reasonably easy one-off jobs (simple tool to parse excel reports, load monitioring webapps, etc) or product evaluation (Evaluate these n products, talk to these 2n vendors (sorry, 'solution providers'), and write a report on your recommendation). There were one or two reasonably interesting projects (a 'visual voicemail' feature hacked onto our avaya phone system and some genetic algorithms for scheduling a conference), but they were the exception. Far more time on the phone talking to end users and vendors than I would like.
Because if you have more than one machine running your app, you've got to reinstall the crontab everywhere. This keeps it DRY.
I work as an IP paralegal by day (when not fiendishly working on my own coding projects at night).

My one recommendation is that if you are cost conscious, send your IP projects (copyright, patent, trademark) to a boutique or, as we call them, a 'mill'. Having worked in both boutique and large conglomerate firm settings, I can attest to the fact boutiques are far more organized and, because their overhead is so much less, far less expensive.

W/r/t at what point in your development cycle you should register the TM, I have seen the spectrum of very early to very late filings. While in one instance a late-stage filing resulted in more similar marks out there (and the class claims for goods/ services had to be much more limited) I have not yet seen it be detrimental to getting registered eventually.

On the other hand, small start-ups (both net based and brick-and-mortar) account for a disproporionate number of the applications we have to let go abandoned due to client request or nonpayment.
I think http://amiestreet.com might solve a subset of Zed's problems (or, perhaps just the "you can't charge for your music" problem). On AmieStreet, a song starts free or cheap, and rises in cost as its popularity grows (capped at 98 cents per song). AmieStreet has a "REC" system that is similar to PopCuts' fan-revenue-sharing model that "thetable" mentions in these comments, somewhere. On AmieStreet, when a fan recommends (RECs) a song, and from that point on it continues to rise in price (and in popularity), they put money into your AmieStreet account. The site also suggests music based on your previous choices, you can preview everything, it has a player widget built in that will allow you to start previewing one album while browsing to other artists on AmieStreet, etc.

AmieStreet is a really great experience, for the fan. I cannot testify as to the experience for the musician. I could see not being able to set your own price point as annoying. Artists do keep 70% of the proceeds after $5 (so, AmieStreet is still a middle man), paid quarterly.

AmieStreet's Wikipedia entry is short but interesting. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amie_Street#cite_note-ForArtist...)

I have not used PopCuts, but I'm checking it out now.

EDIT: For the record, I have no affiliation with AmieStreet, other than being a user. I do have a bit of an infatuation, though.
The article title is poor - it should really be oldest indo-european language words found.
There are dialect words for 1,2,3 etc in England that are considerably older than English (the people or the language).
I really never defend Microsoft, but this is a legitimately hard problem to solve.

One challenge is that even today, many users (even really smart users) don't distinguish programs well. I know an engineer who mentioned features of "Vista" she didn't like, that turned out to be exclusive to the new Office ribbon. Any XP user who upgraded Office would see the same issues, but to her, this was Vista's fault. Microsoft would surely start fielding phone calls from customers displeased with some "feature of Windows 7" that turns out to be an oddity in Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera. Forcing Microsoft to ship alternatives is the wrong decision for support reasons. It may be more sensible to just give users links to browser vendor web sites, I don't know.

Then there's the question of how to implement OS features. Both Windows and Mac OS X have standard HTML help systems, for instance, and it would suck if they had to shoehorn in the user's preferred browser as the renderer for a simple pop-up help window. What you care about here is not the specific browser, but whether or not it is sandboxed properly. IE is "good enough" for actually rendering OS features, the problem is that as soon as a help file visits the wrong web site the system can still be trashed (when it should be protected). Microsoft has to clean up IE's ties to the OS, simply having IE present is not the problem.
the hindenberg was a huge flying balloon filled with highly flammable gas
I would pay for a black board with history.
First, it's interesting that they call this an intermediate level tutorial/article. I'd definitely put a microblog in the begginer category (The "build a blog in 15 mins" screen cast is one of the first things people watch when getting into Rails).

Second, in the time it took to write this article, one could have built the actual app to provide for download or as an open-source project.
Thanks for sharing Paul. Very insightful comments about the challenges of running an online community!
Yes, calories==energy. But why is it necessarily "spill out all over"? If thermodynamics apply (and they do), then adding more fuel to a fire makes the fire burn hotter. Or, to keep the car analogy, pumping more gas to the engine makes the engine run faster, and thereby consume all the fuel being pumped into it.

So, by analogy (and since we're talking about simple thermodynamics), eating more calories should make your metabolism run faster. More fuel, more fire, higher rate of fuel consumption. This is definitely true for those people who can eat lots of food and never get fat. Ectomorphs.

So, why doesn't this rule apply to everyone? Why do some people store what they eat as fat and others just burn it all off regardless of how little they exercise. Why aren't we all ectomophs? Genetics may come into play, sure, but all humans have the same genome.

The difference must be related to differences in our bodies. Which means differences in hormonal reflexes, differences in responses to certain types of food, etc.

It is about calories, but it's not _just_ about calories. It's about our bodies, too, and how we've conditioned them to process different kinds of foods.

Highly recommend "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes.
Bell Canada to charge 15 cents per Twitter SMS even with an unlimited plan
I agree. And even worse, once a guy refused to tell me what his idea is, even after I signed the NDA. He said, 'why don't you believe me and just join us? I quit my job to start the idea, isn't it convincing enough?'

WTF.
Lotus to show innovative OMNIVORE engine in Geneva
Vuelos Baratos
an iphone app would have to be running and not let the phone sleep to act as an alarm clock. this is why there are no such apps in the app store. forget to run it before you sleep and it'll never work.
Cocoa Is My Girlfriend » Don’t Screw Your Customers Over
Best Development Platform EVER
Building a Balancing Scooter
Same here, although I think there is a subtle distinction between "out of bed" and "awake".
I boil the water with the pot covered, and then cook the pasta with the pot partially covered - maintaining just enough heat to keep the water boiling. It does take more effort, but it uses less energy (water evaporating from the surface cools the remaining water, putting a lid on the water minimizes this evaporation). I'm not sure about "way less" energy, but it usually shaves a few minutes off the cook time.

I wonder how fast you could cook pasta in a pressure-cooker?
Mathematics, Physics and "A Hard Day's Night"
Really cool. Could be a nice little media server with the a HD attached. Or maybe a security cam.
Its almost like an online democracy. Maybe we should push more for it.
I personally think that both are valid methods to learn, but that you learn different things from going the separate ways. i.e. when I'm writing something from scratch I have to learn every little detail of what I'm trying to do, whereas taking a look at someone else's code I could gloss over a lot of the implementation details but learn how the author decided to implement some of the relevant/important parts, how to extend, and otherwise generally contribute to a project.
Quake by its very nature amps you up. There's kind of like a magical point of the graph where your relaxation and your amped-upness meet; if I can find that point I'm in "the zone" become virtually unstoppable in-game.

I've found that Rez is designed to make that point relatively easy to find, which is exactly why it's the best game ever.
Here's my method:

1) Remove sheets
2) Move to an upright position
3) Place feet on ground
4) Stand up

Now, if anyone could help me with falling asleep again in the shower...
htmlentities() might help to protect you from SQL injection, but it won't do a damn thing against XSS attacks.
I plan on being a stay at home dad hopefully if the woman says yes...
As I recall, mp3.com was doing fine until they were bought just for the domain name. The site was shut down and nothing useful replaced it.
I can't agree more about the power loss of the vote. I lost the right to upvote and for a while was disturbed by it. But then I thought "Who cares, it meaningless anymore. Not even worth petitioning for. As long as I get to hear about new ideas and whats going on with interesting tech and science, that's all that matters."
We do tend to forget the bad stuff that's happened and mostly reflect in the past on the good stuff.

But we ignore the good stuff that's happening right now and focus on the bad stuff.

I think this explains why people always think things were better 10, 20, 30 years ago.
Fit to be used
In my experience (still a teen...) it's the rule until proven otherwise. I mean just by being a teen many people assume you have some level of technical knowledge, but it doesn't go beyond helping people with setting up their computers and phones...anything like programming is like an "oh, really?" to a "oh, wow [you can actually do it]!" thing.

Well, to be specific, that was the case for me from 13 to 16, then I started prefacing that with "I'm majoring in computer science" and then the discrimination started to go away.
mysql_real_escape_string() _will_ protect you from code injection.

- http://php.net/mysql_real_escape_string "Note: If this function is not used to escape data, the query is vulnerable to SQL Injection Attacks."

- http://www.php.net/manual/en/security.database.sql-injection...

- http://www.metatitan.com/php/16/protecting-your-phpmysql-que...

- http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:PHP:SQL_Injection
just bite the bullet and learn to use crontab ffs.

nice sugar though...
A friend of mine makes sells a decent amount of his music on beatport.com.
Well, I found yours. :-)
Devolving Sigils
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Sy... is pretty helpful
Help a friend break the App Store Top 100 (itunes link)
I don't like the looks of that. It doesn't thrill me. I want any music site I go to to be alive and in love and above all passionate. Perhaps it's a good technical solution, but if I were an artist who was pouring his life into creating music, I wouldn't want a site that feels generic.

(Perhaps something like muxtape.com? Though Zed marked it as a site found wanting, I'd say there's a chance it moves to letting musicians sell their music directly, considering the people involved with its direction now.)
Be advised that this period does not last.

Newborns do sleep a lot, and there is lot's of in between time that a productive person could exploit, however newborns don't stay newborns for long.

Unless you are into totally ignoring the child while they are in your presence, once they start becoming active you'll have a difficult time doing anything but putting attention on them. As a parent of a 2 year old boy, trust me.

If I need to work somebody else needs to watch my little one. When I'm the sole guardian, I don't get a chance to turn the computer on, let alone work.
I gotta say, the idea sounded a bit off to me at first but after poking around the site I really think the possibility of getting in-store-credit or even a partial return on your purchase makes the site sticky in a good way. I doubt anyone will be getting wealthy off of it but it does seem to encourage user involvement in a really interesting way.
JQuery UI - Pt.2 - Widgets
I'll admit that I'm no PHP expert, but I was under the impression that htmlentities prevented XSS by converting all special html characters to their equivalent html entity.

If HTML entities works properly, and it is used properly, shouldn't it prevent XSS since an attacker who inputs something like <script>alert("xss")</script> would simply see the message displayed back to them instead of the browser actually executing it?
nice, but is it possible to use it somewhere else than Rails, like say, Merb or Sinatra?
There's a toy prolog interpretter written in Ruby as well (http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?tiny+prolog+in+ruby).

What I'd really like to see is a Ruby interpretter written in Scheme - or Forth or Erlang or one of those other cool languages...
As a 3d hacker this could be really good news. Yes plugins suck. But... Widely adopted plugins do not suck. If enough people use this new plugin it could become "the way" to do 3d on the web.

He's providing both chicken and egg in the classic plugin paradox. I fear we will wait until rapture before Adobe hooks flash the GPU. I hope it works and I hope he publishes the api.
I would argue that getting someone to install a new browser plugin and restarting their browser (in my experience, people are very reluctant to restart their browser) is just as difficult as getting them to download a .exe.
As a Canadian this comes as no surprise to be. Bell and Rogers (basically the only two telecoms in Canada) have always pulled shenanigans like this against their customers. Canadian cell phone plan rates are ridiculous, and data even more so. When I lived in the US I had a ton of minutes and unlimited data for $50 a month. In Canada I pay this just for a handful of voice minutes.

And this is one of the major reasons why the tech field is constantly failing in this country. Our government (both parties that matter, anyway) have no interest in encouraging fair telecommunication prices to drive innovation.
Could be because the Japanese are used to a different payment model.
I down voted it because ideas are a dime a dozen, and social networks had already come to be prior to Fb.

I google ThinkComputer and very little substance comes up. I google the book, and very little substance comes up. I honestly don't think you had much beef on the bones to execute or market, and that's why I believe Mark passed on working with you and others. After all, how many founders of Facebook were there? I don't think his intentions were to short you if he thought you brought significant value to the equation.

Certainly I wasn't there so maybe I'm making an ass out of myself with said comment, but it's how I see it from a 3rd party persecutive. And with that said, I think it's time for you to move on with your life and show the world that you're not a prototypical wantraprenuer.
The article is quite confused. What they really mean, I think is "words that have reteained similar sound and meaning for the longest time period through the direct main lineage of English."
I intentionally simplified because I didn't know you were a biotech engineer. Also I'm impressed that you were able to divine how much I know about statistics from my few short posts here.

So you're telling me that if I do PCA on the covariance matrix for many loci, I'm not going to be able to correlate DNA with geographic ancestry?

How do you explain this: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5602/2381

I will grant you one point - "Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%." However, if you read the paper you'll find that they were able to identify clustering along geographic lines, and could place individuals with a discrepancy rate of 0.14%.
Hmm, yeah you're right. I'm not sure what I was thinking of.
Not without a little hacking. After a little digging, it looks like it has an implicit Rails dependency (http://github.com/javan/whenever/blob/f036675e94cd9dd9b21d2c...)
There were some excellent shows on recently. One was a documentary on PBS about the fall of Bear Sterns and then ended like an biography about Hank Paulson. It was astounding how much the personalities of the key players involved effected the outcome of the financial mess.

Then last night I watched a special on CNBC that went into a lot of depth about many of the different investment vehicles. Basically the take home was that few people understood the underlying implications of all these esoteric ways of investing in the mortgage market. Even Alan Greenspan admitted that despite a strong mathematical upbringing and access to over 100 PhD's on a daily basis, he understood little about what was going on.

It didn't take much for smart people with less than stellar integrity to game the system.
But in this case they are doing it to play a kickass game for free. People download game demos all the time to play a game. People go to great lengths to play games for free.
Even without an API he could probably hack something with lynx and term-mode.
It will work FINE without Rails. The code you're pointing to simply finds the Rails root if it exists as a convenience. If one doesn't, you have to manually tell Whenever your path: set :path, "/path/to/my/app"
Bulk Email Sending
I am looking for a solution like what Port25 offers and wondering if anyone here has found an alternative service/software to use.
We originally partnered with another company and they wound up going out of business. We picked up all of the development work on that, and that was definitely a little bit of stumbling block and took us more resources than we expected.

That was the company I use to work for. Here's my comment I posted on HN from a few days ago on an article that did not get voted to home page:

#####

I'm particularly fond of Quake Live because a) I was heavy into competitive gaming back in the day and b) I dropped everything in my life and moved to California to work for the startup whose products influenced the creation of Quake Live. Assuming they still use the same technology stack, it's running on an Oracle DB and using Jabber and a few other common web languages at the transport & display layer. [There is a unique browser plugin to handle file distribution, and the game itself is a substantially polished version of Q3. There's no flash aside from maybe a few widgets.]

I say 'influenced' because the tech we sold id Software for QL has been significantly altered and re-written by their very talented team to fit their own ideas and intentions. [They picked up a few of our tech guys when the company shut down.]

The cool thing is based on my experience beta testing Quake Live since Dec. 07, a lot of design principles still seem to be intact. You can see screenshots of our first B2C gaming product from 06/07 here, you may notice a few similarities such as the queue system:

http://startupdistrict.think27.com/colin/www/

The company had to close its doors b/c we ran out of money among other things... however, it was one of the best learning experiences of my life and I have absolutely no regrets. Very happy to see that Quake Live has finally come to life!

#####

It's worth noting that we tried courting other studios to do the same with their old IP, but very few were interested. I think in retrospect we had some issues with packaging our technology to make it easy to use, but also a little ahead of our time. Furthermore, the gaming industry is so big now — it's like trying to be an actor in Hollywood. Without any street credit, it's extremely difficult to get a deal as a technology supplier and even harder to get funding. Selling our tech to id Software was a 'loss leader' that didn't pay off because, well, it took a lot longer to come to life than anyone was expecting.

When we were working on the product linked to above, the hardest part was having to 'bolt on' to other games without the original source code, and I believe that was a leading reason why the B2C product failed. We always wanted to make our own game to realize the vision of game+web, we just didn't have the money/resources to do it. That said, a leading reason the B2B tech offering failed was because it wasn't easy to use — it was tailored to our experience bolting on to games.

The outcome of it sucks for us, I wish we were still around but I couldn't be happier that id Software has been behind this as they are one of the few still supporting the hardcore FPS PC gamers (QuakeCon, etc..).
Whenever simply generates your crontab file for you using a cleaner syntax. It hasn't reinvented anything or added any complexity. You are just using cron.
Bus Scheme doesn't have continuations or macros; Heist has both. It also has tail recursion optimisation, which Bus Scheme is missing.
Web 2.0 runs on dubiousness.
I'm the author -- thanks. To keep things very clean, we created a :cron role for our deployment (which happens to be the same server as our :db). I imagine that many people are running on one server and so the :app role is fine. The point is that you can deploy different cron schedules to your various server types using roles.
I'm sure someone's created a bot by now that posts all the top stories in reoccurring patterns amongst all the social news sites. With that plus your idea I'd call it the bot of infinite karma.
I'm surprised she hasn't washed up on a beach somewhere.

What an awful person - she'll get what's coming eventually.