skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Learning to use fork may be beneficial to eating everything with a spoon.
Some context of what those problems were, how you were using Ruby, what was the expertise of your team members, etc would be of interest for such an inflammatory accusation. Bold claims require proof.
> Python is strongely typed

Like Ruby.

> and compiled into bytecode

Like JRuby.

Python and Ruby are comparable languages. They are both high-level dynamic languages, with the same sort of tradeoffs (eg, you can do more with less characters than in most statically typed languages, at the expense of safety and performance). There are however significant differences in terms of philosophy, ecosystem and community between the two.
Ubuntu on the Mongol Steppe – Carving Paths into Emerging Markets
The cost to infect 1,000 machines with malware is $12
As a first year CompSci student I find this method works remarkably well for me. Workloads are most likely different where you are but I find I'm able to complete most (often not all) of my schoolwork within this time constraint. It's all about productivity. I never even realized how much time I spend on HN or reddit or whatnot when I still have work to do. I have been following this sort of method for a month now although I find I have to break my rules almost every week, I mostly manage to get everything done between 8 and 5. The author makes a good point on sleep too, I can't stress enough how important it is to get a good nights sleep for productivity!
I'm not so sure how well this can be accepted in, say, Romania (just an example, I've never been there).

I spent a few days in Romania. There'd be no 'fear of technology' or anything. TBH in some poorer countries the problem isn't "locals are afraid of your phone" but "locals stole my phone and ran off"
> These might seem like stupid things to worry about, but when you have trust in everything you own, you don’t have to worry about anything. It’s liberating and an amazing feeling. My life was markedly better because of it.

Partly I agree, but I would simplify the statement: “You don't have to worry about anything. It's liberating and an amazing feeling.”

While not worrying, if you notice your wallet falls apart, you may momentarily feel uncomfortable and next time buy a better wallet to avoid losing money.

Should that be a reason to worry that you're using not the best wallet?

That might be true for certain things. Losing money can make you significantly uncomfortable, depending on various factors. There's probably a good enough wallet, but buying the best might just save some time.

Otherwise, IMO in the end it's up to you whether you worry or not. We can choose to alter the environment to be happier, or alter our outlook to achieve the same. I think it's mostly under our control, although may be limited by environment a person was raised in.
It seems like you're suffering from Apple expectation inflation like so many pundits. When did Apple stop innovating exactly? I mean the iPad is still less than 3 years old. It's perfectly reasonable that they would be iterating on their tremendously successful product lines.

It's true that Android has caught up and has advantages in some key areas, but they are selling on such razor thin margins to compete with Apple and even with much cheaper prices it doesn't seem to be hurting Apple's sales much (more like extending into the feature-phone market). Windows tablets? Well, Windows 8 is not exactly lighting the world on fire yet, it remains to be seen what kind of traction Microsoft is going to get and how long they'll have to hammer away at it for an XBox-style success.

Despite Apple looking relatively more assailable, they continue to push an impressive product line forward. It's a lot harder to invent a blockbuster new product when have a suite of computing devices that already cover the range of use cases covered by Macs, iPhones and iPads. I don't understand what people expect from Apple.
> Yeah, that line feels like lazy reporting to me.

Now, now, it's The Register. The tabloid style is part of its identity.
Or biofuel, http://biolitestove.com/homestove/overview/
Show HN: Selligy: Sales Meetings Made Easy
It's CTRL+L on my keyboard. In addition to Nautilus and all the file dialogs it also works in browsers and even in Windows's "Explorer" file manager.

I use Gnome 3.4, though. Did the Gnome developers remove this shortcut from 3.6?
It doesn't have to be considered a temporary fad, I think Wall Street maybe doesn't believe that the company is continuing to uphold it's brand. Though let's be honest here, the article says that Apple didn't loose as much as the rest of the market, so that is actually somewhat positive.

I had to go to the Apple store today because my iPhone broke after only 5 months (hardware button stopped working). The customer service was pretty average, and I was told to sign myself up to book an appointment with a genius. The store was fairly empty, so I kinda expected the guy I was speaking to to do it for me.

I walked by all the new iPad minis, and iPhone 5s, and I'll admit, I picked up an iPad mini to see how it felt. But beyond that, I had zero interest in any of their products.

Now, if you had shown me a bunch of android devices, I doubt I would have been much more interested (I have a Sony Xperia S).

If you had shown me a Microsoft Surface or Nokia 920, I would probably be more interested.

Of course, I'm only one data point, but Apple had a combination of cool products and apparently customer service (never really experience that myself). If people aren't intrigued and excited about the products, and if everything becomes self-serve like the grocery checkout (how many of us are excited about those monstrosities?) that is where they'll loose.

It isn't about a fad, you've ALWAYS got to be improving your products, not just your bottom line.
What are the key features? Why should I wanna try use it? Where is it better then other window managers? I cant find these information on the website. Just that it is "lean, fast, modular and very extensible window manager" which tells me nothing. I see that it is also for Mac and Windows. What does it have that these OSes dont have? What would be the benefint of using E17 ond windows 7?
It definitely adds aesthetic value, but my untrained eye can definitely detect that something's not quite right with the world depicted there.
It wasn't really bullish speculation at that P/E.
It's like you are selling them an energy source for a negative amount of money.
> And for the rest, I spend most of my time either in my browser or the terminal, so there's not really much I expect from a desktop environment than being fast and stable. I don't really care anymore.

This is a really important point.

The average computer user doesn't do a great deal outside their web browser these days. All they really need a desktop environment to do is point them to the web browser then get out of their way.
Having good tools is great but throwing away 20 sets of flatware until you stay on with the 21th is a form of minimalism only for the rich, and absolutely not practical.
I decided to write a convincing comment on this very topic rather than insult someone's well-thought out idea in a totally unrelated and baseless way:

http://sufficientlyadvanced.net/keep-writing-dustin

If you want to publicly haze someone: bring it on.
232 comments and counting, I never knew $10 utensils could be such an intriguing and polarizing subject.
All this "we have simplified the interface" makes me think of the Emacs antinews file...
Keep writing Dustin
CloudFlare buying beers for people in London tonight
Except you dont need a JVM to get performances in python. Using a JVM destroys any perspective of cheap and easy deveployement. If i have to use a JVM , i'd certainly not use JRuby when i can get scala.
> I don't think pushing tweets to every user is a scalable approach. It would seem more sensible to read rather than push tweets associated with a user. I don't know about Twitter's infrastructure, but storing more than 1 copy of the same data wouldn't make that much sense.

Suppose I have 5000 followers. How do you propose to get the timeline? Since you said "single copy of data", I assume you would do something like this:

https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/blob/master/examples/mini...

At twitter scale, that query will be a major bottleneck.
I agree that the comment was too mean. But in fact dcurtis was a bit arrogant too:

"Reasonable people would probably not spend the time to read a book about the history of flatware, buy twenty sets, and test the feeling of each metal utensil against their teeth. That sounds completely insane. But who cares about reasonable people?"

If he would say 'reasonable programmers don't buy books on set theory', then I would just say it's ok, he has an interesting obsession (set theory).

If he would add "But who cares about reasonable people?" I would say it is getting a bit arrogant, but still ok, because he just values interesting hobbies...

But in dcurtis's case 'reasonable people' are people who have absoultely no money to buy twenty sets of designer flatware, because they literally would not be able to feed their children. In my country even the (lower?)-middle class have problem with buying very healthy food or buying new (non-second hand) clothes for their children. Designer flatware? (Designer anything?) 20 sets? Not even one set, not 20. From this prespective the article boils down to: I am a rich single young guy, I have lots of free time, I think I am a wise man, I teach you on things in life: trust me it feels good. The more upvotes it gets, the more arrogant is seems... Of course a mean counter comment will be upvoted, and of course you call those people 'mob', wich is just oil on the fire.
As far as I know, Ruby has proper support for higher-order functions and lexical closures (aka code blocks).

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4769004/learning-python-f...
But the bytecode is then interpreted.
You pretty much have to enforce static type invariants (e.g. "this variable will never be other than an int") to JIT stuff performantly. I don't think that's a point against the GP's argument at all.
From article:
"People of other nationalities, like Tatars and Armenians, against whom there were prejudices and persecution—though not nearly on the same scale as against the Jews"

The Soviet Union killed Ukrainians by the millions.
Elon Musk Will Usher in the Era of Electric Cars
> Except you dont need a JVM to get performances in python.

Python's performance is only slightly ahead of Ruby's. Both Python and Ruby are a bad match for CPU intensive tasks(provided we are talking pure python/ruby and not native extensions). Network and IO in general is salvaged by using evented io(or some high level evented framework).
I guess the desired conversion from promoting yourself is getting a client, not click and tweet count. So: did you get any gigs thanks to that?
If the companies in question wanted to pay dividends out of those funds, they'd have to repatriate them into the US from the offshore holding companies & would inevitably incur US corporation tax on the resultant profits.

So the cash only retains it's "full" value if the company can profitably invest it outside the US: if you think growth via R+D has peaked, then it's significantly less valuable! So how you choose to value the cash on hand depends very much on what you believe the future growth prospects of these companies via R+D or capital investment outside the US to be.
> I'm in rural France at the moment. There is nowhere to buy anything Apple

I live in one of the largest cities in the world, surrounded by Apple and other electronics stores. Yet I still buy things online. I cannot see your point. Brand awareness doesn't come just from b&m presence
In Sweden people can also write whichever party they like and there are no problems counting those votes by hand. We get the preliminary result after 3 or 4 hours, and then they are all recounted the next day.

And, yes, we use one sheet of paper per election. On election day there are three separate elections (municipal, provincial, parliament) and optionally one or more referendums.
I find myself thinking about the historical criticism that has been aimed at the Linux ecosystem, that it lacks design awareness and doesn't have a unified aesthetic principle..

Then I see something like this and I wonder if in a way that wasn't a strength.

I mean "brand coherence"? I can't imagine what that has to do with Linux. Everything has always been so configurable, that in a way a lot of aesthetic decisions were left to the user and the app developer. People used Gnome 2, and other desktop environments to design their own desktop.

I used Gnome 3 for a few months last year when I was making my swing back to using Linux full time with Fedora. I found it usable enough, but it's lack of configuration options became frustrating because it didn't allow me to fine tune my GUI workflow, it also handled multiple monitors terribly and being unconfigurable didn't allow me to adjust that.

I was initially excited about Gnome 3 but it was pretty shallow. KDE 4 is an amazing desktop environment, with lots of configurability and in keeping with letting the user design their own experience. I made a good long stop there, for about a year, optimized my windowing workflow (one size simply does not fit all) then ended using xmonad but running some KDE apps..

It looks like GNOME and Unity are turning against the traditional spirit of the Linux community. I don't think that's for the better. The answer now to the question "I don't like it." for these Desktop Environments is "If you don't like it, tough." where as before it was "If you don't like it, change it."

I don't think Linux devs should ape Apple, Google, or Microsoft. Linux can be, and is, for everyone.. but it's especially for hackers and for people who like to tweak their experience. A project like a DE is huge and by turning away from hackers they're going to limit their ability to pick up new devs and devs are going to turn away from the GTK.

For some people Ubuntu IS Linux, Gnome IS Linux.. but for others not so much.

I don't develop desktop applications currently but I would like to. I don't see myself wanting to start a new project or get intimately involved with one that is dependent on the GTK at this point though.
Interesting pg commented here saying hn has gone to shit too, but for criticizing the post.
I found the awesomewm defaults good enough to be useful out of the box on Squeeze. I've made some minor tweaks since then, but nothing major.
And i say they should have use C++ directly, C++ is the only thing that scales ... what? oh sorry i meant Assembly. Nothing scales more than assembly, java is slow... why are we having that discussion again anyway ?
Bing Rewards
> python is not interpreted,it is compiled in bytecode just like java.

Depending on the implementation, so is Ruby. The canonical MRI 1.9 compiles to bytecode and interprets it. But unlike python, it doesn't write the bytecode to disk. The loading of bytecodes has been disabled until a bytecode verifier is implemented.
You can just start typing a path. Typing / shows an input field, and it has tab completion too.
Wait, isn't it better to actually recycle this stuff, rather than just burn it? By burning it aren't we forever losing access to that physical matter by just turning it into heat radiation? What if we need it later?

EDIT: It sounds like the Swedes mainly burn the organic waste, and recycle what can be recycled. If that is the case, fair enough. Would have liked to see discussion about this in the article, seems fairly key.
Hah, good point. Should've known better. Still, it's not hard to find something better than shades of fuchsia. Blue to orange with white in the middle perhaps?
You make a library for A/B testing. Why didn't you use A/B testing here?
Not like a Nokia device. It will power the phone on from complete off (not sleep or standby) and sound your alarm. Freaked me out when I turned off and boxed up my old N95 and then a week later it turns itself back on and sounds an old alarm I forgot to delete.
Computers are easier (though perhaps less fun) to make than humans. Ruby is slow but it's close enough to Java that the numbers will still work out. Humans: probably not.
You're right and I know that "appeal to authority" is not a valid argument mechanism.

With that in mind, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to make an amusing comment.
Exactly. You have the same sort of solutions for squeezing additional performance out of Python and Ruby:
- using evented framework (network/IO bottleneck)
- using native code (CPU bottleneck)
- using a different implementation (Python has an edge here with PyPy, as long as your dependencies run on it)
4 Long-Term Hacks That Rocked 2012
Ask HN: Tell us about your side projects.
Let us know about your awesome side projects and weekend hacks. What are the cool things you have made or what you are currently working on or plan to work in near future?
I went to their homepage, but I don't see a link there to a description of the project (something like an 'About' page describing the project and its goals)....
I'm halfway through the book "The power of habit" at the moment and here's two little titbits I've picked up so far:

1. Habits have a trigger and a reward and you'll get nowhere unless you work within this fact.

Yesterday I had some success, I was trying to fix a dumb programming mistake and getting frustrated. Normally that would trigger my usual behaviour of running off to /r/funny or HN to get my little reward of amusement/knowledge. This time however I was mindful of the loop and said to myself that my reward would be the feeling of fixing it and having the tests pass. It worked. I got my head down, fixed the bug, and felt good about myself.

2. People who successfully adhere to a habit change routine, visualize and practice how to deal with "inflection points" upfront. Inflection points here are those tough spots where you are more vulnerable to regressing to your previous behaviour.

I've been having a bit of trouble lately sticking to my habit of getting up at 5am to work on my own stuff (open source and writing a book). Last night I thought about my alarm going off, feeling the cold outside the duvet and having an overwhelming desire to roll over and go back to sleep and visualized myself just getting straight out of bed. Sure enough, this morning my alarm went off and I was out of bed before I was even fully awake.

I think it's going well, however here I am procrastinating by writing a big post on HN, so YMMV :-)
There's another case to be made that Apple's income in the US is coming predominantly from a relatively affluent youthful buyer population, who in turn is getting their income from student loans. The student loan situation looks like the next iteration of the serial credit bubbles that the US government has been busy blowing ever since the dotcom collapse: no-one can say when a bubble will burst (and indeed, some things that look like bubbles turn out not to be) but if / when it does, spending on Apple kit will nosedive.

It is of course possible that Apple can compensate with greater foreign sales to make up for any such drop, but if the only thing holding US M4 growth up (ie student loans) falls away I can't imagine that US imports of consumer goods will respond positively.

You could argue that Apple is really a levered investment on future consumer spending: if you're bullish about the world economy, you should be even more bullish on Apple & vice versa. This is the price of Apple's huge growth: if you're small, you can grow simply by being excellent. Once you're huge, macro effects start to dominate, no matter how good your products are.
> What this says to me, a non-RoR user, is that it's harder to build websites with Java than with RoR, but if you pass a certain (very unusual) level of traffic, you'll wish you'd made the extra effort; otherwise, you'll be glad you didn't. (Extra effort isn't free.)

Twitter hasn't phased out Rails, it has replaced background services written in Ruby.

> Fine, but what I wish I understood was why RoR is so popular to begin with.

That is hard to explain. You will have to try it out yourself and compare with whatever you are currently using.

> why isn't one of them Python on Rails

As other responses pointed out, Python has Django. And no, Django isn't rails inspired. Django was developed independently. Also, the languages and philosophies differ significantly to have a Python on Rails.
Do you think there's merit in incorporating a way for users to collaborate towards finding solutions; and I mean something designed for collaboration rather than the current answer+comments scenario. In some ways, that means relooking at the current paradigm where users start with an answer, which by default, implies something complete. Of course, the flip side of what I'm saying could be a lot of half-baked gibberish, but then again, since peer respect is the currency here, maybe that in itself takes care of things.

I don't really have an answer to how to do collaboration, but I think it may, just enable a lot more challenging problems to be posted here, which takes this a while lot further.

Also, I'm wondering if anyone else thinks if having one needing to give bounty even if there is no satisfactory answer could be an impediment down the down.
GNOME is clearly trying to imitate OS X. That much is plain to see.

In doing so, it seems the devs have adopted the Apple approach; dictatorial design. In many respects this is a good thing. It gives them the good sense to say "no" to certain proposals; I'm sure there are active GNOME contributors who would prefer Nautilus to have five customizable toolbars, and the system menubar to have a mind-boggling array of system stats. No.

Obviously, haters gonna hate. People who get a kick out of relentlessly customizing their desktop environment will no longer feel welcome. GNOME sold out, it went mainstream, whatever. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

This is a victory for ordinary users. This is giving the developers focus. A lot of user suggestions are just pointless distractions from the core goal, which is apparently to imitate OS X as much as possible without being called on it.
Oh my, I'd almost forgotten about all the gold. Lot's of excessive shimmering too.

It's clearly a technically very impressive desktop environment, but I always thought they needed better design for the actual themes.
Oh great, one thing i noticed weeks ago (and apparently it's still behaving that way):

When you maximise the terminal and mark everything with the mouse the CPU goes crazy. efreet_icon_cache is taking up 100% CPU and the laptop becomes very noisy.. I guess it's not supposed to take up all CPU for that good looking marked text thingy :)
You are correct in your assumption.

However it's silly to say that we need to import trash. I've lived in cities like Helsingborg, Landskrona and Malmö, in several different apartments, and only ONCE have I had the facilities to dispose of organic waste separately.

So I think it's much better to do a national campaign and force landlords to implement organic waste disposal, hand out those brown paper bags some get from their landlord, before we decide to start importing trash.
I'm assuming that this is hyperbole on Dustin's part, but you're absolutely right, that's not practical.
1. Simplicity is removal of redundancy.

2. More redundancy can be revealed by expanding scope.

3. The ideal scope size is what can be reasoned about independently and specified independently from the rest (there's a global optimisation problem here, of trade-offs between the scopes of adjacent parts).

4. The scope for measuring redundancy can also be expanded, to include all things reasoned about and specified by a person. This enables us to account for specification techniques which are complex in themselves (in an absolute sense), but which improve simplicity overall, by being applicable in many situations (generalised) - they can remove redundancy across unrelated domains by factoring it out.

an information-theoretic perspective