skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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.)

If you get to the scale of twitter, and more importantly if you have written a real time messaging server with a web application framework, it doesn't matter which framework or language you started with as you're going to be completely rewriting your entire stack at some stage as different parts fail in order to deal with the load (unless you have an incredibly experienced team who has written a twitter equivalent before and scaled it to 15000 messages a second). There's no difference between ruby or python (or perl, or php) in that regard - they are all interpreted and relatively slow, which starts to matter at this scale. And also even if you had used java or c in the fist place, if you had an architecture not written with massive scale in mind, you probably wouldn't survive that growth without radical changes on every level of your stack.

Re ruby versus python, the popularity of rails is partly historical accident, partly that ruby is a nice language which doesn't get in the way and is ideally suited to this domain, and partly that rails is deals with lots of the basics of web development for you without getting in the way too much when you need to adapt it. None of that means ruby is better than python, but I'd disagree that people put up with ruby in order to use rails - it's a really nice language in its own right, but it is not highly performant (though it is getting better). For most websites of course, many of which can employ caching, that is a non-issue, even at large scale - witness the success of Wordpress in php which would not survive even modest loads without caching.
Agreed. But, probably my situation applies when you've come past all the pivoting and you've settled with one idea you decidedly are going to work on.
Xmonad/awesome (haven't tried i3) are absolutely fantastic, however, in my experience, you need to spend some days tweaking configuration files in order to achieve a satisfying experience (especially if you want dual-screen support to work in a less... interesting way in Xmonad). From what parent was writing, this is exactly what s/he does not want to do.
If you like http://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife (best possible durability/quality) you should also check out http://www.reddit.com/r/GoodValue (best bang for the buck)
Show HN: Weekend project, save notes to Dropbox by email
GTK is a huge thing used by hundreds of unrelated projects, some of whose very big. It is a responsibility. Gnome developers basically plundered the development of GTK and now only care about their use cases. They should admit that they are irresponsible. It is bad.
E17 (Enlightenment) enters alpha after 12 years
i'm seeing lots of emotions for some reason. don't like a wm? use something else. is a developer from another project harassing you? say "no. go away. shoo". this is just silly
technically you could still suffer from that.

subdomains are treated as separate domains, right

If all the subdomains had links back to zilo (say the header or footer), it starts to look like a huge link farm, or a bunch of satellite sites. It's actually pretty dangerous. But disavow is here, right? hah
Probably a touch screen calibration problem. Still bad though
> because it's impossible to improve a programming language

Well, since "improve" is a relative and a matter of taste, it is impossible to improve a language, isn't it? Make it run faster, and it will either take up more memory or be slower to develop with. Make it faster to develop with, and it will run slower or have some other tradeoff.

Hence, "use the right tool for the job". And when your focus shifts from "quickly building a product" or "quickly adding new features" to "rock-solid stable and fast", then you need to switch tools. Simple as that.
Hunting Botnets in The Cloud
For me, productivity changes on a day by day basis. There are days when I'm able to stay focused and work from 8am to midnight, taking a half-hour lunch break and a 5 minute break every 3 hours and I actually get a lot done in that time. On other days I work for hours on end on the same thing and won't get it done because I keep procrastinating, checking HN, reddit, whatever.

I think it's a lot about being motivated and excited about what you do. If it feels really interesting, the work is basically doing itself. If I've got other things on my mind (which I have lately), everything feels like a chore. Still have to do it though. The same even applies to my personal projects to a lesser degree.
I have no clue what you're talking about but I'd like to learn— are there any websites/books you recommend?
Yeah, you're probably right. I'm removing my comment, though I stand by my point.
You could not even idle for 6 hours with that generator in the pic. (On gasoline)
I'm not sure I would use compiz as a shining example of something that makes a desktop more functional.

Regarding the differences between Gnome 3 and KDE 4: I haven't tried Gnome 3, but from I've read (including TFA), they go out of their way to make the desktop not configurable. Before switching to awesome and then Xmonad, I was a heavy user of KDE 4, and it is extremely customizable. It also had some novel ideas about grouping widgets/applications depending on the current activity of the user, which is probably implemented by now, and which I don't think is present in GNOME 3.
This was a depressing read. But I noticed there was no dirt on the Xfce project. They continue to produce a useful, stable, customizable desktop environment that doesn't radically change every 6 months or try to force its way on you. And so, I continue to give Xfce my highest recommendation for anyone interested in running desktop/laptop Linux.
Or replace it with another programming exercise.
> It is my hope that you are a GNOME app…

I can't really wish this guy anything other than good luck and good bye.
Then you should really know better than to make statements like "I think I could write a scalable Twitter in mostly Ruby. And I've never written a line of Ruby in my life."
I disagree about KDE4 not being customizable. While the earlier iterations of KDE4 (such as 4.1) were lacking in options, newer iterations like KDE 4.8/4.9 are really customizable. See also Linus Torvalds' recent post where he also praises the configurability of KDE4, saying that it may even be too configurable.
PEs are reflective of past revenues.
As this graph shows, tracing PE is no way to the riches
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=LWPE+Interactive#symbol=L...
The point where you are having scaling issues because of the language then you are really going to be past the worrying about bootstrapping/hiring stage.

It sounds like you are spending time/effort worrying about scaling way before needed. If you can solve your problems you have today faster then I would do that, not hinder yourself today for possible problems way down the track.
Github and the thousands of Rails powered websites have no problem scaling, so i'm pretty sure neither Ruby nor Rails are a problem.
Two golden quotes from a Gnome dev. Beware, they are taken out of context:

I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app

and

for the first time we may have ability to really shape the user experience and form an identity for the GNOME platform

Why would the windows manager be a "brand", rather than the distribution? (Red Hat, Ubuntu).

There is no point (for them) in people "recognising the install" if they don't have easy access to it.

Having wasted enough time configuring appearance, I now would be in one of two scenarios:

1. Install a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or Red Hat and then use whatever comes as a default (and avoid fiddling around to save my time for more important things). Won't use Gnome if it is not the default.

2. Install whatever allows me to use the same appearance as in the other machines. SuSE/KDE used to have a "Redmond" theme that looked and behaved like Windows Classic. Do the same in the Windows machines.
"Best Innovation" CloudSigma award
Start-ups are competing. Looking forward to finding out who is the winner of "Best Innovation" CloudSigma award at the Founder Institute Showcase event!
Scientists Make Light Travel Infinitely Fast
> I recently switched to Fedora on my desktop, because I wanted to fiddle around with systemd.

You could have gone to straight Debian (assuming you were on Ubuntu). Systemd is not the default, but it works very well as sysvinit replacement.
Don't Apple stocks historically sink for a quarter any time a new product is announced?
HN Mobile site blocked?
Does anyone on HN know why the mobile hacker news site can't load any news?
Actually I've noticed that Xfce themes are continually broken at the moment, and I wonder if this [GNOME nonsense, not Xfce] is the reason?
But his key example, cutlery, is fairly preposterous. He claimes a dead Japanese designer made the finest siverware ever.

I'll agrue that the photo of "the best" cutlery is, in my opinion, "perfect"-ly hideous. Therefore it's not "the best," it's merely his favorite.

So he has made the stunning conclusion that "people are happier when they own things they like."

sigh
I've been thinking a lot about Apple recently. Here's a brain dump:

1. Apple cannot compete with their current strategy outside metropolitan areas - and that's most of the world. I'm in rural France at the moment. There is nowhere to buy anything Apple, expect the iPhone - I haven't seen a single Mac computer anywhere - in use or for sale. But you can't move in the supermarkets for Android tablets and PC laptops. And we're not talking 3rd world countries here.

2. Apple's rise has partly been caused by being ahead of the curve on technology, with a blockbuster launch every 4-5 years. iPod (storage, battery life), iPhone (touch screen, UI), iPad (touch screen). There is no evidence of a further blockbuster launch - I am not supportive of an Apple TV.

Coolness has a lifespan. People get bored. I'm bored of the iPhone now. It's viable for me to switch to Android and so I will do so at some point. I don't want to have the same phone for the next 50 years.

Apple is not in control of its manufacturing facilities. If we agree that Steve Jobs was right on a lot of things, then was he right to push for Apple to own and build its own factories?

Out of battery.
Why? I will answer it in just one word - money.
Links to revoke authorized access to Google/FB/Twitter/etc accounts
Could you please tell me what fortran is the good tool for ? :)

As much as I agree it's delusional to think one language may be adapted for virtually any kind of tasks, it seems way too much consensual to me to tell there is no such thing as bad or deprecated languages.
It's sort of a risk. Sometimes the $100 is for the fashionable brand, and sometimes it's for the quality.
US election 2012: hug photo makes social media history
One time I had to set my alarm for 4am (early flight) and Siri said, "OK, but don't wake me up!". On the one hand that's pretty funny of course, but on the other hand, I think it's a helpful sanity check for you to make sure you didn't actually mean 4pm.
I still don't get what's wrong with voter ID. Do liberals support any way to make sure that people voting 1) are citizens and 2) are who they say they are?
Codhisattva, what you state is false. ASCAP is the appointed agent of songwriters for blanket licensing purposes and operates under a consent decree.
I guess it was lucky Twitter moved away from RoR ;)

Disclaimer: RoR fan.
> The JVM, at its core, is not working with static types. The bytecode itself is free of static types, except for when you want to invoke a method, in which case you need a concrete name for the type for which you invoke that method ...

Not sure what gave you this impression, as the majority of Java bytecode instructions are typed. For example, the add instruction comes in typed variants: iadd (for ints), ladd (for longs), dadd (for doubles), fadd (floats), etc.

The same is true for most other instructions: the other arithmetic instructions (div, sub, etc.), the comparison instructions (*cmp), pushing constants on the stack, setting and loading local variables, returning values from methods, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_bytecode_instruction_listi...

InvokeDynamic, as you point it out, was added to make implementing dynamic languages on the JVM easier, because the JVM was too statically typed at its core.
Designer here. I was just using Easel yesterday before you added Bootstrap. I was trying to work 'visually'. Great first impression. VERY glad to see you've added bootstrap! Noticed a few things about the first Easel (Easel Pack (?) interface elements): I'd like the ability to paste color codes instead of using a color-circle. I need the colors to match the corporate identity and can't do that if I can't paste the exact color code. I also need the colors of elements to match, so I'd love to be able to create a color swatch. You have solved a lot of things for me with the Bootstrap integration. I really like the way you're going about it. Good work man!
On the other hand, 4 and 16 are hard to confuse ;-)
I'm not optimistic on Apple in the long run, because so little of their revenue is recurring. They hit the jackpot with the iPhone, but once that euphoria ends either their sales or their margins will crash.

But I don't think that time is now. People will be buying their stuff hand over fist for Christmas and the stock is cheap. Incredibly cheap actually, considering a fifth of their market cap is cash.
Hurricane Sandy Proved How Hard It Is to Break the Internet
Thankfully Ubuntu 12.04 is the Long Term Stable release. I think I'll be sticking with it for a really long time partially due to all this nonsense.

If 12.10 was the LTS I would probably have looked at switching distros.
'Twisted light' data-boosting idea sparks heated debate
The best is usually expensive.
There aren't many DEA agents compared to local cops. I would guess that most drug infractions are enforced at the state level and below.
CM7? Why aren't you running ICS? Even the official Sprint firmware has been upgraded.

Yes, JavaScript has come a long way with the latest engines. However, it's still a long ways away from being competitive with iOS or Android NDK Apps. Even Mozilla's poster child for the potential of HTML5 in 3D gaming, Banana Bread, is 4-10x slower than its native counterpart Cube 2.
Abandoned Suitcases Reveal Private Lives of Insane Asylum Patients
Oh with regards to your payoff: "Design & build in your browser" I don't design in the browser. I do build my design in the browser. I design on paper, using Photoshop, Illustrator and what not. If you're designing you don't have a clear idea of what you're going to make and you're changing things, replacing, resizing... Wouldn't recommend that in a browser ;-)
Oh man. I remember using e16 for a while way back in the day. The "water effect" desktop thing always turned heads.

aside: Interesting, but brief, interview with the project lead (Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler): http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Seeking-Enlightenment-...
Very valid point there dude. I don't know dude...maybe I just want things to be efficient right from ground up...Or it could be the after-effects of falling in love with Functional programming in Scala :)
more detail also > http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/sandys-global-impacts.sh...
Hash collision paradox
Statically vs dynamically typed peformance difference is clear for virtually any static or dynamic language you care to name, it has nothing to do with the jvm being "tuned" for a language:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
I think upvoting this comment was a reaction from people who were upset to see this blog post so high on the front page. Not necessarily because they taught this comment added value to the discussion, but because they strongly disliked the article.
guys.. you can do workout for only 15 min a week (check out Body by Science)
Even better - have A/B testing and experts. They're good at understanding why some A/B tests come out certain ways, can point out issues that might need further investigation, and can help discover new tweaks and fixes that you can, in turn, A/B test.

(I know Patrick isn't saying this - but I hit the 'we don't need UX / we don't need usability tests - we A/B test!' thing quite a bit now and it's bloody annoying. Both because (a) yes you do, and (b) the folk saying it are usually doing a lousy job of A/B testing ;-)
JRuby, even when using a lot of Java based libraries, doesn't get you the performance boost you need — it is just incremental over Ruby and even then only with some code.
It is incredibly customisable however the article lists a specific customisation (ability to re-arrange applications in the taskbar) that was in KDE3, missing in KDE4 and is actually useful to have. The ability to tilt desktop widgets at odd angles, mentioned by Linus, is utterly pointless. So the article has it right - they ought to start listening to user input.
I was thinking on using CentOS6 on the desktop for this very reason. I'm sad.
Hmm, this looks interesting although I agree with jmathes that it needs polish.

I was really surprised to be thrown completely out of the game world when I clicked 'solve it' on the first problem. It might be nicer to at least open the console screen into a new tab, or have some kind of visual reference to the game world. It felt jarring.

It feels like there's not much guidance on how to start, if it's actually intended for beginning programmers. It might be helpful to add a hint system? I'll send it to my boyfriend who has been teaching himself python for a couple of months, see what he thinks.

I really appreciated having keyboard shortcuts to save and run the program though, good thinking :)
I always never use the words 'always' and 'never'. They are always never true.
I'm a student, with afternoon and evening classes. I don't have these freedom and perks. If anything, I look forward to getting a job so I can stop worrying about studying for a test.
Very true, however, most users are willing to download such things as native programs (e.g. installing web browsers) from unauthenticated sources over unencrypted connections. If you are in a position to inject .js resources, then the user's security would be compromised anyway.

EDIT: SRP is going to be integrated into TLS soon anyway, so we might as well hold our breath for that.
You're really missing the point. For example, this story about the developer isn't about harrassment, it's about the complete misunderstanding of other projects and how they work.
You know when, non-techie, ordinary people can't tell the difference between a designer and a backend engineer, right? The same applies to all other disciplines in life. Great three paragraphs while saying absolutely nothing insightful, cohesive, nor valuable.
Rasterman is kinda rushing into this, no? Seems like just last millenium I was installing DR16.

I would love for it to catch on again, but I wonder if/how it can build an audience after such a long hiatus (notwithstanding EFL etc.).
Also, good luck and good work! :)
One of the dangers of A/B testing that the author didn't discuss is actually measuring statistical validity

Isn't that actually one of the problems of thinking you're doing A/B testing when you're actually not ;-) A proper analysis is an intrinsic part of what A/B testing is.

It's like doing TDD without the refactoring step. TDD without refactoring is, well, not TDD.
At one point, my favorite desktop by far.
As it happens, a few weeks ago I decided to take E16 for a spin after many many years of neglect. It still felt great and snappy. I'll be trying this latest alpha for sure.
And since limited choice works for you it should also work for the rest of the world?
Is anybody else surprised by the hate mongering in the comments and losing the essence of the post altogether?
Digital Revolution's Winners And Losers
umm... my point is, you're free to ignore someone, tell them to go away, not use their software, etc. you can do whatever you want with your project (within reasonable limits, obviously. i would normally not add a qualifier, but you seem like a picky fellow). and they can do whatever they want (same qualifier)
Here's my vote to "Reintroduce location/path bar toggle button." I really need the location edit box in file dialogs, and those %$£% removed it. Now I can't simply paste the whole file path to open or save the file, no, I have to click, scroll, click, scroll for every path component, instead of just one paste. %^$#

I also don't understand this "brandmaking" by alienating as much people as possible. Depressive read.
Face it: the global economy sucks. There are various types of crisis in the US, UK, EU, Japan, and China. Every government is desperate to raise money i.e. increase taxes (cf France's various recent disastrous forays in this area). So the point that Apple, Facebook, Google, Starbucks et al may have to pay higher corporate tax is a good one (and let's hope they do).

More importantly for AAPL though is the generational shift, I think. People in their 20s (just), 30s, 40s know about the Apple 'cool' factor but on a recent trip to SE Asia I would guess 60% or more of the teens were using non-iPhones. (And NB smartphone usage in this group in Singapore is probably 90%+). The newspapers had multiple full-page ads every day for Android phones (paid for by the telcos I guess). And needless to say the Androids are far cheaper than the iPhone.

Finally if the iPad mini is "good enough" for most people then it will cannabalise the full iPad sales.

I don't foresee another blockbuster product rollout though I'd love to be surprised.

I used to have some AAPL shares -- I sold at a tidy profit (though not at the peak) and now just observe from the sidelines and sleep better at night :)

I just wish they would improve the working practices in China, or at least pay higher wages and take a bit less in profit.
Scalability is an architecture issue, not a programming language issue. You can certainly build linearly scalable system in Ruby. It just costs more to scale a Ruby app vs. an equivalent Java app. In the end, the tradeoff is between engineering cost and operating cost. When you spend 100k to hire an engineer and your traffic can be handled by a few boxes. Engineering productivity is your primary focus. As your traffic grows, you need more and more servers, server efficiency becomes more and more important. At some point, the savings in server cost justifies the increased cost in engineering effort and you make a switch from Ruby to Java.
Anyone have additional insights to what is meant here?

"...the campaign’s Quick Donate program, which allowed repeat giving online or via text message without having to re-enter credit-card information, gave about four times as much as other donors. So the program was expanded and incentivized."

- How did the Quick Donate program work? Like Amazon's 1-Click checkout?

- What was the call to action for Quick Donating again?

- How was the program expanded/incentivized?
With enough hardware you can make virtually anything scale, for a price...