skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Certain things are fine to do w/env. vars. but as you mention, the need for their use is much more infrequent than is suggested in this post.

Additional things to think about:

* https://github.com/railsjedi/rails_config for local developer config

* There is a reason for autoloading: faster development. Even though you should not usually need to make app-specific configuration changes outside of the main environment.rb and each environment-specific config (development.rb, etc.), if you do, you might consider putting them into a module in an autoload path, and make sure that the fully-qualified path (A::B::C maps to something like app/models/a/b/c.rb) is correct, so that it autoloads without trouble.

* Some suggest putting constants for frequently used values in a file somewhere under config/initializers. That way Rails doesn't complain when reloading them. But, that doesn't autoload if you make changes in development.

* You can extend a Module that is autoloaded with methods that are "marked" with module_function :method_name to become private class methods on the class that extends them. This way you have non-inheriting methods that basically act like config variables.

* You can just use class_attribute in Rails to define inheritable attributes and then use self.the_class_attr_name = something to set them in the body of the class for configuration.

* attr_accessor :some_var_name, @@some_class_var, @some_instance_var, a hash, a Struct, or a OpenStruct are fine ways to hold config values and can be set inline for class vars, in the initialize method for instance vars, or methods called by other hooks, depending on what you need.

* Usually avoid $some_global_var as there is no way to tell whether it has been defined nor whether it has been set explicitly to nil.
Douglas Crockford's Monads and Gonads
I'd like to subscribe to your e-zine.
Long ago, in a galaxy far away: I was accepted to UGA (which is a big deal in hicksville) with a National Merit Scholarship. I also was offered the chance to apply for a fellowship, but I missed the deadline. (My dream college was St. John's in New Mexico but I didn't have the foreign language classes to get accepted.)

I went up to UGA by bus for orientation and wandered around on foot on a Sunday trying to find something to eat while feeling awful. As the day wore on, I felt worse and worse. By the end of the day, I just felt really dreadful and I just wanted to leave. I called my sister who kindly drove up to get me. I gave up my scholarship, attended a local college, married, dropped out of school. I had kids and was a homemaker for a long time.

Many years later, after a lot more mysterious health issues, I was told I had a deadly disorder. Looking back on it, had I gone to UGA (or St. John's) and pursued a career, I likely would have died young, one of those headlines that says something like "Promising youth dies mysteriously". The social isolation of being home wth my kids likely helped me stay relatively healthy for longer. My preference would have been "social butterfly". And it likely would have helped to kill me.

I am not religious and I don't think you have to believe in some sort of god to find a logical explanation for the detour I took. I didn't have a diagnosis but I also didn't feel well that fateful day at orientation when I decided "I just want to go home". So let me suggest that if you fail to get into Harvard, perhaps the message is that it isn't the best fit for you. Forcing it might do more harm than good.

I am more inclined these days to accept seeming roadblocks as constructive feedback: Either step up my game so I can get past it without forcing it or accept that it is probably for the best that I not go there. I suggest you get cracking on something else. It would be a shame to let a lot of other doors close because you wasted too much time on disappointment.
Thanks, this was actually very useful to know! I just started with Clojure, got excited and moved on to the web development with noir, literally last week. So I suppose it's a good thing it happened now, before I spend a lot of time on it... I guess I need to move on to Compojure and Ring, by the looks of it.
Cool. I was curious and figured others would be as well. I like the idea. Effect on battery life? App is free, what's the model?
Pet Peeve:

The big friendly button labeled "Get the App"... doesn't.
Thanks for writing that up! I wish I had been as aware of these things as you are when I was your age.
I'm twenty - four years older than the author. Pretty crazy to compare our experiences...

5th grade (1/2): Everyone hangs out on Neopets, lots of people are excited about the GameCube. First time I ever heard of Google.

6th grade (2/3): Neopets is still popular (but popularity is starting to wane), people hang out on AIM, some start getting cell phones. lots of students carry their CD players to school and wear their headphones whenever they can.

7th grade (3/4): iPod Mini is the "hot device", more people have cell phones. everyone hangs out in AIM chat rooms.

8th grade (4/5): iPod Mini still in, most people now have cell phones. nerdy friends start playing World of Warcraft (some never stop, stealing to support the habit). Not many people know / care what MySpace is. A few people have gmail accounts.

9th grade (5/6): Everyone has MySpace. Most people are now using gmail. A few friends have blogs / Facebook. People torrent everything.

10th grade (6/7): MySpace is the hub of all social activity. Some start using Facebook once in a while. A few people create Twitter accounts. Only one or two rich kids have iPhones - they are teased mercilessly.
Apologies, fixed this.
By the way, if you have trouble finding which comments are new, I highly recommend the HNCommentTracker[0] extension for Chrome. It will tell you which discussions have new comments on the front page, and will highlight new comments on the discussion pages. I couldn't imagine using Hacker News without it! (By the way, I did not create it. I can't give you support for it!)

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hncommenttracker/i...
Sorry this was misleading. Fixed now!
I find it interesting that this was in the same class as Filepicker.io

Is cloud-based file selection something that should be offered by a web developer, or by the OS?
Waiting on someone with expertise in the area to come in here and explain why this is typical sensationalist FUD to make an otherwise boring article about Yet Another "Scary" Botnet exciting.

Is there any point to this article other than highlighting the necessity of constant security auditing, educating the user about safe computing practices, and possibly implementing two-factor authentication?
Ride-Sharing, Regulators, and San Francisco
Flickr support is coming and we list a few others on our site (collections.me)... but very much open to suggestions!
Seems more like Adobe Bridge than Finder.

http://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html
Yes, this. I never browse Amazon - I am always searching for a specific item. Fab is the opposite experience. I could spend hours just browsing. It is dangerous. I've told my boyfriend that if he is ever at a loss for a gift idea, just go to fab.com and pick something at random and there is a 99% chance it would work out.
Since HN is explicitly designed to deter casual visitors [1], it might not be the best example to cite for poor comment design. Threaded's not great, but completely flat comments scale really poorly -- I can't imagine scanning a page with ~100 unthreaded comments, but I do that all the time at HN. A lot of the points seem like they could be improved a lot with a little javascript (ie, nuking unproductive threads), but, as the quotation below indicates, those changes probably aren't going to be made here.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html (4 paragraphs from the end, "But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."
That's the part that needs fixing. A greedy amoral entity can threaten your entire livelihood for no cost to them and you are powerless to defend yourself or even understand the process by which to do so.

That sounds like institutionalized injustice to me.
This article assumes too many things. They act as though a person can't be happy with a career. Starting a company is a path good for some, bad for others. It all depends on what the individual wants.
Incidentally, here's an alternative UI for HN that lets each comment stand on its own: http://hackerstream.com. It's a hobby project I built with a friend.
This needs to be said a million times.

I do not support wars. That said, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the Iraq war killed less people than the Vietnam War, which in turn killed less people than WW2.

A mere 70 years ago, my country was occupied by some of the most brutal oppressors in the world. Now, our biggest problem is that we eat too much food. Most of my fellow countrymen will never have to know what it's like to be starving, to have our homes destroyed, our family members enslaved or worse.

It truly is something to celebrate.
They are staying free, they're just adding ads. It's no different than Facebook. Facebook has been and always will be a free site.
Interestingly enough, one of the first YC companies from Summer '05, Memamp, tried to solve the Desktop search problem with replacing Finder.

I remember watching their demonstration during demo day and and being very impressed. Now the problem space is even harder, with cloud and hosted solutions in addition to all the desktop files.
I remember what it used to be like on random forums across the internet, and it wasn't pretty. The fact that discussions on reddit can still be easy enough to follow in spite of the tens of millions of visitors, and thousands of comments speaks more for how good the system actually is. Living before threaded comments like HN and reddit was like living in the stone age. Every system has it's flaws of course, as mentioned in the article.
Fashion Mermaid Wedding Dresses
Thanks for the feedback, and so glad you like it!

I made a plugin interface just for things like adding typescript support. I know pretty much nothing about typescript through, are there any good node compilers out there? It would be incredible if you made a plugin for it - if not I'd be happy to try to tinker one together myself.
My aunt went through the same situation. She became clinically depressed for several years after going through the IVF process several times. She was on medication and had completely withdrawn from life. It wasn't until they decided instead to adopt a child from Korea that she changed, almost overnight.

After the successful adoption, my aunt completely changed. All she ever wanted was a family and to raise children. Adopting their son from Korea inspired her again. She got off medication and returned to her fun, outgoing self. It was an amazing transformation. They wee both in their mid forties when they decided to adopt.

I'm so sorry for your lose, but please, don't get discouraged and give up on having a family. Consider adoption. There are so many different kinds of adoption available these days and there are so many children in need of good loving families like yours.

If you need more information, DM me and I can go in more detail about their experience.
Visual Design in a Lean Startup
I like it because "literally" is being used hyperbolically, therefore in those cases it is describing the opposite of itself.
Would you give them your full name normally? At the very least that's what you're giving them.
Good news - I already made a plugin for rails : ) https://github.com/jenius/roots-rails
The patents trolls use are mostly the detritus of failed businesses acquired for nothing during liquidation, not garage inventors making good.

Part of the problem was that every web business in the 90's figured that storing their data online and delivering it by browser was a brand new idea so they all got the same patents over and over. Every troll on the block has a "data on a server" patent.
My Google Reader account is surprised to learn that RSS is dead.

How else do you keep up with updates on a bunch of different sites? (Serious question.)
Do they tend to keep private profiles, use pseudonymns or just broadcast it completely publicly with twitter? I don't recall twitter having 'friend' only posts.
Impressive!

p.s. improvely (which I knew about before) and dialshied (which I've now bookmarked) work great but I got this on www.w3counter.com:

Oops! An Error Occurred

The server returned a "500 Internal Server Error".

Something is broken
Please e-mail us at [email] and let us know what you were doing when this error occurred. We will fix it as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
+1 for TotalFinder, I also love the visor feature (ctrl+~ to get to my terminal through TotalTerminal, ctrl+1 to get to all my finder windows).
How is this app going to make money?
How will this handle music?
Exactly. There are some professions where you can get plenty of fulfillment without starting your own company (it may even be impossible to start your own company). Healthcare immediately comes to mind.
you're looking for something like

return myList.join(" ")

or

return implode(" ", $myList);

or something similar?

Or maybe even

$string = '';
foreach($myList as $item) {
$string .= $item." ";
}
return trim($string);

Or something more complex? I can't really imagine it being more complex, but I can imagine people failing. I too am sometimes shocked at how people end up getting programming jobs who don't grok extremely basic concepts.

I do understand how some people end up in programming roles - often just because they show some ability to get stuff done - they're the least bad in an org, and no one else wants to do it. But that's different that someone intentionally applying for a job as a "developer" and not understanding the concept of a loop (I've met a couple over the past 15+ years in the world of paid developers).
Yep

npm install -g typescript
tsc helloworld.ts

More info here: http://www.typescriptlang.org

Will give it a shot :)

p.s. I would add a tweet button on the site, I actively looked for it, although I'm lazy I tweeted anyway, but this might give you some extra shout-outs, especially for the shot grace period you are on HN front page
This is interesting. I'd like to know more. Are you targeting young inexperienced programmers? Are they just out of school? What kind of filtering do you have prior to bringing them in?

I have never hired a recent grad for programming.

I used to own an electronics manufacturing company near UC Riverside (California) some time back. We had pick-and-place machines and the usual assortment of equipment you'd have for the assembly and testing of circuit boards. We made microprocessor-driven industrial motor controls.

During that time I thought it'd be great to hire engineering students. As someone who was a capable electronics hobbyist before I even touched college I assumed that these kids would be hell-bent to work in electronics as I was when I was in college. Not so. I probably went through 15 or 20 of them before I found a couple that were worth the effort.

When it came to programming I never hired anyone with anything less than five years of demonstrable experience.
Yeah impressive. I'm on a windows machine and find the windows explorer, and especially "search" to basically be broken. I have so little confidence in the search that I avoid it at nearly any cost. I find that it was much better on Windows XP (and I'm not saying it was anywhere near good on WinXP).

I'm not sure to what extent this is a replacement (on the site it sounds ambitious), but I'm very curious.
I think as social networks grow people need to periodically retrench to increase the signal (close friends, crushes) to noise (mom, zynga spam) ratio. FB's big problem here is the egalitarianism of friend status. Twitter has the same problem. G+ has more flexibility but ultimately relies on increased user effort.

The eventual winner in the space may well be whoever solves this: automatically figuring out which friends are more important to the user, making that measure invisible to users, adjusting it appropriately over time and then filtering to show everything from the most important as well as important updates from less important people while still allowing the user to see less important stuff from the less important people. The eventual winner could also be FB just on sheer forward momentum, size and how deep their hooks are into everyone.

I wonder if increasing bandwidth has also played a role in FB's declining engagement. FB was built as a pics and text based site but long term the trends will move away from this. Yeah it does video and music and everything else but they are stapled on. Over the past year I've watched my wife use FB less and less each night and things like skype and netflix more and more.
Here's a hypothesis partly based on facts in the article: The trend setters are early adopters and the power of the network effects sees quick adoption of the new trends.

If true, it's not about pivoting, but figuring out how to connect with the relevant trend setters.
After reading the headline, I thought it was strange that a Google company would need money for a new server. After clicking on the link, I see that the article is from 2001
Ones that already have the ideal setup are usually not looking for a replacement. It ideally would be something he would like but doesn't already have.

These type of things are only good if what he got needs replacing or there is a better product he's hesitant to upgrade to.
In the USA, you can't represent yourself if you are a corporation or an LLC. Gotta pay a lawyer. Although I suppose you can find some unemployed law school graduate pretty cheap on craigslist.
Amazon does have an offering in this space: http://www.myhabit.com
I'm going to disagree with a lot of other commenters: In my experience, a top-notch education is enormously valuable, and where you go to school very much matters.

I applied for grad schools in math, my first choice was MIT. I was very disappointed to be rejected. My second choice was Michigan, and I was very disappointed to be rejected there too. My third choice was Stanford. Rejected.

My fourth choice was Wisconsin. I went there and it was an AWESOME experience. They gave me as much as I could handle, and prepared me very well for the road ahead.

I will disagree with other commenters and say that it is not "all for the best". It probably would have been better if you got into Harvard. You really did lose something, and you would be dishonest to yourself to pretend otherwise.

But Plans B and C and D and E and F are also really incredible. I had the amazing fortune to get a three year postdoc at Stanford (a "postdoc" is a short-term job you can get right after you get a Ph.D.) and worked with some of the best mathematicians in the world. Stanford is a top-notch place. Apply there.

Apply to MIT. Caltech. Princeton. Rice. Brown. Harvey Mudd. Deep Springs. Apply to the state school in your state. State schools vary highly in quality, but some of them (Michigan, Wisconsin, Berkeley, UNC, and others) are really top notch.

Apply to any school that piques your interest. Or, consider doing something else for a year before returning to school, if that's your cup of tea.

You still should be selective and aim as high as you can, but know there are a huge number of wonderful universities out there offering mind-blowing educations.

If you're prepared for periodic disappointments, then you need fear nothing and the world is yours! There are so many opportunities out there which are still available to you. What an awesome fact to contemplate. I wish you good luck.
I agree that I don't like trees, but in HN just go to your user in the upper-right, and click on comments. Problem solved! Still a tree, but no more clutter.

Looking at flat comments for an involved discussion is sometimes confusing because you have to scroll around even more to see who is replying to what.

Maybe PG would provide an option in user config to view comments in a list rather than a tree if we asked.
Merge multiple presentations using Saaspose.Slides REST API
Moving from seattle to the bay area you basically get that for about 8/9 months on end.
Guess you better start pounding the pavement!
You're more than 100 years too late with that strategy.

http://forthillhistory.tumblr.com/post/16595519368/josiah-ba...
I'm working on one right now. Will be a few months before its ready. There are some that are specific to stores, etc... that shows pricing trends but not sure on a universal one.
I've always found unthreaded/single threaded conversations to be better when you want the discussion to remain civil and focused. For example, on MetaFilter or Edward Tufte's board.

I wish/hope someone puts some effort into studying the difference one day though because it might just be confirmation bias on my part.
I agree that this is probably the right answer. Unfortunately, it's a difficult business model to pursue and open source may not be able to solve it.

I look at this like I look at Linux versus Windows/OS X (as I type on my MBA next to my work Linux laptop): Open source may provide an alternative that, for a certain class of people, is every bit as good as the commercial mainstream; but for Joe Sixpack and Molly Mall, using such a solution doesn't even factor into their consciousness. It's not that it isn't good enough; it's that it doesn't even exist on their plane of existence.

I've spent a reasonable amount of time thinking about this (as a side-thread from a previous start-up I was involved with), and I have yet to come up with a combination that satisfies my preferences for data privacy and ownership with "normal people's" preferences for ease of use.

Unless a catastrophic failure occurs (Facebook crashes and loses everything), I don't think people will realize there might be better solutions.
Single threaded conversation has worked superbly on MetaFilter for over 10 years: http://www.metafilter.com/ (ditto Edward Tufte's board - though he uses a very heavy level of moderation to maintain quality)
Yay that's exactly what we need to make file management more coherent - another baroque piece of crap that only adds features instead of refactoring existing ones.
Why is "white upper class" a "criticism"?
<3 that. Is the guard spring loaded and are labels available?
That's the very same thing I thought of as soon as I saw the page.
Sid Roth Supernatural Healing
Sid Roth wiki it’s the glory, or the presence, or the Spirit of God; Genesis 1, was hovering, and number two, it’s sound or sound waves. Sid Roth radio broadcast God spoke, everything was created. Sid Roth Supernatural Healing
Harvard has excellent financial aid.
Will Backbone still send the whole representation of the object to the server when using PATCH? It's something that's always bugged me how I end up sending way too much stuff to the server.

Great release anyway the event handling is more than welcome and Backbone has been a joy to use for the past few months. Thank you for that.
This was a very lovely note to read. My father died about two hours ago. I miss him immensely.
It's basically a front for all the cool research they're doing behind the scenes in Computer Vision (the company consists of 3 PhDs). The app itself isn't necessarily to make money.

Think of it as a technology demo that's cool and can be used by anyone to demonstrate the research they're doing (though most people just think of it as a cool app, they don't know the backstory).

I'm almost certain they have a bigger picture for the long term.
Just build a new Norton Commander for OSX and we are happy.
Anyway, don't get why YC/PG invests in such ideas. Though nice this idea is no venture case (easy to copy when successful).
What is the utility of recycled 11 year old crap?