skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm "thinking in DCI" for 2 years now.

At GameBoxed (http://gameboxed.com/) we've got a Rails app that uses a lot of .extend on every request. It's in production for 1.5 year now.

It's a backend for multiple social games (one backend app for many CoffeeScript frontends).

It's not huge in terms of traffic and performance needs. We implemented it with a DCI-like architecture in mind. It was helpful at the beginning. DCI wasn't the only way to implement it, but it was the simplest way for us at that time.

We've had some performance problems, but they were never related to the usage of .extend. If it was a performance problem, we would probably consider removing the .extends (not a big deal), switch to Java, do more caching, there are so many options.

Again, we don't have huge performance needs, we've maybe 40 req/s at peak times.

DCI is much more than .extend, it's a huge shift in thinking about the OOP architecture.

If we (as Ruby community) agree that it's an architecture worth trying, then maybe it makes sense to introduce better optimisations techniques to the current Ruby implementations?

Anyway, it's great to see the discussion happening. DCI may not be ready to use right now, but it's more of a change in thinking than in the implementation.

I definitely wouldn't call it completely broken in Ruby.

Here are some of my posts on DCI in Ruby:

http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2011/02/dci-and-rails....

http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2012/01/dci-and-rails-...

http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2011/08/dci-patterns-h...
Tartufi al cacao, ricette ricicli avanzi dolci
A facebook friend just took ownership of one numbered roughly 3,000.

So probably about that many.
Quoting http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone/operators-and-oems :

> Ubuntu has already been adapted to run on chipsets using the ARM and Intel x86 architectures relevant for mobile devices, with the core system based around a typical Android Board Support Package (BSP). So chipset vendors and hardware manufacturers do not need to invest in or maintain new hardware support packages for Ubuntu on smartphones. In short, if you already make handsets that run Android, the work needed to adopt Ubuntu will be trivial.
The Incredible Landfill Orchestra
Even so, if they hit up the victims for $100 instead of $10000, they'll need to send out far more letters, and deal with far more targets who simply ignore the letters. IANAL, but I believe it does cost money and time to actually file a lawsuit and/or compel the targets to do things like pay up under penalty of law.
This is a good point. Also mentioning which flavour of regexp is supported would be nice.
Two years ago I visited the site of a company in South Africa that delivers (short-term) emergency power to remote areas in modularized fashion.

I wrote about it here: http://joubert.posterous.com/modular-mobile-power
Microsoft's R&D mission is not pure scientific research. The shareholders expect profitable products from it. Google for: "When we have really good ideas, our goal is to make sure we get them into use, that we change the world with our ideas and with our technology. We take our best ideas and push them into our products as rapidly as we possibly can. That's important."
Most probably not. Apple doesn't like people hacking into Apple devices.
CES 2013: CEA Partners With Launch.It For Eureka Park Coverage
I think they already realized that the desktop market is shrinking. Come to think of it, in my extended family I don't even know anyone who bought a desktop computer in the last 4 years. A few people got a laptop, lots of smart phones and tons of tablets.

So if they are going to wait to succeed on the desktop it might be too late. As fewer and fewer people will care about the desktop by that point.
Hey, this is really cool, and a great visual language for regular expressions! Must have been fun to build.

I found a couple of bugs: it doesn't seem to handle `?>` and inline modifiers (http://www.regular-expressions.info/modifiers.html), and with a couple of expressions it simply gave me a server error with no further information.
This was discussed yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993463
There are two different projects. What you're talking about is the Ubuntu for Android.
The turning away of refugees by the UK and USA is bad as well.

However, in the credit column, they have that whole "Defeating Nazi Germany" thing, which Switzerland does not.
As someone who dropped out of college to start a company and successfully exited, I
wanted to give my personal perspective on this.

Dropping out of college made me more successful than I would have been in the short/medium term, but closed a lot of doors for in the long term which I spend a lot of time often thinking about. Although it's quite possible I could go back to college and finish my degree, the opportunity costs for me now are a lot higher; I will most likely never go to grad school. I was quite fortunate to create a business with a great idea and an easy execution; however, looking back, I could of easily chosen something that wouldn't of worked. It's only with my greater maturity now that I can see how lucky I was.

On the flip side of the token, if I hadn't dropped out of college, I probably would be slaving away in a consulting/investment banking role and never would of gone down the startup route. I would not be as happy/wealthy as I am today and I probably wouldn't be as mature as I am now. I understand my limitations/vulnerabilities and strengths better as a result today.

Although I'm happy with my decision, I have been having a sort of a midlife crisis at this point.

All through life, there's always something ahead. In middle school, you have high school. In high school you have college; and theoretically in college, you have some kind of first job. After your first job, you get promoted/transfer to higher paying jobs etc….

For someone who drops out of college, the path can be a bit ambiguous. I've sold my first company and I'll most likely start another company soon, but what happens after that? Do i continue starting/selling companies for the rest of my life? Do I end up just becoming an angel investor/partner at a vc firm? Or do i just retire now and do all the fun/creative projects that I wanted to do as a kid? I guess I'm still searching…

I'm still searching because the toughest problem of my life wasn't to drop out or stay; that decision was easy. The toughest problem of my life is something I've been delaying solving and which I should of tried to solve sooner and which I may never solve.

The toughest problem of my life will be to learn and choose what makes me happy.
I guess was looking at it more like of those that dropped out, how many ended up not succeeding, with the correlation implying that dropping out wasn't the right choice.

Agreed that there are quite a few confounding variables though. Any stats majors out there that know how to adjust for socioeconomic status + other biases?
iubuntu for android is just android underneath, this new announcement is a stamd alone os
Actually, the sizes are in fact, simply odd left-over relics. This is pretty well documented history about how studs came to be nominal vs actual.

Same with hardwood lumber, in fact.

Considering i build about 20 pieces of fine furniture a year, and have built 3 houses, all of which are things "beyond a picnic table", as well as being active in a number of the industry associations that define this stuff (in my spare time), and you apparently know more, maybe you could explain the logic to me.

FWIW: I have no mental block, i actually work in both systems all the time. The whole exercise here has been pointing out your claims are wrong, not about me at all.
I assume that whatever contract they have with Microsoft would make that very difficult.

There's not really any evidence that this will sell more than Windows Phone does anyway, I kind of suspect that canonical would be thrilled if this got the same sort of sales that Windows Phone does.
I think the point Jon's making is that a business is a lot more likely to swallow a $75 fee than a $200,000 fee. If you hit me with a $200,000 licensing fee I'm a lot more likely to hire lawyers to retaliate and really make you work for it.
Twitter still uses Ruby on Rails to generate the website, as always. Their use of Scala is on the backend; the services that lay behind the Rails app. Facebook uses a similar architecture behind their PHP code, using many other languages, including Java.
Ok, so lets say you did that. Do you have a hypothesis about what might be different?

College is actually reasonably affordable, there are accredited four year university degrees that cost about $25K over four years. Generally those are 'state' schools but still $25K it what it costs to buy a car, so if one can choose between buying a car and going to school we could do some interesting comparisons there.

In every survey I've ever seen, whether it was done by the Census bureau or the chamber of commerce, people with college degrees were more likely to have better economic success than someone who had not completed college. The numbers are quite skewed toward college graduates with STEM [1] degrees.

By and large, today, for the general case, if you want to increase your chances for economic success, getting a STEM degree from an accredited college is your most highly leveraged investment.

[1] STEM - Science Technology Engineering Mathematics
> The desktop market is more or less disappearing

I think you mean "declining" rather than disappearing.

The last I heard (october news) pc sales were expected to decline by 1% in 2012. If that means "disappearing", that would mean the auto industry has disappeared years ago.
I don't understand. Are you saying that map, filter, reduce and al. on lazy sequences in functional languages are inferior to loops, or that Python list comprehensions and generators are inferior to loops?
That's basically LINQ to objects.

Maybe you're refering to LINQ-to-whatever (LINQ to SQL, etc.), a LINQ generalization where you can quote your expressions, rewrite the AST and emit something else (a very constrained kind of macros, if you will).

MS is probably to blame here, but people keep conflating the two.
Now submitted as an item in its own right:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4998770
How 'often'? Either all the time or very rarely, depending on your perspective. You wouldn't have 50% of your codebase treating code as data, because only a few lines of macros could define an entire new paradigm on top of what's included in common lisp. Those macros could be used pervasively throughout the codebase; they could be used often but written rarely.
The really cool thing about going to Buenos Aires is that its often the same time zone as NYC and the flights are overnight. So you can go to sleep in NYC and wake up in Argentina with no jet lag (if you can sleep on planes).
Mentioned over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4998751
Linkedin Voted Best “UI” Of The Web (But Not Really)
LINQ is indeed optional, but this discussion is about the evolution of the language, with LINQ being held as an improvement. And because it is new and shiny, C# code across the globe quickly became infected with it.

Your comment on "where there is no noticeable performance hits" strikes a chord because when first used there are no noticeable performance hits. But then that application grows and scales and suddenly it is death by a million paper cuts, thousands of grossly inefficient set operations devastating performance. That's aside from the fact that LINQ is often a short-circuit saving from having to think about appropriate algorithms of object-methods to deal with the likely uses.
"Computers are so fast today that does this benchmarking business really matter?"

Famous last words.

Computers are much faster than they were years ago, but look at how much crap they have to deal with... So much crap in fact that we barely notice they are indeed much faster. So much crap that hardware can barely keep up.

Performance is never mission critical until it becomes mission critical, and that usually happens all of a sudden. It's that moment a few days into production when the system becomes unbearably slow and the rest of the company is breathing down your neck asking "WTF is going on?! Fix it, NOW!".

It's problematic enough when you are just creating to many objects and making processor caches irrelevant, but if your performance issues are baked directly into your coding style... good luck with that.
The Best Health And Fitness Apps For Your New Year’s Needs
eLocal (http://www.elocal.com) - Conshohocken, PA (Philly burbs)

Ostensibly, the job title is Ruby Developer, but really your job involves bringing to life the software that is used by our consumers, customers and internal users. You will be responsible, in concert with our product and operations teams, for feature definition, project planning and estimation, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Often, we work with Ruby and Rails, but there are many other tools in our toolbox, including PostgreSQL, Solr, Chef, Redis, AWS, PhoneGap, and more. Our developers are given the freedom to find the best solution, but must take on the responsibility for a successful implementation. We are looking for an individual who has a proven ability to ship great software regardless of the technology.

Must Haves:

- Eligible for work in the US
- At least 2‐5 years of relevant web development experience
- Experience with scripting languages such as PHP, Python, or Ruby, (Hardcore would be a +!) as well as the ability to
quickly learn and apply new technologies (we are willing to take someone without Ruby experience assuming you
have lots of web development experience and are willing to learn)
- Experience owning, delivering and maintaining production code or services
- Exposure developing on Linux/Unix. You don't need to be an admin, but you need to be comfortable with a terminal
shell
- Self motivated with a strong work ethic
Nice to Haves:
- Devops: Linux Administration / Nginx / Amazon Web Services / Chef
- Data: PostgreSQL / Redis / Solr
- Javascript: CoffeeScript / JQuery
- Mobile: Phone Gap / iOS development
Try to understand their funding situation first and foremost, but if that's in line then I'm sure they're telling the truth.

Startup founders are optimistic creatures, and 3 months seems to many like plenty of time to launch, get traction, and finish a raise. All 3 startups that have tried to hire me have wanted to do in two-three months, and upon prodding, had to admit that was because they were still in the middle of a raise that wasn't going as well as expected.
> Persuading them may be frustrating, may take time, may risk you losing the job to someone less scrupulous than you who puts in a lower quote.

Good. It is an opportunity to charge extra for fixing the mess. And if they don't make a mess - tough, you had charged too much in the first place.
What does extend give you that delegation doesn't?
"considering that White House Petitions don't work"

Or any internet-based petition for that matter.
I'm working on a set of self-published E-books (http://justthebestparts.com).

Among my goals was to be able to publish to the Web while writing and have the option for public comments. I also wanted to write the books using Markdown or Textile.

I ended up writing some tools to convert the generated (X)HTML to epub and mobi, and the results are pretty good. However, I also want to have a PDF version and I've yet to find an automated tool that does a good job. I'm deeply skeptical that any tool can take HTML and output nicely formated PDF with proper page breaks, image handling, no dangling sentences or paragraphs, no distracting rivers of white-space in the text, etc.

I'll give this a shot but I'm not sure if there's a better solution than periodically hand-crafting the PDF.
Excuses don't matter. The fact is that these mixups happen. And the probe would not have been brought down just as easily by mistaking 'kg' for 'g', because that would result in a number that was off by a factor of a thousand, and the result would be unlikely to make any sense. The meters/feet mixup that actually did happen could only happen because being off by a factor of 3.3 resulted in a number that still made basic sense, even though it was incorrect.

There are documented instances of metric/imperial mixups crashing space probes and forcing airliners to land after running out of fuel in midair and such things. Are there any documented instances of similar metric/metric mixups?
I'm having a hard time understanding your justification. Ebbsfleet is 25 miles ESE of London (Ashford 50+ miles), with no local (TfL) connections. I'm also curious to know the basis for your claim that "the vast majority" of Eurostar customers are from north of London. I hear lots of people live in Surrey, not to mention London proper.
You forgot the part where Smith attempts to explain in great detail and with an inevitable reference to Euclid's fifth postulate how 7 perpendicular lines (which are also referred to as "orthogonal" he might add) are only possible in 7-dimensional space, and that in fact, this can be extrapolated to say that there is a one-to-one relationship between the number of spatial dimensions and the maximum number of orthogonal lines which could conceivably be drawn, but that since we are constrained by the 2 dimensions of the screen and there is no simple method for displaying spatial objects of dimension > 3 in 2 dimensions, for all intents and purposes the display of 7 perpendicular lines is not feasible.
A reasonable part of this conversation is the possibility that an EMP could be deployed in our atmosphere that would knock out power from coast-to-coast. US government commissions have been setup to study this, and they have come back with dire predictions about how quickly society would collapse in that event. And, if you'll pardon the author's bias, someone recently wrote (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/19/north-korea-...) about how North Korea's new ICBM capabilities threaten the US right now.

I'm not saying we should all be running around waving our hands in the air and acting like our hair is on fire, but if you want to talk about single points of failure, you apparently need look no further than your nearest wall outlet.
Motorola were the only OEM to have interest in ubuntu for android.. they took it, and completely ruined it.[1] There was no greed on canonical's part. I'm not sure whether i'd prefer 'android+ubuntu', or this 'ubuntu for all the screens' (existing ecosystem with mature OS vs a real free, unified desktop+mobile OS), but they aren't dropping either, apparently. I do wish they would allow the developer community access to their builds, though. I want it now!

1. see webtop; also look on XDA to see how to partially restore it to canonical's idea.
shrug I use it on a daily basis, over top of Linux, mostly. I've used Wily/Acme-SAC/Acme as my programming and OS interface for the past 10 years (2003-), after 11 years of Emacs (1992-2003). Both systems are completely reprogrammable, and Inferno has the advantage of being an actual OS (as opposed to a kitchen sink). I recommend it because it's a good way to get the feeling that you know the whole system, which you seem to be interested in, like the early home computers. I think the major three OSes are a little too big and bloated to get the same feel. Also, since it's a VM, you can take it around to other machines, and share it with other people, without changing the base OS they use.
They may package the distro Cyanogenmod-style.
If you see a good UI walkthrough - you probably didn't notice it
I thought I had a lead but it would not apply to 9.0...

Did you find out what went wrong?
The updates are specifically to improve the rendering at smaller font sizes.
Actually, not all construction sheet goods come in 4x8 sheets, you have things like cement boards, which are 3x5 sheets.
Same with some fiber based sheathings, some fire-code panels, etc. There are actually plenty of non-4x8 construction sheet goods.

In any case, let me make this very simple:

All non-domestically produced (and most domestically produced) sheet goods are produced to metric sizes that are close to 4ft x 8ft x whatever thickness. They are whole number integer metric sizes. They are metric sheet goods. They are produced and measured metrically by every producer and exporter.

They get sold as imperial sizes in the US. However, the fact that they are close to some imperial size does not make them imperial sized lumber in any meaningful way.

If i take a bunch of things that were produced as squares, sell them as circles, and people keep calling them circles, that doesn't make them circles.

You can call a 4ft x 8ft x 1/2" piece of sheathing 4ft x 8ft x 1/2" if you like.
But it's neither 4ft, nor 8ft, nor 1/2".

If you don't believe that sheet goods produced and measured metrically to whole number metric sizes are metric sized simply because someone in the US decides to call it something different, we'll have to simply agree to disagree as to whether they are metric.

I'm happy to agree that folks in the US don't work with the metric system intentionally, but they are working with it, whether they know it or not.

This whole discussion started because one of the premises given was that things like construction sheet goods (and lumber, but let's stay simple) would have to change for folks to be able to use the metric system in the US.

As i've shown, this is simply false, they just need to pretending they are imperial sizes, because the construction sheet goods are already done to metric sizes.
Unless he's updated it, his 2 year old Go code won't compile any more. 2 years ago, Go was a rapidly-churning target. Now, it's settled off to Go 1, but you'll have to go through and fix some changes--and there may now be better ways to do things.
Health sensors the size of a postage stamp (Medigram YC W12 Blog)
This is a response to Max Rudberg's post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4975416
I'm not fully certain and I would love some verification/counter-argument, but wouldn't the new Public Use Anywhere in the World aspect invalidate atleast some of the garbage patents like the one discussed in the article?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/11/15...
SEEKING WORK - Philadelphia, PA / Remote (Willing to relocate)

Looking for junior level Rails work, but I am also interested in anything which I can get my hands on. I presently live in Philadelphia and would place priority on working here, but I am also willing to relocate (depending upon location) and/or work remotely. I am self-taught and extremely receptive to learning new technologies. Where I lack knowledge, I gain the drive to absorb and surround myself with anything I can.

A primary project I am working on right now called "define.io" is linked below. It is a fairly simple, yet (hopefully!) effective way of allowing users to review tech products. It is in a very early state, but does have some basic functionality. All of the site's code is posted on Github (also linked below), and it is hosted using Heroku.

I primarily work with: Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/jQuery, HTML/CSS (Bootstrap), Heroku
I'm interested in learning/working more with: Go, Haskell, Objective-C, Redis/NoSQL.
Also open to working with: Python/Django

http://pauldipietro.org/
http://github.com/cuttooth
http://define.io/

Email: paul[at]define[dot]io
I'd figure that more interviewers would ask technology-specific questions, but it is hit-or-miss from what I've seen. For example: questions about Framework X or Y that your company actually uses. This would seem to be a lot more important than things that many haven't done since early CS courses (like algorithm gymnastics).
Nice Idea - I had developed http://www.Codeshelve.com sometime back - might want to check that out.
Apple says Do Not Disturb scheduling is broken until January 7