skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really nice charts. I prefer Flot, but I would seriously give these guys a second look if I was in the market. Not free, but very affordable.
i know everything is blocked!!
i know!!, whats happening, the cop said 'gunshot crimescene'
Plain old Fedora at the The University of Edinburgh here. Pretty reasonable setup, a few things a bit out of date, default quota a bit on the tight side if you need to install your own version of anything large (like wxwindows etc) but all in all pretty fair.
Well, how does one identify these so-called "sneezers" ? Wouldn't one's fans be the sneezers since they love the product and are more likely to tell others about it.

Would have been better if Seth had elaborated more. I would also disagree with the fact that one should ignore one's fans. The fans are the people who use the product the most and are more likely to give you constructive feedback about what could be better.
23 year old here.

Girlfriend and I are moving to a different city (Montreal) in July. I leave my job in June but gave huge advanced notice.

Everyone around me keeps asking if I've found a job yet and they always cringe when I say "No." To be fair, I haven't sent out TOO many resumes but I'm starting to pick up the pace.

One side of me just wants to forget about senidng out the resumes and try my hand at freelance work, consulting, and whatever else I can think of to make money. Work from home and try something totally new and exciting. I have savings an the GF will be going to school so the government (loans for university) + part time job will keep her money in check.

It's definitely scary I'll say. Like the one comment said, you could have done everything right but in the current situation you may not get anything that you could have 5 years ago. I say forget about all that and just go full force into trying it out.

We twentsomethings are young and we can always bounce back a few times before we end up on the streets :)
I have to agree with Nutter - MacRuby is nowhere near a complete implementation and there is absolutely no point trying to judge its performance until it is. See last year's MagLev debacle for precedent. You were right on board with that train wreck, if I recall correctly, and let me assure you the few of us who poured skepticism on their numbers are feeling pretty vindicated by now.

Another problem I have is the use of these artificial benchmarks to judge speed at all. Time and time again experience has shown that benchmark performance has little relevance in the real world. For example, your most recent Ruby 1.9 benchmarks post:

http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/12/10/reflections-on-the-rub...

shows Ruby 1.9 coming out 250% faster than 1.8. 250%! This is an absolutely meaningless figure. I have recently posted my own benchmarks of actual production 1.8.6 and 1.9.1 installations running an actual real world program (Rails) serving an actual production web site and the performance gain is closer to 15%:

http://fukamachi.org/wp/2009/03/27/thin-ruby-191-vs-ruby-186...

I will not pretend that my quick and dirty testing is any kind of canonical "last word" result but on the other hand, I also can say with absolute certainty that no sizable app is going to experience anywhere near a 250% speed increase from Ruby 1.9. These benchmarks are worse than nothing, they're completely misleading. I am all for getting everyone onto 1.9 but geeze!

And of course you can't even run a "real world" app on MacRuby at all, because it's too immature, which kind of completes the circle of pointlessness. It is way too early for this kind of thing.

I do sympathise with your mission of promoting knowledge of and getting people excited about the future of the various Ruby implementations but can you please tone back the hype a bit?
Why Backtrack 4 beta Is Meh
The fact that so many parents are basing the medical decisions they make for their children on results that have been proven over and over to be wrong, false or misinterpreted and the well meaning, but scientifically unfounded spouting of Jenny MacCarthy amazes me. Unfortunately the main stream media (wow, I can't believe I just typed that) has a tendency to latch on to correlation studies because they are easy to understand and spin, not because they are right.

I've spent much of the last 4 years of my life studying the state of the research of Autism and neurological diseases and disorders. Does Autism scare the crap out of me? Heck yeah! Did I immunize my 10 month old boy - yes. Did every member of my lab immunize their sons and daughters - yes. There's a correlation study for you - 100% of our group of researchers who are better read than 99.99% of the world on Autism and the state of Autism research immunized ALL of their children. I can't wait to be on the cover of TIME!
Fuck analog sunday, this was worth every digital second spent on it. Pure genius!
I am not qualified to comment on the speed issues, but I don't want to loose sight of how very cool MacRuby is, even if it is slower than YARV/JRUBY. Imagine taking Ruby to the Iphone. Too cool......
Worst case is you realize you don't have time to finish it quickly, so you buy it from someone else and sell the customers that to keep them happy while you work on the 'real' product.

I realize this approach will probably be hated on by the HN community, but for a certain set of products, it makes perfect sense.

I'll add one more thing:if you guys were selling hardware, you'd have a much greater appreciation for this technique!
I second the Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby and Learn You a Haskell For Great Good. However, I think SICP is a bit ambitious.

Here is an old HN discussion on teaching programming:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=428095

In addition, I recommend _why's Hackety Hack based on Ruby. It also seems that a new version is on the way!

http://hacketyhack.net/get/

Knightinblue, I don't know if I am interpreting your intentions correctly or not, but I do not recommend just giving a ton of resources to your nephew. Rather, I believe that it is important to actively help guide him in learning. Be a mentor. Show him how to make things work. Show him how to make the computer do fun things. Do not completely leave him on his own.

Lastly, push him towards programming (and computers in general), but do not completely overwhelm him with information. Knightinblue, you seem to have amassed a huge collection of resources. In this case, I strongly believe in quality over quantity. Be very picky. In my opinion, many links will definitely need to go.

Most importantly, be absolutely sure that your nephew will have fun and enjoy the experience. There is nothing worse than being completely frustrated by something new.

Sorry for that odd advice tangent. I just wanted to say it.

One last question: Knightinblue, how much is your nephew interested in computers? Is it 'hey, I think this might be cool' or is it 'yes, this will be my future'?
Role Oriented Programming
This is predicated on the assumption that Ruby matters, present & future.

While I love Ruby, and use it for most code I don't write in Javascript, I can't help but wonder if in 10 years' time Ruby will look as big and bloated and arcane as Perl does now, and some new upstart will have all the mindshare.
I would advise against so many languages/technologies at once. This was the mistake I made in the beginning and I haven't really recovered. I can dig in to many things and make them work, but I think I would have been better off if I tried to master one or two things.

Find out what your friend is interested in and make your recommendations based on that.
Someone needs to tell me who the experts are so I can be mindful of this and prevent it from happening to me.
Python implementation details
"The rules about what's on topic explicitly say that articles don't have to be about hacking. They just have to be interesting to the intellectually curious."

Frankly, I think that's a mistake. <opinion>We get screwed more often than not with this rule. There's regularly boring, offtopic articles that get to live because of it and it's seldom the case that an offtopic article will turn out interesting. And even in those rare cases, I can't help but this this is Hacker News, not Intellectual News.</opinion>
COME CNProg first, right? Do not forget FAQ Oh!
So, your opinion is that a PhD is not necessarily bad, but (based on your experience with a few people) that a PhD in computer science makes a person useless?

Just to highlight the absurdity of your logic, I think it's fair to point out that based on the evidence provided, it's just as likely that you're the problem -- the only common factor in your anecdotes is you.
There's that too. If I were a social researcher rather than a biology/computer science researcher, I think I would be banging down the door of Twitter headquarters for unfettered access to their raw data.

In some respects, Twitter has become the human social genome project.
[Scribd Document] Online Marketing Trends 2009
Tippingpoint Labs is a digital content creation shop for major brands in the United States. Here are our predictions for creating and distributing content online in 2009. Enjoy!
PyCon: Concurrency/Distributed systems talk
What is a good recommendation algorithm?
But Objective C is pretty nice too and with blocks being added to it, is there any reason to want Ruby (other than personal preference) on the iPhone. They should have had it from day 1 of course.
What can we do about our personal data?
It sounds like your question is more "How do I not let my desire for sex get in the way of getting stuff done." and has nothing to really do with relationships. A relationship with the right person would only increase your own creativity and productivity.

I guess I'm extremely fortunate to have a relationship with someone who encourages me when I feel worn out and wants to give up and who understand when I have to put in time to get stuff done. I'm a big believer that the right person for you inspires you to do better and makes you feel like you can achieve anything. I double my efforts because I want to create something of value so that we can both share and enjoy the things we want to do with our lives.
In my last application (I got hired) it was the programming guy who asked me what Latex was.. (and not to test me!)
How about asking people who sign up where they heard about the product? Note that you'll be thanking the person that made the referral.
I saw someone complaining about this the other day. Not sure if your intentions are the same...

StackOverflow is CC-SA 2.5 licensed. The "derivative" site is also CC-SA 2.5 licensed. They both have clearly different audiences. I don't see a problem.
The Basics of Umbrella Companies
The Basics of Umbrella Companies

Umbrella companies are basically companies that allow contractors to work for them temporarily. Such arrangements are typically done through employment agencies. Recruitment agencies generally issue contracts solely to limited companies.

In the wake of IR35, many umbrella companies have been established in the UK. This is because there are a lot more benefits to be gained with an umbrella company than with a limited company due to IR35 requirements. A Managed Service Company or MSC law was also passed in 2007 that required contractors to either work for an umbrella company as an employee or to establish their own limited company. Contractors working for an umbrella company will then be paid through PAYE after the required invoices are sent to the recruitment agency.

In December of 2006, another law was proposed that clarified the terms defining MSCs. This law was called “Tackling Managed Service Legislation” and it was also intended to address the numerous cases of tax avoidance. The law also sought to reduce the incidences of contractors’ avoidance of proper National Insurance and income tax payments through the use of various legal loopholes. This law was finally passed in April of 2007. Certain amendments were made to the law in August of that same year, and in January of 2008.

Most Umbrella companies typically provide the same types of services, which is why it is important for you to compare between each of them. While expenses can be an influential factor in making your decision, you should be wary of suspicious “dispensation” schemes. You would be better off with a company that obtains documents from HMRC as a way of keeping track of expenses. It would also help you to view expenses as pay back for justifiable costs of running a business, and not as another source of money. Remember that is you who will be held responsible for erroneously filed expenses and not the umbrella company you are working for.
My last relationship would sometimes significantly reduce my desire to create anything.

The good times were great and of course programming was the last thing on my mind. The bad times were simply draining and I'd lose the drive to make progress on my goals.
Correction: Revenues could goes either way.
...Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. Ahhh!... It is from one of your writtings...
You say that like it's a bad thing!

If there was a viable young upstart which was better enough to seriously start stealing Rubyists away (perhaps a "Ruby for functional programming"?) then wouldn't that be a net gain for the world?

I love Ruby but I hope it's irrelevant in 10 years' time, because we've all moved onto something unambiguously better. Think of how much more productive we'll be! : )
What is a Good Recommendation Algorithm?
You make a very bad conspiracy theorist. Or comedian.

The language isn't slow, implementations of it are. Regardless, you can still maximize the performance of something slow, even if that local maximum is not extremely fast in the absolute sense.

We cover the whole range of techniques, from better architecture, DOM tweaking, and the maximization of specific bits of code.

The contents of the book never touch Google Checkout, even in their zipped form.

I wasn't aware publically boasting of ignorance was cool after junior high.
The initial phase of being in love or going through a breakup, I can't concentrate and my work suffers. When a relationship is working, it has a positive influence on my well-being and that in turn positively affects my creativity and productivity.
I use LaTex a lot. That said, I have a few problems.

Nothing is as bad as someone who decides he is going to use Latex for general documents - such as composing tests or any type of document.

Why when people use LaTex their brain automatically shuts down? In college there are people who give extra marks if a report is done in LaTex. I thought that if a report looks nice (no matter if you've done it in FrameMaker or Word/OpenOffice) it is all that matters.

LaTex is nice - but it is not the holy grail that everyone pretends it to be.
Could the Tesla Model S become the Google Car?
By which ethical/moral reason why content authors should have the right to control all the copies of his work?

I can see misapproriation as an ethical issue, but copying, not at all.
In my experience, it was about 1/3. Then again, I wasn't a great player.

In 2003, I came up with a Magic-like game that solved a lot of these problems. It wasn't a kill-your-opponent game, but a German-style TCG with a Victory Point (VP) system, making it more amenable to multiplayer games. There were no "life points", but you had Action and Focus points that you could use to draw extra cards or resources, to give creatures an advantage in combat (making it more nondeterministic), etc. The number of strategic options per turn was vastly greater than in Magic, so it was harder for a player to get "stuck" and unable to do something useful.

Unfortunately, at the time I knew nothing about programming, nor had any money (I was 20). It was pretty obvious that the only way the game had a shot would be to take it online. Now I could hack it up, but I've forgotten most of the mechanics.

The disadvantage of this game, and why I think it wouldn't have ever taken off the way M:tG did is that, despite having "better" design from a Euro-style perspective, it wasn't a game that would finish within 30 minutes. A turn involved multiple players (most phases of turns were concurrent) and had a lot more strategic options than Magic's "untap, draw, cast, attack" formula that describes 90% of turns, so a single turn would last 3-10 minutes.
I made several now face-to-face friends after meeting them on Twitter
I disagree with your reduction of the question I'm asking. It's not just about sex. It's a question about balancing a set of strong (but mostly counterproductive) emotional and physical desires with the higher purpose of getting things done.

I agree with the rest of your post, though.
I took yesterday off as well. Went out for lunch with friends, walked around, smoked some pot, napped.. good day.

Today I actually need to get some work done and finish this new product so I can launch it in the next couple weeks.
Google's position is very tenuous, because it's very easy for users to switch search engines. Which is one reason Google works so very hard at the competitive advantages it can build, such as PR, patents, tools (gmail, docs, maps), and improving search.

All you need is better search. Is that possible? Google would like you to leave that research to them, with all their money, experience and PhD's, what's the point in trying? Surely there are better prospects anywhere but there? This is one of Google's competitive advantages. (of course, if you did invent better search, they would immediately buy you).
As I read this I immediately thought of Ditz (http://ditz.rubyforge.org/).

The idea behind Ditz is that, if your project has no centralized "truth", then a bug tracker that represents centralized "truth" doesn't make much sense. Instead, Ditz keeps track of your bugs right there in your Git repo, so when you check out that 3 month old experimental branch, all of the bugs that still existed on it are right there for you to read about.
I graduated about 5 years ago with $22,000 in debt. Its been paid off for the last 2.5 years (on a salary not too much different than an American liberal arts major). I hate the notion of owing people money.

Since then I've had 3 jobs, started a business, saved up a bit for retirement and for a rainy day, and built the business up to where it could be the day job if I needed it to be.

So I'm looking at my 27th birthday in a few weeks not exactly feeling the crushing weight of the great depression on my shoulders.

I suspect there are more than a few people like me in my generation. We don't talk to reporters because we understand that college-educated Americans should not snivel about how hard they have it.
Alan Kay, in his Turing award lecture:

A couple of years ago we started this project called Squeak, which is simply not an attempt to give the world a free Smalltalk, but an attempt to give the world a bootstrapping mechanism for something much better than Smalltalk, and when you fool around with Squeak, please, please, think of it from that standpoint. Think of how you can obsolete the damn thing by using its own mechanisms for getting the next version of itself.
A roundabout way of looking at it: Do a survey of all the people you admire for their productivity (by your own definition).

You'll probably find there are womanizers, monogamists, recluses, etc, etc. i.e. All types.

It's a leap of a conclusion - But I'd say either it's not correlated, or it's totally unique for every individual.
It's decent, but I switched to Qt when the licensing changed and definitely do not regret it. YMMV, but I find it the most pleasant and complete GUI toolkit of any language. wxWidgets makes you do more stuff manually. For example, I've found sending custom events to be a fairly complex and error-prone process, requiring badly-documented macros, while Qt makes it a breeze with the signals/slots mechanism. Qt also offers much better integration with VS, eclipse, etc. wxWidgets does have a fairly usable stand-alone designer.

I don't know about dabo, but having used both toolkits, and now that Qt is LGPL, I don't see any serious reason for choosing wxWidgets over Qt. Personally I use it from C++, but if you want Python I'd suggest having a look at http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt .
As a PhD student, I get criticism for taking on tasks that are short, useful and possibly clever, but not novel. If it can't go into a published paper, it's a waste of time, apparently.

And really, there are so many minor improvements that can be made in academic life -- like maintaining the public web server for an app or database you published a paper about, or getting source code documented and ready for release -- that if you take all of them on as they appear, you'll have almost no time for writing papers, grants and a dissertation. PhD students are trained to neglect the simple stuff in order to get through school.

So I can see how a PhD dropout could be positive. The best coworkers are the ones that can either prioritize and take care of the simple stuff so quickly that it's not a problem, or can switch back into "get things done" mode when it's needed.
Signs of economy's demise are fading a little
Greg nails something that seems to be passing the academic world of recommendations by: you can't measure recommendations quality with RMSE. It's just not a good metric. User happiness is the goal, not the ability to predict ratings of unrated items. I'm glad to have someone with a little more clout than me saying this.

Some ask, "What's the difference?" If I tell you about 5 albums that you've already heard of, are the recommendations good? Even if we're pretty certain you'll like them? If you're buying an obscure jazz album and you get "Kind of Blue" as a recommendation (probably most popular jazz album in history and one any jazz fan would know of) is that a good recommendation?

How do users build trust of recommendations? How does that factor into the algorithms? It turns out you need a mix of obvious and surprising results. All obvious and they don't discover anything; all surprising and they don't trust them.

Those are the right questions. A good algorithm for recommendations is one that people interact with and discover things with.

This is an awesome read (in fact, I uhm, submitted it a few minutes before at Greg's blog, but it's good enough that I upvoted it here too). As soon as I ran across it I immediately blogged, tweeted, and submitted here. I'd had a draft of an essay along these lines kicking around for ages.
I'm going to assume by relationship you mean a normal loving relationship, with its up and downs, the normal fights but not abusive or lacking or with a cheating partner.

If that is the case, I can say that it improves my programming, both at work and at home. Yes you have fights, but when you know that you have someone you care about and s/he cares about you it drives you harder to do it. Sure it takes some time from your programming time, but well defined boundaries can be easily set.