skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure... Nice write-up.

From the Hacker News site I have been following the recent controversy and even participated in some discussions. :-) Your Honor, I plead guilty! :-)

I cannot blame them (Twitter) when they seek their goals for a better business with higher quality and performance. I even respect their creative skills. So I don't have a beef with them even when Ruby gets caught in the polemic.

Ruby to this day continues to be an open source project put together by a community that for better or for worse has most core developers being Japanese.

But since about 3 or 4 years ago, Ruby has had other developers seeking to implement compatible Ruby versions... That is, Ruby has outgrown itself and continues to do so. JRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby...

At the end of it, though, Ruby continues being relatively slow when compared to other kinds of languages. But first read the following article to see some reasons why is that:
http://blog.headius.com/2009/04/how-jruby-makes-ruby-fast.ht...

Since Ruby's beginning, it was not out to reach C level performance. And JRuby for one improves upon some of the shortcomings of the main C implementation of Ruby quite well, not without its own shortcomings though. :-)

So, what do we have in the controversy? Twitter is a little sick of complaints of it letting the ball fall when much more is required of their services, so they go overboard when defining a solid platform for it with Scala. Not to mention that they simply can't go converting their entire system to Scala just yet and they are still happy with the Ruby part of the equation at creating the web interface the users see.

What do we have then? More options of development. Instead of C, C++, Ruby and Java, include Scala there as well. Each with their own pros and cons. We know that, right? But if it were simple to use each one of those languages and more when providing a set of services, we would not have a beef with who chooses what when developing. Nature has it that while it's possible, it's much tougher to get it working. That's partly why big companies like Google try to minimize their options of tools and in doing so help to set standards throughout the industry.

Such standards, fortunately, don't apply for everyone, otherwise Twitter might have started with something other than Ruby on Rails.
I've been running WebKit nightlies on OS X for a year or so and generally been happy with Safari. That said I think there are two big things to look forward to in Chrome:

- Plugins in separate processes. No more beach balls or crashes from Flash.

- Tabs in separate processes. No more beach balls or crashes from Google apps.
The Apple II was a side project

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
No, you're completely dodging the issue by saying some library functions, not written in Ruby, are not slow, and then talking about development time, which has nothing to do with the slowness people are talking about. The last time I checked, we're talking about the speed of code written in Ruby, and in particular, the speed of code as it's typically written.
Aren't all of Pentagon's cool toys programmed in ADA?

I never heard of an open-source project based on ADA...
Of the reality?
>E.g. if I pay someone $100 now for $100 worth of lawn care over the next five years, I make damn sure I can trust that person. If I pay the bank $100 for a CD maturing in five years, I don't.

> This gives all banks an incentive to take undue risk

Actually, you've just demonstrated that FDIC insurance gives you an incentive to take undue risk. You'll deposit your money at any bank without regard for whether said bank is trustworthy.

BTW - It's curious that you seem to believe that better rules will help since you also seem to believe that "clever people" can always get around the rules.

As to whether a govt-run bank would do any better, feel free to point to the fraction of govt enterprises which are run as well as you'd require of govt run banks. Which states' DMV is "good enough"? How about the post office?
> I'm a bit short of the wealth requirements to be called an accredited investor ... (1M net worth + 200K/year income).

>That just seems blatantly unfair to me. It's the government setting up a different set of rules for the rich.

Those rules are set up to protect you from unsafe investments, scams, and the like. After all, you need to have enough money to keep paying taxes....
Gun owners are more at risk for suicides than homicides (by quite a large margin). The media covers these, although in reality they happen far less than we would think (see recency effect).
Yet another "on-line" crisis which has been played out, time and time again, "off-line", since the dawn of civilization. Just because you have the ability to block/follow people on Twitter does not exempt you from having to develop social skills.
"Open" doesn't mean anything goes - if you have an "open" marketplace in a town where anyone can sell, if someone is antisocial then they could be banned (not of course referring to what happened here, but banning does not cancel out open-ness automatically).
> That just seems blatantly unfair to me. It's the government setting up a different set of rules for the rich.

There was one VC here that mentioned how someone emailed him about also investing in 3 of the companies that he had invested in, and how he couldn't let the person do it because the person didn't fit the requirements to be an "accredited investor" then he mentioned what three companies they were. They were all money pits with no path to profitability. I believe the "accredited investor" bit helps people from having there life's savings thrown away on a unregulated bad investment. The ultra rich either inherited money or built a real business from the ground up and sold it. I would suggest one of those paths instead :)
> And I can't just take my money elsewhere, because the city granted them a monopoly

Did the city grant the monopoly to help you or because they got paid off?

Someone mentioned torches and pitchforks. Tar and feathers are also useful.
Try the following Google search, and read the linked results, and perhaps you'll come to a different appreciation of Mr. Brooks's writings: http://www.google.com/search?q=David+Brooks+site%3Alanguagel...
The regular expression engine and large number support are simply not broadly representative of Ruby performance, and do little to refute empirical observations of properly representative benchmarks and the many educated critiques of Ruby's implementation.

Your final example of development time is wholly unrelated to runtime implementation performance, and its use as a justification to assuage cognitive dissonance is predicated on a false dilemma -- that a language can not both support rapid development and a well performing runtime.

It is not necessary to introduce a false dilemma to justify an individual preference for Ruby development, in spite of its measured performance.
I can see the connection, but I myself don't use Twitter that way. I write a full blog post of content, then edit down to 140. It's surprising how little needs to be said to make a point, when it comes down to it, and how strong a point sounds when it's been compressed that far.
EventMachine supports an actor-style threading model, which may be what Tony was comparing it to; pretty clearly, Tony Arcieri knows EventMachine and async programming --- he's one of the better known people in the EventMachine "community".
Only half true. It did link to a University of Melbourne page, which is slightly more precise and is based on an interview with a researcher in the field:

http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/news/5750/
> The difference is that a fancy pen and a fancy writing table are functionally the same as a cheap pen and a cheap writing table. One is just a more expensive version of the other.

Actually, while some forms of the output may be functionally equivalent (it's hard to do good calligraphy with a ball-point), the experience isn't. (Some folks really enjoy using fine pens.)

It's unclear how the experience affects the output.
I was astonished at how awful the Android audio libraries are -- no direct access to the mic, no real mixing, can't alter playback rate, can't have more than 10? player objects instantiated at a time, etc.

It's a really constrained sandbox.
This sounds like a multi-variable linear regression he did in Microsoft Excel?
You're asking a loaded question by conflating violence and possession and/or use of firearms, as if the firearms are part of the motivation for the violence.

Violence decreases with less unwanted births, a higher general level of education, and the evenly-applied rule (and understanding) of law. Put your time and money to work on those fronts and you will see a material decrease in violence.

If you live in a place with high gun-ownership, you aren't going to effect change by trying to ban the guns. Advocating firearms safety education would be a good place to start, and believe it or not the NRA is probably your best hope for bringing a culture of firearms safety into your community.
Search YC

http://searchyc.com/

I use this, and a site-restricted Google search,

http://www.google.com/search?q=hacker+site%3Anews.ycombinato...

when I want to check if a cool link has already been posted here.
Freakonomics is a great read.
Unfortunately, religious fanaticism is a reality. People do die and kill in name of a religion.
Cato's article claimed that this study showed that private schools were clearly better at educating students than private schools. My point about performance was to show that the study itself says that isn't the case, based on the executive summary of the study itself. How was that silly or illogical?

My point regarding special ed and alternative schools is that these programs make averge-cost-per-student and average-performance-per-student metrics incomparable between public and private schools. The statements are derived directly from the study report. How is that silly or illogical?

I didn't say that only indoctrination about the supernatural is distasteful. Indoctrination--religious or otherwise--is unethical. You bring up FDR and Henry Hissinger as examples of public school indoctrination, but there are many public schools (like mine) that presented those men in an objective manner. There is no doubt that some teachers in some public schools may engadge in some kinds of (often religious, nationalistic, or otherwise political) indoctrination. However, it is something that can be identified and corrected within the public school program without changing any fundamental aspect of the public education system. The only way to rid religious schools of the indoctrination--for which they were created and which is one of their main selling points--is to close them or transfer them from religious organizations to secular organizations (which is something I fully support).
You're right. Of the 30,000 or so people per year who die from gunfire in the U.S, a large proportion is from suicide - especially in white males over-40, as this nytimes graphic illustrates (gray is homicide, pink is suicide):

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/04/21/weekinreview/20...

So if hackers should work on anything, maybe it would be some form of help for white males to get through their mid-life crisis.
Thank you for reading villageidiot.

I did not mean the post to introduce sufficient and necessary conditions; instead to communicate my methodology. Thought it might be helpful to a few.
> * According to the study, many parents (19%) turned down the vouchers they received after their students were accepted to public charter schools. It seems like parents are showing a strong preference for charter schools over private schools. IMO, this warrants further investigation into the funding of public charter schools instead of public funding of private education.

Umm, why should the preferences of 20% be a reason to exclude an option prefered by 80%?

Fortunately, we don't have to make either group unhappy.
We can have both public charter and vouchers for private schools. If the money goes with the kid, both will get funding proportional to the demand. I suspect many of the parents who weren't offered the choice would go for one of those two options and DC has a lot of students. So I believe that we can have "enough" public charters and enough private schools in the DC area.
No no no no no. Consciousness is a process (which you probably agree) but one which involves both the brain and the environment.

The car analogy isn't that bad, though it's a bit incomplete. Imagine you want to study ways to optimize traffic in a city. You can use a car in a garage, since you have all the information necessary inside it (and you do, technically). Or you can use a model of the city with many toy cars inside it. Which will help you most? It's about the level of abstraction you choose to use. And it's important not only because some models are more efficient then others, but because some models have inherent biases. In this case, considering consciousness trapped inside the skull makes it a lot harder to see things which would be obvious when defining it as interaction between brains and environment.
That's very possible. Reporters tend to exaggerate certain elements, but he has a pretty strong math background. Either way you look at it, he's hacking the numbers to increase his own odds of investing in the right stuff.
PR, marketing and politics are facts of life. The reasons that Ruby/Rails community ridiculed (obviously accurate) "ruby is slow" are exact same reasons the community was such a success in the first place. Consider what would have happened if "ruby is slow" meme took off. Forget the RoR itself, but it would have actually been a disservice to users who don't understand the details and wouldn't have been able to make the right choices.

If you actually want to affect a change with communication it's useful to think through what, where and how you say it. But mostly, don't just complain, include a patch. E.g. our Ruby and RoR patches were accepted the same day with gratitude: http://blog.pluron.com/2008/01/ruby-on-rails-i.html

We (Pluron/Acunote team) are going to be presenting @ RailsConf 2009 ( http://en.oreilly.com/rails2009/public/schedule/detail/8615 - Advanced Performance Optimization of Rails Applications ) and it's going to take some work to frame the presentation in a useful fashion. As tempting as it is just to point out how bad every single part of the stack is, from our hosting to Firefox, it would be highly misleading; they are still the best available options.

Having said that, it's a pleasure to have HN where these sensitive topics can be discussed in a rational fashion.
jmtame,

Thanks for the post. I found it interesting; however, your WP theme was distracting. It looked as if the post was all in [quote][/quote] tags.
Big Banks' Recent Profitability Due to AIG Scam?
This post offers an interesting viewpoint about how far hydrogen fuel cells can go:

http://blog.cocagne.com/hydrogen-economies.htm
For financial news:

http://newmogul.com

For everything else:

http://nonhackernews.com/
I like Tony Arcieri, but this is a weak and somewhat unseemly argument, easily knocked down:

(1) Most urgently, Alex isn't bashing Ruby. He's at pains to point out that Twitter continues to use and like it. Pointing out the relative strengths of other languages isn't "bashing".

(2) The technical problems Alex has with Ruby are bona fide well known problems with Ruby. Put aside the green threads debacle and the MRI VM is still a dealbreaker. I have lots of long-lived EventMachine code, and MRI simply isn't up to the task. Arcieri even stipulates to this in his post.

(3) In deriding Kestrel, Arcieri is ignoring several of key facts that Twitter had to face when they built it: first, that they were already down the path of a house-built message queue (they didn't go to Scala to build Starling, which moots his critique of it); second, that apart from Apache, none of the competing projects were mature enough for Twitter to commit to at the moment in time we're bickering about; and third, that his preferred queue (RabbitMQ) would have required them to commit to yet a third exotic platform, Erlang, the Ron Paul of programming environments, and would have won them no more meaningful performance than they got with Scala, but would have robbed them of JVM compatibility.

It's the third point that rankles me the most. In a 24 graf jeremiad, we find only 10 grafs in that Arcieri can't make a performance-based critique of anything but a straw man (Starling), and can only do it by himself rejecting Ruby in favor of Erlang. This is the best the Ruby community can do to answer Alex's argument?
His point was that anyone could do it because it was open source. Robots indeed almost exclusively build in Linux. That doesn't mean their designs are open.

An exception might be the vibrant hobbyist small uav builder.
I do not believe that forthright explanations of genuinely complex topics can ever be a disservice to users -- accurate and complete information is critical to "make[ing] the right choices".

The suggestion to provide patches is a simple displacement mechanism. A correct, reasoned evaluation is not predicated on also including patches, and a reasoned evaluator may have significant cause to not invest further effort in providing improvements to the evaluated software.
It doesn't need to be legally enforceable, they can just kick you out of the iphone developer program, and you have little recourse.
This is a great article.

If anyone is interested in learning more about Andy Beal's million-dollar poker games with the best players in the world in 2001, you should check out this book: "The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time", by Michael Craig. It's got a pretty complete profile of Beal, and tells all about the games.
Whenever this comes up on HN, my response is that just because it is hopeless having a business model that depends on copyright (crappy internet), doesn't mean they don't benefit from prolonging the process.

The days of mature consumer technologies depending on Broadband speeds you get in S. Korea are a ways away. How many people are still not connected to the internet at all? How many people have no broadband at all?

If they can add 1 or 2 or 5 or 10 years to the point where youtube is what people connect to their big TV, they make a lot of money.

It's sort of like saying a business model that requires U2 to stay popular is not sustainable. Of course not. But it doesn't mean you should give up.
Isn't that a lot like saying that despite the VM system, OpenBSD 2.1 wasn't slow because it had a pretty good "gzip"?
Ask HN: Firefox v. Chrome
I've been a firefoxer for quite a bit, but the blogosphere seems to give props to Chrome...thoughts? Should I make the switch?
Chrome, if you can deal without the extensions (for now).

Chrome's faster, more stable, and uses Webkit. But I'm biased.
And what's stopping them from doing this now!
Even if Java wasn't Free and being OpenSourced, IBM is rich enough, to pay SUN for they use of JAVA

IBM is a resourceful entity, it doesn't need things to be free to invest in it, Myself personally I can only invest in FOSS because because I cannot afford to invest in prorietary techologies this why I am investing in the shinto shrine that is Perl and Perl technologies, I am also investing in a less Open technology Groovy and Grails, less Open for its weak reliance on SUN and SpringSource, IBM on the other hand can buy and rent what they need to increase their market share, they can in theory invest in Microsoft Technologies, which in someways they do by providing Windows Clients for many of their tools, Myself of course I only dare to think about creating portable applications, because I cannot afford to rely on MSFT ,so at the end of the day it about investments

Honestly I think IBM will be buying SUN's market share, not products. IBM wasn't growth, wants to increase its revenue in 2009 by whatever percent SUN client can do this for IBM of course this will cost IBM them 9 Billion they are paying of course in addition to several oher costs associate with running SUN
Steals traffic - Digg doubles its traffic by showing your content in its frame and redirecting the shortened urls back to Digg instead of to your site.

When I share a site on Twitter or whatever, I usually link to the social news site instead of the site directly. I want my karma, and I want all the comments in one place. So toolbar or not, you aren't getting linked directly.

Also, this is not stealing. This gives you traffic that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

Steals links - by creating shortened urls that are redirect to Digg first and foremost

Not stealing. Want some cheese with that whine?

Steals content - your content is essentially being hosted by Digg through it’s framing structure.

Completely wrong, unless you think that web browsers are stealing your content. I mean, on Macs there is that Apple logo above your page, and in Firefox, there is a Firefox logo! Oh noes! (What's the difference between a Digg toolbar and browser chrome? I certainly don't see one.)

Steals potential revenue - by either blocking your content/ads or by stealing ad impressions/clicks.

Completely false. I use AdBlock anyway, so no need to worry. Nobody sees your ads.

Enables others to justify framing as well - then we are right back to where we started in the late 1990’s when websites were nothing more than frames within frames and lawsuits are handed dished out like candy.

"Handed dished"? Citation needed.

Citation needed for everything, in fact.
I'd stay away from CDOs, but there are great opportunities in cash subprime and Alt-A mortgage bonds. If you know how to analyze the deal structures, it can be very lucrative. If you run the bonds to extremely draconian default and loss scenarios, you can still end up with 15-20% yields.

$10,000 is too little -- for agency MBS, $15,000 is the minimum purchase size, and I think the rules are similar for non-agency bonds. Most of the high-end brokerage firms can help you, though. I know Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns Private Client Services (now a division of JPM) deal in mortgage bonds for individual investors.
until it is fully and widely understood. Cognitive dissonance

By accusing people of "cognitive dissonance" and apparently believing that's the primary issue here, you are contributing to the drama.

See the comments on the original:

http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twi...

The aggressive and insulting remarks directed at Ruby, Rails and people associated with them are exactly the source of the problem here.
It's bizarre from the outside to here non-americans take availability of weapons as a non-factor.

There's plenty of room to argue about rights or the difficulty of actually reducing access to weapons. Saying that low hanging fruit is really gun safety, hotlines, preventative mental health etc. etc. etc.

BTW, I come form a country that probably has one of the highest rate of adults who can use & have access to an automatic rifle in the world. There aren't many incidents of this kind. I know that availability isn't everything.

Most killings are not conducted by the super resourceful, premeditated unstoppable type of people.