skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm so tired of that comparison.

Heres the difference: Rails is programmed on Ruby.

Rails in itself is, to me, not that impressive. It does a lot of things right, but it does probably just as many wrong. Not the least of which is scaling.

But the advantage that Rails has is that its programmed on top of Ruby. And for that reason it will never be truly akin to the monstrosity that was VB.

Except in that it attracts poor developers. But, thats simply because its easy. The trick is finding the people who use Rails because of Ruby... not the other way around.
It was inevitable: lambdacats
No one said anything about truth or falsehood. The truth, unfortunately, does not just automatically win in an argument.
Half the myspace users are over 35:

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1019
Just google for it? I think this answers your question:

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=39...

--

Which phones does Google Maps support?

Google Maps works with the following devices:

* Most Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones.
* Palm devices with Palm OS 5 and above.
* All color BlackBerry devices.
* Windows Mobile devices with Windows Mobile 2003, 5.0 and above.
* Symbian Series 60 3rd edition devices.

If your device is supported and you have a data plan, visit www.google.com/gmm from a mobile web browser to download Google Maps. If you're not sure if Google Maps will work on your device, visit www.google.com/gmm and we'll perform a quick check to see if your phone is supported.

Note: Google Maps doesn't work with BREW-enabled devices. Some mobile services providers may restrict data usage by applications. We recommend contacting your mobile provider to confirm the details of your data plan.

--
So it is a database lookup system based on some kind of tower id?

I was just wondering about that. It would really make sense if the GSM/CDMA standards had the tower pass their position to the cellphones, but I guess that was not something the people designing the systems had in mind back in the days.
There's another requirement there; there have to be no false positives either. Charlie, who lives halfway around the world, can't be falsely reported to be nearby.

I don't get what pixcavator is driving at with the x sin(10x) notion but it seems to fail the Charlie test to me.

If this function has to preserve both proportionate nearness and farness, without false positives, it to seems me that it's just an ordinary geometric transform and therefore easy to reverse.

IANAM (I am not a mathematician).
Why Submitting Web Content for Copyright Protection is Critical (and how to do it)
This post should have been titled "click some color boxes and then watching a loading graphic spin forever".
I always thought Geni's interface kind of sucked. There could be a lot of reasons this one is taking off while Geni is stalled.
I have never heard of a successful startup that got funded this way either.

VCs tend to get deals through referrals from people they know, like angels, lawyers, professors, and other founders.
Nick Denton, Oprah Winfrey And The Art Of Getting Laid
Web 2.0 Startups Find Europe Fertile Ground
"But I am wondering - are they for real?"
They will really take your money.

If you've exhausted all of your social capital and none of your friends, folks you have prior shared success with (e.g old bosess, co-workers, team members, customers, suppliers), family/relatives, and current advisors (e.g. lawyer, CPA, banker, others) are willing to help you then you can pay these guys to broadcast your business plan or profile.

You might ask them for three references who actually raised money as their testimonials seem to revolve around arranging meetings where founders can touch the hem of a VC's cloak--but no money seems to have changed hands.

Alternatively you might reconsider your business model, as a parent I would be willing to pay pikluk so when I see "The PikLuk Service is FREE and it provides a safe Internet experience for your children." I wonder how you are going to make money in a way that doesn't conflict with your primary brand promise.
I expected you guys to get into YC... maybe next time. If I had a bunch of money I would fund you.
I'm so tired of that rebuttal. But really, it doesn't matter. Rails is great, as long as people build great stuff in it. Too much talk is all that bugs me.
if you are a visual studio developer and want to get started with ruby and rails there is a fantastic plugin from http://www.sapphiresteel.com/

actually if your a rails developer on windows it's the best I have used. Has all the code complete and formating that you would want plus all the integration with rails that you would expect.
Top H1b Sponsors
One reason to think that Rails is "all that"
This thread got me thinking:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84771
DJB Releases All Source to Public Domain -  qmail, primegen etc. now in public domain
I agree completely, but I don't think that that loyalty can or should come from legislation. It's got to come from the culture of the company, perhaps with contracts to back it up.

I think these days, most people of my generation don't really think much of the idea of loyalty from or too a company, which, for some people, careers, and companies, is probably damaging in the long run.
Facebook raises 60 million from Hong Kong billonaire Li Ka-shing
my home rating : 6/100 ! work rating 14/100 !
Forget your blog: 5 reasons to keep a personal log
There is a scene in the movie Weird Science where the main character looks up something in his so-called 'log'. "You keep a diary!?", the other geek asks. "No, of course not! Teenage girls keep a diary, I keep a log". Here's why you should too.
Will IRSeeK Have A Chilling Effect on IRC Chat?
Welcome to democracy @work ;)
Hey that's what I do.
I wonder what the bot is called. I don't like the idea at all.
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Sysadmin and development - (37signals)
Thanks for the link, but in my opinion, he is just chasing a chimera. At least he mentions the easy problems, and they are menaingful in my opinion. I have no problem if people invest their time in trying to create artificial intelligence. Those are well posed problems, like "create a chat bot i can have a meaningful conversation with". The "experiencing state" in my opinion is rubbish, it's nothing. As was written in the other thread, "how can physics explain the sensation of eating a strawberry". I think that it is essentially just like this: if(isEatingStrawberry()){ taste = strawberryTaste} (with more associations etc., but there is nothing special about it that lies outside the realm of physics).
Sounds like a great idea to me. Anything that cuts down the repetitive questions is great.

For instance in ##javascript, half the questions posed end with the answer "Use a closure".

These are public channels anyway, archiving them seems fine to me. I'm surprised google hasn't got in on this yet.
Spammers Giving Up?  Google Thinks So
Insider charged with hacking California canal system
cool talk! Is there a way to full-screen archived clips in the player?
Will the Blue States be the "New Economy" Winners?
So you are not betting on black swans themselves, but you are betting on their results. Thank you for this insight.
The name is cool, the UI is tight and I just found a cool new band. Great work.
Want to know what Web 2.0 offices look like or what millions of funding can buy?
It's not trivially easy though. Part of growing a market is also having connections in that market. For instance, the i18n of reddit would have been trivially easy in terms of programming (I think, at least - there aren't too many strings there). This has been around for a while:

http://it.reddit.com

But they've been absolutely beaten by a localized clone:

http://oknotizie.alice.it/

In part, because the guy behind it, Salvatore "antirez" (on this site, too) Sanfilippo already had a popular Delicious clone, and was able to get significant traffic from that from the outset, in addition to being reasonably well known amongst Italian hackers on his own.
I just searched for my handle and I can see all my previous conversations. This is nuts.. and really cool.
By looking at the tag cloud on the homepage irseek.com, it's nice to see that the unix world is strongly represented!
YouTube -- The early beggining
You didn't look at Indiana.
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/academics/sample_curricul...

This is the undergraduate informatics curriculum which, as you'll notice, strictly includes social science courses throughout the first two years.
So, is it working yet?
I think there is an inverse relationship between positive attitude and eagerness to win arguments.
The Evolution of Facebook's Beacon (with screenshots)
As Wikipedia moves to S.F., founder discusses planned changes
Facebook backs down in privacy case / Social Web site publicizes users' online purchases
It's good work, and they're a good group. But the result shouldn't be too surprising. It's based on word association data (salt-pepper, bread-butter) and if there's anything Google does really well, it's that. And funny enough, the "search" area of the brain (left inferior prefrontal cortex) has been associated (using fMRI) with those types of linguistic relations and especially in amplifying them when they are weak. Still, that's a very small piece of semantic memory. Indeed, it leaves out the whole rest of the brain!
Review: 'Blade Runner'
Better to ask first.

Problem is that systems analysis is a lost art. People don't know HOW to ask.

People know what they want. They just don't know that they know.

Here are just a few to the things you have to do (that almost no one does anymore) in order to elicit requirements:

- Spend time with users doing what they do, asking questions until you understand how things work. If this means sitting at their desk, following them around their office/factory/route, or wading hip deep in <whatever>, then DO IT.

- Ask questions to groups of people at the same time, so they can argue with each other and learn together what's really needed.

- Ask lots of "Yes/No" questions.

- Ask lots of "On a scale of 1 to 10..." questions.

- Ask lots of "What is the probability that ..." questions.

- Cover the wall with paper and draw pictures of EVERYTHING. Leave the paper there for all to see for weeks. Let them understand and learn together.

- Put every piece of paper they use in their jobs (or personal life) on the wall, so they (and others) can really see what they have to deal with on a daily basis. Not blank sheets, but paper with real data on it.

- Identify every data element. How do you know when you're done? Keep asking until there are no more answers.

- Feed people while you ask them. (Amazing how smart people get while eating pizza.)

- Then (and only then) give them a prototype to play with. (I suppose here is where your "measure" comes in to play.)

- Exactly right? No? Keep going until it is.

Aside from the prototype, we haven't written a single line of code. Is this hard? Absolutely. Maybe that's why most of us don't do it anymore. Does it work? It you know what you're doing: every time.

(Aside: Notice I never mentioned using crap like Rational Rose or UML. That stuff was never meant to help this process. It was meant to make people who don't know what they're doing appear as it they did. Built an industry by paying junior people $50k and billing them out at $250/hour.)
It's almost a prerequisite to getting funding that you are smart enough to figure out how to get a referral into a VC firm.
Does venture capital kill great ideas?
Is Facebook Ruining Christmas?
does this mean there will be an equivalent of robots.txt for IRC chat rooms?
Interview with the creator of Tetris
I disagree, and I also think the line between argument and discussion is rather blurry; especially in text-based communication.

One of the most interesting threads I've read lately was that one where Walter Bright posted a comment about D in a thread bashing C++ programmers. His post was attacked by a few others, and the resulting argument was very interesting.

I think this is the thread: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2007/9/7/257355

Though I don't have time to find the specific chain of comments.
Well, he's right by virtue of a tautology. Winners are the ones who participate as well. Right or not, it's an asinine comment. I've downmodded maybe 3-4 posts in the past month and this was one of them.
Is Kinset the Future of Online Shopping?
Brian Beckman: Don't fear the Monads
I predict that Facebook will continue to push the limits of privacy violations, and will back off only when the outcry is so widespread that they're in danger of losing users.
The Reply All Button Must Die
Right, I saw that but what exactly is a data plan, and what phone plans have it? I didn't see it on Verizon, Tmobile or ATT's sites. Maybe I'm just confused.
What?! Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
Yeah, this seems like a brilliant way to get acquired by google.
They should take climate into consideration. My apartment in Madison, Wisconsin scores 92/100. I'd generally agree with this, but when it's 15 degrees Fahrenheit on your walk to work... Brr.
There are two issues, as this guy says:

http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/irseeking-trouble

1. They didn't ask.

2. While IRC isn't private, you should be made aware if someone's logging it, and frankly I'm not really in favor of logging it in any case, as it detracts from the more informal nature of it.
Python Speed/Performance Tips
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips#head...

There are a few basic suggestions, it is a document anyone new to Python should read.

What have you done to improve performance? Personally I tend to use a unit test so I can setup a situation with a bunch of test data, and it will show me how long each option takes when I am trying to improve an algorithm.
The Five Smells of a Startup CEO
Web Metrics: Many ways to skin a cat
"e-mail from legitimate marketers"

Yeah, right...
Face value: Doing well by being rather nice
Hopefully not at the $15 bill valuation. Microsoft at least got an ad deal as part of the package.
Trying to warn people that an advert is showing up as a virus when you click on the link to this site. How that is worth negitive points I don't know?
Best billionaire name ever.
Rough seas nearly sink Facebook's Beacon
Is Software Too Soft?
Do interfaces offer too many degrees of freedom?
Everybody needs to read this article.
You think that liPFC is involved in gain? An alternative is cue specification, which is consistent not only with the work purportedly showing a gain-like function in liPFC, but also with other work suggesting a role for liPFC in episodic retrieval.

what's your venture to "find brains" btw?
I'm not sure if I agree with the article. More often than not an email is a way to communicate with a group of people so one must keep using reply all. I've had more problems with forgetting to CC someone or accidentally hitting reply instead of reply all than with sending am email to the whole team by accident.

Perhaps reply should always reply all, and the list of recipients should be more proeminent.
Perhaps
Google plans to bid on wireless spectrum
<q>You just participated.</q>

I did not realize this was an argument. I guess I lost.

Seriously, though, the most interesting arguments don't resolve for quite some time, if ever. For example, who was the winner in the infamous Torvalds v. Tanenbaum argument over monolithic versus micro-kernels? One could say that Torvalds "won," in the sense that Linux became far more successful than Minix. Yet, Windows and Mac OS are both based, in part, on a micro-kernel architecture, and both have a greater share of the market than Linux.
I'd like to see a scoring system that evaluates the discussion or thread as a whole, rather than the individual contributions; a metric like a signal-to-noise ratio, where a thread gets a higher score for being on-topic and relevant, or a lower score for degenerating into a pissing match.
Beacon led me to consider deleting my Facebook account (I wasn't using it much anyway). Then I realized there is no easy way to delete one's Facebook account (deactivating your account doesnt really do much).

I did manage to find a way to delete my account (a hack really and it took some Googling).
VCs: What's Your Failure Rate?
BCC is a solution from the originating end. Not hiring stupid people is a solution from the reply-all end.
This problem lessens significantly once you decide the difference between an "issue" and a "detail".
It depends on the venture capitalists themselves. Our start-up has little to no interference from our VCs. It feels very much the same as before we got funding, now we just get to keep working. But again, that only says something about our particular VCs.

If they allow you to keep working, I don't see how you can claim that "venture capital kills great ideas."
VC failure rates
There are a few data points missing from this analysis: like over what timeframe the 5x returns were realized:

I can get that over 20 years with an 8% return!
47 Tech Companies That Could Change the World
Why aren't you just pointing your submissions to what you're linking directly? It seems like that's the way hyperlinked posts ought to work.
Yeah, I've got to admit to being quite addicted. I like twitter and tumblr because they feel liberating in comparison to "blogging." I always felt like I had to craft and labor over what I want to say rather than just saying it. I'd rather spend my time hacking and then tweet or post a few thoughts or questions and move on. I'm a developer, not a journalist.
Steve Jobs and the squishy Macbook
Ask YC: Want to work for a startup that figured out how to win the lottery?
Are you looking for a fun job? A really, really fun job? The type of job where you sometimes think "I can't believe I'm getting paid for this?"

Well I've got one, and maybe you could get one too. I work for SeeMeWin Inc. and it is currently my job to recruit some more programmers for our team.

Imagine this could be your job. You come to our casual office in a great location in Cambridge(Kendall Square to be exact), and write cool web apps in PHP, Python or Rails that do things with databases and statistics. You help get our current product line off the ground and you can suggest new features/products which we can build. You get to work with a great team of hackers, marketers, and business folks. You get to work at a young company that will be written about in most news outlets. You'll be able to tell all your friends "I helped start that company", because we are definitely still in startup mode and you would still be eligible for the title of co-founder.

What is SeeMeWin? SeeMeWin is one of the most original startups to debut in a long time. We started by creating a live streaming show(think Justin.tv) where we planned to scratch lottery tickets 24/7 until we won a million dollars live. We were in a few papers like the Boston Herald & Cambridge Chronicle and were on NBC and WAAF as well. We scratched tens of thousands worth of tickets and made some decent ad revenue. But something cool happened when we were doing this. We found some really neat statistics. Perhaps we found out how to win the lottery at a profit. Perhaps we already won the lottery. Who knows? Anyway, regardless of our original plan of creating a TV show to occupy us until our real jobs/school started, we decided to turn SeeMeWin into a real company. Now we are SeeMeWin Inc. and have some angel cash.

That's a brief overview of the company. To learn a bit more about what we're up to, check out SeeMeWin.TV or SimScratch.com, or email me breck@seemewin.com.

Position: Developer. Full or part time. Students welcome to apply.

Requirements: Solid web app development experience(PHP/Python/Rails/MySQL/Linux/CSS/HTML/Javascript). Looking for a fun job. Live close to Cambridge or the T(telecommuting might be ok, MIGHT).

Compensation: You'll be compensated with stock options, a salary(if you are available full time) and very cool perks. If you need a place to stay, we've got that covered too.

If interested, email jobs@seemewin.com.

Please don't repost elsewhere, but feel free to forward to friends who might be interested. This isn't a job we're posting on the web, but we're big fans of HackerNews & YC so thought we'd share it here.

Fun fact: In 2006, Massachusetts residents spent $3.2 Billion on scratch tickets!
It was originally announced when they released 10,000 Days, but somehow got delayed until now (like 18 months), so the news on toolshed is quite old.

Here is the amazon link...
http://www.amazon.com/Vicarious-Tool/dp/B000Y1ZXU2/ref=pd_bb...
I love the first picture, with the glittering crystal tower behind razor-wire fence, under ominous sky...

Damn, now where'd I put those mirrorshades...
There was lots of similar complaining when Google started indexing usenet, the complaining will go away and it will be a very useful service soon enough.

Note on other past complaints: Facebook is open to all colleges; Facebook is open to all people; Facebook has news feed; Twitter encourages narcissism...
OK, I'm jealous. That place is a million times better than the beige hell I put up with 40 hours/week.

As much as I want to work for myself (and I am working on that), if I had to work for someone else and I had to go to their place to do it, that place seems pretty sweet.

Although, I'm sure you get used to it the longer you work there. Regardless of how nice the place looks, if the work is boring/crappy, you'll still hate going there and doing it.

That's not to say that workplace surroundings aren't meaningful; they most definitely are. If the work is fun and interesting, good working environments (they don't have to be as lavish as IAC) make it more fun and interesting.
Y Combinator Startup School Notelab 2006
I'm assuming; people have been using IRC bots for years.
I have always thought a 3d casino would be a 'winner'.

You could walk around the gaming tables and watch before deciding to take a seat, chat to people, etc, etc.
Doesn't this belong in the jobs section?
Would it be ethical for them to use this investment for the purposes of readjusting their valuation?
Hopefully they'll use a well-known bot name that can be easily kickbanned...
don't forget the free virtual drinks and suites for high rollers! :) That's a really good idea; thanks for sharing.
Ask YC: A way to make the world better
Did a guy here once said he had a lot of money and was willing to spend it in ways to make the world a better place and was asking for suggestions? Does anyone remember whom he was? Maybe he's still seeking? Well, here is a good project he might want to give a look:

http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/eco-friendly/cookin...
He seems to have a problem more with "Great job!" e-mails rather than Reply All.

Pretty vapid piece.
Yes but that's only for YC funded companies. I know a lot of people have requested the ability for non YC companies to post jobs there too. I think that would be a great feature, but it's up to PG I guess.
But at least you do get to learn how to run offensive plays while still learning volleyball.

Personally speaking, in my 5 years of college (Drexel University from 1996-2001), most classes were 80-100% theory and 0-20% programming. None of it was application-level programming until the Software Engineering track in senior year. And you didn't have to have a full working program to pass either; it was enough to just show you made an effort.

I'd rather see a university that promoted the idea of letting self-motivated students do their own thing instead of just turning education into a checklist of required classes and credits.
I like online shopping because I don't HAVE to browse, it's a benefit for me. I would say no.
Taking a lot of time and wasting time are not the same things.

All I'm saying is that blogging can take more time than it appears on the surface.
I can hear it now: "Great article! I'm forwarding it to everyone in the office!"
Why the emphasis on bash?
Addicting (online) Number Puzzle