skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like you've run into limitations in the frameworks you've used, not in the MVC pattern itself. In ErlyWeb (which I created, so I'm biased -- but not too biased), components are implmeneted by a controller module and a view module. Any component can include any other component. The controller decides which subcomponents to include, and the view decides where to put them after they've been rendered. This design makes it natural to separate a page into different controllers + views that can be reused in other pages. It also maintains the MVC philosophy that the controller should decide what should be rendered, and the view should decide how to render it.

MVC is an elegant design pattern, but I think an MVC framework must provide a simple way for components to include other components. Otherwise, I can see why you would find it frustrating that your main controller has to do all the work.
cool with me
There are other pieces of this puzzle besides before_filter.

In Rails, you don't necessarily have to have a monolithic view. On more complex sites, you use fragments, called partials. Sidebars can be easily created by having a "shared" view directory full of partials. Further, there is a content_for helper in Rails views. Views render late; you can set an instance variable in the subviews that will affect what gets rendered in the layout. Trying to keep track of that can get hairy, so content_for abstracts that for you. Combined with the partials and the before_filter in the controllers, you can get a view to produce a number of things without having to resort to pulling DB info inside the views -- that reminds me too much of the bad old days of PHP.

In the logged-in users example, in what is normally in the sidebar, you use a render :partial => 'shared/users' if @users; then add a before_filter in the site-wide application layout to pull in the data if someone is logged in. A more complicated example is to render a "sidebar" partial, which renders more partials depending on some array of sidebars you want to display ... then use a before_filter to figure out what you want to populate the sidebars with. Any controller or actions can override or add to that sidebar array.

The main thing that sucks about this kind of organization is having the code scattered in a number of different files. This is where using an editor that knows the relationship between the files is important -- you can hit some key combination and jump between the different fragments without having to hunt them down in the file browser.
http://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Vms-Unsupported-Undo...
> Perhaps

No, the title is misleading. It was misleading on reddit too.

> ... because I can't manually destroy objects.

I'm not sure about Java, but if it's similar to C# then you can manually destroy objects. When they get "officially" removed from memory is up to the garbage collector (that is, when more memory space is needed).
Paul Buchheit: We all have tunnel vision
You can de facto enforce anything by getting an injunction of a product release. The company starting the lawsuit might lose and pay for it, but the startup could be killed by a delay in release, legal fees, and investors backing off from a risky setup.
And if you call right now with the ANTS Profiler you'll get not just ONE license, but TWO licenses for 5 easy payments of $59.95. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!! We'll throw in this FREE Profiler coffee mug, absolutely free! Operators are standing by!
Ning - anyone have any experience hacking it up?
I'm looking into hacking up a Ning network. Since it is an OpenSocial container that looks to be pretty customizable, I don't think it would be too difficult.

Has anyone else had any dealing with Ning?
How to Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week
Google Trends Reveals People's Predictability
Ian I thought you said 27th in your email?
27th is better than 30th for me.
I agree with you about the TDD presentations. They usually show exactly the trivial cases that could just as well be proved. But at the end of the day the question is which camp has empirical proof of being able to improve software quality in real world projects. My feeling is that the "correctness proof" camp doesn't have much to show in terms of progress recently. What we're seeing instead is a useless proxy fight between dynamic typing versus static typing proponents about stuff that can just as easily proved as it can be tested.
I said "perhaps" because while it might be misleading in the sense that this isn't some discovered memory leak in the C# language, it is an example of how programming mistakes in garbage collected languages can still lead to "memory leaks". To be more specific, memory that you intended to be freed and made available was not. You can argue about the semantics, but I think the intent of saying memory leak is clear here in the context of the article.
Herb Schildt's "The Complete Reference: C++"
Oh please, we're all whores. This story would only be spam if it were contrived to sell more ANTS software.
7 Steps to Design a Kickass Web App
Justin.TV - live tech talks
I wasn't arguing about the term "memory leak", but the misleading title's implication that it's a design flaw in the C# specification (or, for that matter, Microsoft's or Mono's implementation). It's not. It's a memory leak due to the programmers error.
"The view CAN do the work of determining what will be shown"

1) In Django the controller is called the view and the view is called the template, same principle but unless you want to get confused you should think of it as MTV == MVC (if you want to equate the two, Django seems to be perfectly happy making up its own interpretation of MVC for no apparent reason). Really the controller (in the MVC sense) is doing the work here.
I agree that this particular argument is pretty pointless, and I even believe that there are plenty of examples of people programming with TDD and having great results.

My only problem with the TDD paradigm is that it doesn't work with the way I think about software. It isn't so much about having a formal correctness proof, but when I'm writing code, its incredibly more valuable to me to think it through, reason about the various inputs and outputs, and convince myself that it is a correct solution. And although I usually don't, I see the value in writing tests to verify some of the assumptions you made. I don't, however, see the logic in starting from a set of tests (especially ones that can't possibly know about the specific "pressure points" of the code you will eventually write) and then deriving the solution. But that's just me, and as they say, different strokes...
And I wasn't arguing that the title wasn't misleading. Just that while it may be slightly misleading, the article itself clearly puts it in context.

perhaps: "used to express reluctant or qualified agreement or acceptance."
Should Steven Wolfram be envied?
Sure, you may think his New Kind of Science is useless. But he is rich and can do whatever research he likes -- it doesn't matter what others think.

And it's obvious that he is having fun in the process.

Isn't that something to be envied?
Sure you could simulate one particular order of things, but if you do that you no longer need tests because you're close to a proof anyway. Tracking down the order of things that causes a problem is debugging, not testing, in my view.
In 1997, getting my first HTML lessons using an illustrated guide.

The moment when I typed something in notepad and it opened in IE I was running all over the house screaming "IT WORKED!."
Also, its worth noting that you can not reclaim the memory of an object in Java, C# (http://blogs.msdn.com/clyon/archive/2004/09/21/232445.aspx), or any other garbage collected language. If you could, you would no longer have managed code. What you may be able to do in some languages is say "hey GC, I've got this object, I know its got no references, verify that and free the space now please". You can't do this in Java (or C# so far as I know). This is what I meant when I said destroy.

Why might someone need that level of control? Well in an ideal world you would not, but in reality (at least in Java), GC is highly JVM dependent, and on the JVM I use (and probably most if not all of them) GC makes no guarantee that objects available for collection will actually be collected. The OS X JVM in particular is pretty bad here (again, I'm guessing others are too), when you run out of memory, it doesn't even try to GC. Even if you call System.gc() you might not get any space reclaimed. Its ridiculous, but lots of people actually have a method that is basically "System.reallyGC()" which loops a whole bunch of times on System.gc() calls until it either gives up or reclaims some percentage of memory.
I'm out of the UK until the new year but after that I would love to meet up to talk to entrepreneurs and ideally lisp hackers.

I should be in the north, but due to the dearth of lisp hackers around I'll gladly travel for a little lisp based cognition.
Firefox lets you see your saved passwords. Poke around your preferences.
23andMe must be paying out the nose for PR. There are at least 2 other well-funded companies in this space, and I don't see those folks getting features in the New York Times....
Could you / do you use memory (object) pools? It's crazy to put C++ techniques on top of Java which is supposed to take all that off your hands but, as you say, 'in the real world'...
> They are counting on you...

More often than not, they're counting on a risk-taker to try and bring financial stability to the household, as well. If you are spending so much time away from your family that it's wrecking your family, there's a problem. But there are plenty of ineffectual workaholics that do the same thing for some overlord's profit.

If you're going to sacrifice something as valuable as time with your family, it better be for a good reason. Chalk up another benefit for making these choices concrete.
At the risk of sounding like an old prude, I'm not crazy about dragging somebody out by name and then everybody gathering around and critiquing his life. Seems a little perverse to me. Perhaps asking about his work, the general lifestyle, or his theories might be a little more fertile ground? Instead of asking opinions about the man himself. I mean really, who the heck really knows Wolfram here? He's just some guy we read about in the media.

Having said that, I'm glad to offer positive feedback about what I know about him. I can certainly admit that I envy his lifestyle of setting up a company and then pursuing science with the resources available. I'm a big fan of NKS and the computational universe. But heck if I can understand it all. I admire it the way I would a great painting -- it's obviously the work of a master, and whether it's expressionist or impressionistic I have no idea. He's a interesting and unusual person. It'd be cool to have a beer with him and discuss The Matrix.
Did you mean to say should Steven Wolfram be admired? Envy is never fun.
We're VC funded startup with a strong team looking to add a capable developer. RoR, C++, and math skills a plus. Contact jobs { AT } somethingsimpler { DOT } com.
Sorry Vikram, that was a mistake. Let's wait and see who can make it on the 30th.
Sorry I think its just the wording that is confusing here.

The controller is doing the work to determine what will be shown, yes. I meant once the controller determines which view should be used, the view then can manage the specific data being shown.

Django does separate the view into a 'view' and a 'template'. One does your work, and the other does the displaying.
http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

"The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
At the risk of sounding like an old prude, I'm not crazy about dragging somebody out by name and then everybody gathering around and critiquing his life.

I don't know about that. I think it would be a neat idea for a startup.
This just depends on your personality. Some people envy while others admire.
changd.com - track changes in your life
I bought this domain (along with .net .info .us and .biz) to build a nice web 2.0 application. My idea about the app was to keep the world updated about changes in your life.

Keep your friends and family updated when:
- your phone number is changed
- your e-mail is changed
- you change your job
- your house address is changed
- getting married
- you become a father
... just about any change in your life.

You can tag all your changes. Changes can either be 'permanent' or 'transitory'. If one of your tag is 'life', it could contain changes like Birth, Growing up, School, College, Girlfriend, Marriage, Kids, etc..

You can see your life's timeline in a time machine (like in Leopard). You can even attach pictures to changes.

Secondary uses include broadcasting these changes using various modes like SMS or email, set reminders, et al.

I started building the app but I haven't been able to complete it. I don't have enough resources to complete it. I am willing to sell the idea along with all these domains. Any ideas how I can go forward? Or is the just plain stupid?
fun tool
I had a similar reaction. I think a lot of people did. One should never underestimate the power of (a) making it easy for people to get a hello world running, and (b) view->source.
Update On AdultFriendFinder Acquisition - Penthouse May Be The Buyer
Truth to be said, the title comes from slashdot, but hey guys, why argue about the title when the content is cool? I enjoyed the article and just for the record, I did understand the problem was a user memory leak and not something to do with C#.
Sounds good to me. Would be great to meet some like minded hackers.
You mention resources. What resources do you need? And where are you based?
Amazing anticipation of the web from 1934
i like the idea a lot, especially if you can incorporate it into fb or opensocial (preferably both).

i dont know how much luck you'd have selling it in its current condition. it's a good idea! run with it!
Critique our new website: Gatherama.com
We're planning to launch in December. Looking for some feedback before launching.
About line numbers -- the people of TYPO3 did add them to their branch (though they made a bit of a mess in the process), and it seems most other in-browser code-editors support them, but I've never really seen their utility. Something like a status bar showing the current line would be just as useful, less wasteful of screen space, and addable as a wrapper to the current editor. I designed the thing to be a 'component' that can be put into all kinds of systems, rather than a full-blown IDE.
I'm closing my browser right now :)
We're planning to launch in December. Looking for some feedback before launching.
What makes a startup sexy and successful? 5 points.
cool, what do you hack in lisp? i enjoy how ruby and js also support cps/map+fold/bottom-up library design; do you do haskell too?
Version 3 was great.
I'm going to say GoF. Flame me.

Also "Learn Java" (1996) and "Enterprise Java Beans" (2000).
We use a lot of thread local pools so that we never allocate new objects. We generally have a fixed number of long lived threads, so this works out pretty well.
There's a good ASP.Net implementation _anywhere_?
Mathematical Curiosities in Futurama
Just use News.YC, now with Noprocrast.
The majority of this article would more aptly be titled "Why you shouldn't go to law school if the only reason you wanted to was for the money", and most of the same arguments would have been perfectly valid 10 years ago when everyone was trying to get a degree in CS because it was the next big thing. That says almost nothing, in my opinion, about law school in its own right.

As far as the rest of the article is concerned, it is a collection of generalizations that are unconvincing. The best thing to takeaway, I think, is this:

"As I said, there are some people who are happy with the practice of law. But the data are [sic] not in your favor. Make this decision very carefully. Don't just drift into it because you're not sure what else to do with a humanities degree."
That's a god damn memory leak. What the hell.
Thats one of the really interesting things about the OLPC - most of the programs are written in Python, and it has a 'source' button on the keyboard, so users can view and modify stuff [http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/keyboard/children_view_sour...]

I had that same experience with HTML, I'm sure if I could've viewed source on a load of decent Python programs I would've gone nuts for it as a kid. A hell of an improvement to feeding a book full of BASIC into a C64. If the rest goes to plan, there'll be a lot of handy hackers around in a few years.
Test your web design in different browsers
> you can not reclaim the memory of an object in Java, C#, or any other garbage collected language.

That's just not true. Python currently doesn't return memory from space allocated to primitive types but there's a branch that I'm using that will do that too which will be merged to that main soon. That's a pretty broad statement you're making.
I think Steven Wolfram is one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of our time; I admire him for that.
I just found out yesterday that I failed the bar exam. This was, surprisingly, a great post. Thank you drm237.
Ask YC: Should Fridays and Saturday nights matter to a young hacker?
Last night I spent from 10pm to 7am this morning hacking at the school science building.This his slowly now started to become a not so unusual occurence for me since dropping out of college in the middle of the semester to work on my startup project.

I've come to accept this as a new lifestyle and a necessary exchange of time if I'm to be successful in a highly competitive internet startup scene.

Yet I can't help but hear that little man in the back of my head every once in a while saying "your young and your being dumb, you should be out having some fun".
I modded you up. There probably is a great little startup idea in taking famous people and trashing them in new and interesting ways. Not sure if it fits the board, but then again, you didn't ask about the startup potential originally. Great follow-up comment.
Totally agree - its not cheap like good old Rusholme or some Brummie establishments, but still a great feast...
Can't believe it - UK based hackers who love curry, love it.. in the words of Highlander, "We are brothers!"
Everyone should swap Control and Caps Lock. Caps Lock is a useless key taking up prime real estate.
I won't turn it on for fear I will just waste time finding a workaround.
Is it an aggregator for all online content a person browses?
What materials are those arrays built out of? Do they require any special (laser trimmed) components? Special lithography? I smell an industry ripe to be commoditized by a startup.
IMHO it's all about the correct balance. If you want to succeed at anything in life you need to balance your leisure and your work. Too much work will consume you as a person, ruin any relationship and get you emotionally unbalanced. Not working and having way too much fun will ruin your economy, your health and your work. Try to have at least a little bit of fun. Sometimes you need to chill out if you want to focus on something. Don't try to focus it as two different things, they are both connected and part of the same cycle.
PS: Don't drink too much tonight ;)
A part of me wants to scold you that you need to balance your leisure and work, but I totally understand how one can be consumed by his work and vision. I have the same problem :)

But I usually find that a few hours in the "middle" of the work night spent socially with friends or in a club do wonders to my concentration afterwards.

And even more important we need to get our heads out of the fox holes once in a while otherwise we lose a lot of our creativity and very few things are more important in this field.
I've never wanted a down button before.
i'd really really like to attend but am away that weekend
one way to avoid this is deliberately trying to find non-corroborative evidence for every idea/opinion you form.

it's talked about in the Black Swan and is surprisingly difficult to do.
pg on Symbolics
Canada Worse than 3rd World Countries when it comes to Mobile Data Access
I can't speak for you, but I find that working crazy hours is a big waste of time in the long run. My health, happiness and mental soundness all deteriorate due to a screwed up sleep schedule and lack of socialization. Aside from the long-term consequences to body and mind, all this deterioration adversely affects the quality of my work. I spend a lot more time chasing dead ends when my life is out of whack. So take a break, have a drink with friends, maybe even get laid. Your project will thank you later.
Anyone who speaks Spanish have time to translate the Spanish parts? Google was no help.
Upon further review, surfer's new Theory of Everything severely deficient
Some valuable information there, especially point number three:

3. a startup should be useful

Many of you have asked my how to launch a startup. This topic has been covered many times already, but there are 5 points that I would like to underline.
Firefox 3.0: 11,000 Bugs Fixed, and Counting
The god of small things - Hawking bets that Higgs particle will never be found
The hack of the year - TOR operator sniffs everything passing through - publishes hundreds of passwords online - gets arrested
Works great for me. See you then Ian!
yeah have fun, go out party, meet some partners, and take off some of that insane workload.
funny he says yahoo's idea was original the word yahoo is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"
Adding Math to List of Security Threats - Adi Shamir (S in RSA) discovers a new bug
Amazing crow intelligence (vid)
When you are young you have time so you should go ahead and work away. Don't eat too much fast food or drink too much soda though.
I actually have no idea what "non-corroborative evidence for an idea" means. Does that mean try to prove yourself wrong? Or to try to find evidence for the idea that, due to its difference from your original evidence, doesn't actually corroborate? Or ...?
Now that Safari also has a MS version you can test your website in all browsers pretty easily.
it's always been super important for us to take at least one day and night a weekend off, except in special "crunch time" occasions. otherwise, the weeks seem to blur together. we also take our weekends very seriously, as it's a good time to let loose after a hard week of working.
Rules I wish I had followed when I was 20(-ish):

1) Listen to the little voice. If he wants to be doing something else, so do you. You can only ignore him for so long.

2) When you can't do #1, make sure that you're doing something valuable. Don't squander your precious youthful enthusiasm on non-productive crap.

3) If you're prone to overwork, make your social life a priority. Never turn down a social invitation, unless you have a life-changing reason not to (your computer will be there when you return).
In Korea, a Boot Camp Cure for Web Obsession
And exercise 4x a week with good sleep every night. Even better if you work with friends.
Interview with John Carmack, about Id Mobile
1978 Guerin's, Vaschalde's and Warusfel's "Le calculateur programmable de poche" (in French, translated: "The Programmable Pocket Calculator"). A translated excerpt: "... we can imagine that [in the future] programmable calculators will be branched through the telephone network to central computers that hold massive amounts of data. "
Researchers use robotic cockroaches to control swarm behaviour
Just give audience to, or work very hard to find contrary evidence for, a concept you hold as true.
What a Microblog service financial model might look like
I see no reason to miss out on two perfectly fine nights to get work done. Of course those nights matter to a hacker.
Very interesting!! Read also: http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theor... (linked in the article)