skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like you have had some poor experiences with it. I wonder if all your at office experiences have been expedient and not slowed down in any way or is there some bias there? Sounds also like there is some grudging that you have to commute...

The question is, if a company is able to pull off 'remotes' do you think this is a competitive advantage since coordinating this seems to be so hard for some companies? Is it a survival mechanism for companies that might not otherwise be able to happen locally?

Is a company like 37signals, stackoverflow early or others possible in an office or did they succeed longer because they were remote? How has all the research been done across the world and across oceans? What about multiple offices, does remote communication suck that way as well? Is everything done in your office or are there some outsourced parts?

Remote skills and virtual communication are a requirement today, companies unable to do this are missing out on competitive advantages. Companies that can perform well remotely also look at external factors more I have found, offices get an internal sickness. I think a mix is probably best but a company must be able to operate remote I believe today. Companies that can't write/read/coordinate enough to remote probably can't coordinate customer communication as well either (who are all remote in many cases), it is an organization culture thing. In the end how many times and people at your office do you actually need to meet up with on a daily basis? Driving 1 hour both ways for 15 minutes of face time sometimes.

All this means for Yahoo is they are going to miss out on workers and engineers located outside of SF or a 'remote' office, the bet is being in the same place will beat out the pool of developers farther than 100 miles from a Yahoo office. And it sucks when that good engineer or employee has to move that you've invested in and knows or built successful products in the office...
Could it be because 2/3rds of their employees work in the retail channel?
My bet would be that it's because the URL doesn't end in '.pdf'.
It might have been about older adults, but that doesn't mean their target demographic is older adults.
> 1. Probably 75% of new startups are using rails, and rightly so. You'd need a good reason not to use it. "Rusty slow legacy systems" - what nonsense.

75%? Evidence? You are the one who is talking nonsense, sorry to be direct and getting on Reddit level but you started.

> 2. If there was a better language, they'd probably learn it? Or are you trying to insinuate Ruby programmers are dumb/lazy?

Do I really have to tell you? Instead of doing some research Rubyists still defend their old tech (like you do now).

> 3. If you are blaming your slow web page on Ruby, you're doing it wrong.

Yes you are right, and now get back in your comfort zone and code some slow web services.
Have you seen this? http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_tro...
My company runs some of the retargeting campaigns for New Relic. I just checked our setup and they're definitely excluding people who have converted or become customers already. New Relic works with a few providers though so it's very probably one of them is machine-gunning all visitors with ads.
1.8 Gpixel sensors don't exist, due to physics. It's combining 368 sensors.

No one stores or transmits uncompressed video outside of RAM. 15Mbps is decent for 1080p24, so 1.8 Gpixel 24fps would be decent at 15Gbps. Assuming say 14 hours of daylight (drones can't stay up indefinitely and night vision has different requirements), that's no more than ~100 TB per mission or day. As for getting the data out, I'd assume they swap an array of 50 HDs or so.
Assuming you can code, you have internet access and you'll have some spare time. Especially in software, those three could make up for the lack of money!

VC backing is nice but not a bliss on all sides. In your situation, without VC funding, you'd keep your freedom, you'd not be distracted by money, you can't run out of money and your strongest asset can't go anywhere, cause that is yourself.

With respect to the latter, this means that it is wise to foster this one asset: improve your tech skills, market knowledge, business skills and your network (and networking skills). If you're someone dreaming of your company you'll find this fun to work on.

Having a fulltime job that helps you improve relevant skills is a plus, as is a job / boss where you could reduce working hours (and salary of course) in small steps.

There's a few ways to go from here. You could work per hour. The cool part is that this would enable you to free yourself from your daytime job bit by bit. The downside is that it requires work. As you describe it, this is limited in your area, but perhaps you should do a more in depth market analysis to be sure? Also, you could work for people remotely via the internet, there are many websites that bring work and workers together. Whether this can help you will depend a bit on what country you live in, and how your monthly wage is compared to that in other countries.

The other option is to bootstrap your own product. Read Tim Ferris' 4 hour workweek for inspiration. This depends on a good idea, a bit of luck, how you execute it and your patience. You can balance your webdesign skills a bit by using tools like 'Bootstrap'. Don't worry too much about this part if you are building your own product, look at Reddit, Amazon, Hackers News: the relation between use and looks is pretty noisy!

It is not impossible and bootstrapping has been preferred by many over VC money. Given your personal situation, you do need a lot of patience and put in a lot of time and effort. But as long as you learn from it, and enjoy it, it is all worth it.

Good luck!
Yeah valid criticism. The biggest issue is that the HTML for HN is almost devoid of any semantic markup. This means I’m reliant on a little bit of JS to differentiate between different pages in order to achieve the desired look.
Ecommerce is a slog -- what's your angle?
> Some people SWEAR by one of the two, and refuse to use the other

Meh, I use Ruby for most of my work (day and side projects) but have nothing against Python. If I was writing a script for something on the OS I'd probably use Python.

Some people just really want to feel part of a group, I guess, and publicly dissing "the other" makes them feel more included in that group, or something. As for me, I like to feel like part of a group too, but it's a more inclusive "programming" group, rather than focussing on any one particular toolchain.
Utter bullshit. You've not heard of Skype?

I am a remote worker, and routinely help coworkers with all shirts of stuff. It works best when everyone's remote.
Great points. Speed and newness are paramount!

This is exactly why the most accomplished hackers write their web apps in SSE4.2 machine code.
"Is there still a place for single-person bootstrapped company which cannot afford to spend money or time on anything, but the product itself?"

If you have time to spend on the product then you also have time to spend on the research, the marketing, the promotion, and the interaction with your customers.

A business isn't purely about the product - there is so much more you have to do to make it successful.
Yes, there are performance increases. Sasada-san gave a good talk at RubyConf this year on 2.0.0's internals and performance enhancements: http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1272-rubyconf2012-implementa...
HFS hard links don't even work readonly on Linux but are used extensively in Time Machine backups, so there is at least one common use case of HFS partitions that isn't cross platform.
I experienced it once, while flying back to Brazil from London using British Airways. They fucked up so badly, they were asking for volunteers the first day (I volunteered, got paid £450 + hotel, a sweet deal if you ask me), and then again next day. I've seen it happen again on a trip from Buenos Aires to SF.

I think this phenomenon is probably more noticeable in infrequent (daily or so) 'important' (read: long and expensive) flights people are unlikely to forget about or cancel at the last minute.
The Freecycle Network - changing the world one gift at a time
Even worse (and especially in LA) some people are completely friendly until you're not around.
> 75%? Evidence?

None really, just the startups at an incubator-type place near me. Might not be 75% but it's certainly a big chunk and probably the majority.
Do you study on them? I tend to look back and forth a lot when studying and books are unbeatable in this regard. You can use your fingers as bookmarks while looking at the contents. Compared to e-readers or browsing this is unbeatable (although browsing tries to get there).

You get a real sense of where the content is by the thickness of the papers. You don't have that with a browser.
This will just lead to low wage workers in some third world country being hired to flip pages on huge racks of Kindles.

The thing is - popularity is a stupid metrics to use for picking reading material (or almost anything else). There's a small number of people I respect enough to read anything they recommend, but I'm not going to read something just because lots of random people choose to read it.
I guess it's just personal preference but Java has always been my favorite. I don't need a fancy design and word clouds etc. Furthermore, the Java documentation has a very high level of completeness, consistency, and all-around quality.
That actually might be it. Very interesting. Thank you!

(Makes me think of Scheme/Clisp too)
I know that's what the OP meant and I agree with what she's saying. I was just translating what http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5273223 was saying to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5273250
> It's nothing but flame bait

Why? I am damn serious about every point: Ruby/its entire ecosystem/Rails/DHH is outdated/becoming obsolete/so 2005.
Ah, the power of fame. Implementations spreading like weeds. Four already in javascript, even though the spec is not anywhere near finished:

npm search toml
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/-/all/since?stale=update_after&startkey=1361700343737
npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/-/all/since?stale=update_after&startkey=1361700343737
NAME DESCRIPTION AUTHOR DATE
node-toml TOML parser =ricardobeat 2013-02-24 10:08
toml TOML parser for Node.js =binarymuse 2013-02-24 04:19 toml parser
toml-node TOML ==== =thehydroimpulse 2013-02-24 08:01
toml-parser A TOML parser for node.js =aaronblohowiak 2013-02-24 06:41
How I Learned the Basics of UX for My Startup
Show HN: Simple Angular Tabs With History
Is that actually true that PHP is slower? Say something like Symphony2 vs rails for a reasonably complicated app. Is there much out there in terms of benchmarks?

(I think we are both coming from that it really doesn't matter most of the time side but would be interesting to know if PHP is actually slower).
Calculating Lifetime Customer Value (LCV)
It is one of the most active eco-system out there, and gems are a breeze to install.

Ruby itself is quite flexible and easy to use although it does have quirks.

But yes, ruby is hellishly slow. I have not enough experience to speak about the legacy systems, though it would interest me to know about that. You do hear a lot of stories about switching from Ruby to Scala/Java/Clojure.
And then then the fast lanugage implements caching.. Your first point is valid
i can understand why people hate walled gardens. An open sw/hw system would have meant growth opportunities for more people and companies rather than just apple. We have a little bit more open system with android but with all the locked bootloaders on android devices we could do better.
The article attempts to explain "why not".

Here is the TLDR as I see it: If you insist of hiring over-qualified people, they are more likely to jump-ship as soon as something better comes along - staff turnover is a major issue.
People with degrees will expect to be paid more and will generally be less satisfied with a job for which they are overqualified. This will push morale down and create lots of turnover.
So no evidence whatsoever.

No java, JavaScript, python, php, perl, c++, c#, erlang?
Why do you say that it doesn't fit computing? Perhaps I'm not very OCD, but I don't see why you always need to see the whole window of an app to work efficiently.

But that's just me, even if you prefer tiling windows, you can have many more configurations than the split screen.
And there's an implicit expectation that JavaScript is somehow related to Java.
Wrote my own dumb parser in CoffeeScript as an experiment, tried to publish as `toml-parser` :D

https://github.com/ricardobeat/toml/blob/master/index.coffee
> Back then LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress allowed people to blog. But I had to remember your blog address, you had to remember mine and we had to check in on each others blogs from time to time to see if there are any new updates, and blogging was a painfull process of jotting down big posts.

Even had you not discovered feed readers, surely you must have noticed that LiveJournal had friends pages?
Repeating "x is so 2005" is not a discussion point.

Your original post, and every one since (including the multiple sets of edits you apply to each), consist of nothing but a daisy chain of mud slinging and ad-hominem attacks directed at other commenters.

You're a troll, plain and simple. Sorry for feeding you, but I simply think it's sad this unproductive rant has completely derailed the entire discussion here.
Overall, a good feature set. I only see some utility for keyword arguments, admittedly, but I tend to write very functional code, so maybe other people will get more mileage.

Refinements, as I understand them, are a bad idea.

I understand the motivation, but this is not the way to go about it. There's now a new scope all over the place (the set of refinements applied to any given class). This means that the behavior of any given class now can depend heavily on context.

This makes optimization a bitch, for the same reason that it makes programming a bitch. I can now have two Strings, one Refined by ActiveRecord, the other Refined by Sequel, which expose a different set of incompatible methods.
I use Ruby some, but I'm not sure I'd describe it as clean exactly. I've used Python a bit recently and was struck by just how clean it seemed. (I'm not sure Python has anything that quite replaces blocks, though. I don't claim Python's all better than Ruby.)
I think asking the question why people use it is a good topic, it could have been asked in a better way
Nine of which were brought by the company that is currently threatening OP. I would be a little worried.
How To Get Top Engineers To Open Your Email Then Join Your Company
Awesome idea ;-)
I ran into yet another consequence of this situation today: In a Linux/Windows setup, I lost two hours of minor Photoshop work (i.e. stuff that was simple but annoying to recreate).

I have generally found it safe to read from my NTFS drives in Linux (I avoid writing if at all possible). This time, however, when I went to load the result of my work back in Linux, it could not read the folder (Thunar reported some generic IO error). Going back into Windows to investigate, Window's opinion was "It smells like Linux has been here! I can't STAND that guy or anything he touches, so I burned the folder just to be safe. You can thank me later."

As best I can tell, it had something to do with a combination of:

1. Windows Update needing to do things upon shutdown and startup, but then not booting back into it for a month.

2. Linux having been in hibernation rather than halted. Might have had some access bit set on the NTFS drive when it hibernated? I don't actually have the domain knowledge to claim that is what might happen, so it's a complete hunch.

This was really just a rant to get out the anger at lost work. This article was quite timely, and while I'm not glad to see people share my pain (because it's still pain in the end), I hope we one day see improvements.
When two things are very similar, people tend to develop stronger feelings about the differences that remain.

I once discussed the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other -- like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of "the narcissism of minor differences", a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier. -- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

http://www.historyguide.org/europe/freud_discontents.html

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_bias
This is great if you're happy to forego all social activity outside professional/academic endeavors...
Hum. That rant goes against F# itself, not against the book, notably the less than stellar support for GUIs. The book itself is fine, albeit a little bit expensive. The criticism of this review, as well as the optimism expressed by the blog post both miss the wood for the trees: F# will never outshine c# or VB.net in areas where tooling matters more than the language itself. It is tremendously useful for developing libraries and services to be glued together by c#.
1.9 was not supposed to be a wide release, and it contained more breaking changes than 2.0, IIRC.
And you backed it up with no facts what so ever.
This decision alone won't save Yahoo!, I think the problems are a lot deeper than this.

The return on remote work is dependent on two things: the right people getting hired, and the managers making sure that work is being produced. Anyone left to their own devices is going to slack, unless they are invested emotionally in the job.

There's an old saying: Inspect what you expect. It holds true for office workers and remote workers. Both have the potential to slack or produce. The person in charge needs to measure what each person is producing, and perhaps Yahoo! is lacking a way to measure that right now.
Firstly (Disclaimer) I am a Rails developer, I choose to be one right now, until (if) I find that my efforts are better spent elsewhere.

I agree with tferris to some extent. Those arguments are nonsensical to say the least.

This might be a feeling, I am not one to shout random feeling-based percentages, but I feel that people, in general, not just HN, don't realise that you can just claim things in this way. 75%? Where does that come from?

Also, the second argument is complete rubbish. By this logic anything that the masses do is better? So Earth was flat at some point in time? And yes, I think that people ARE lazy, as we should be, why use a framework otherwise? But some people are just stuck in the before mentioned comfort zone. Evidence is the popularity of Rails clones in PHP (or at least attempts at). Why not just learn Ruby and use Rails? => Fear of learning new programming languages and being new at something?

Third argument is right to a certain extent. If you need to invest a lot of trouble to make some slow code (which Ruby tends to be) faster, at what point do you choose to just use something faster? Where is the line; break even point?

I use Ruby at the moment too, but you have to remain critical and even more so, you need to reflect on your own ways of reasoning.
Perhaps student debt feels good for employers because desperate graduates will accept any kind of treatment?

Please correct me if I'm beside the mark.
Dalek designer Ray Cusick passes away aged 84
Should we learn some 'new' and 'fast' language, then code slow service?
Stolen from: http://www.fefe.de/c++/
The language does not implement caching. Your application architecture needs to take server caching into account.

And in my experience, devs who focus so much on the "fast language" part, do so, because they don't actually know much about caching. And no, this statement is not universally qualified.
and the binary packaging format

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel/
I dont know about that 75%. Considering that more and more people are using Nodejs.
Just take a look at some of the companies using Express.
http://expressjs.com/applications.html
It's not about faux outrage. It's about workplace trends. Large companies have a tendency to follow what other large companies do. This isn't about the decision of one company, it's about the mindset of our industry.
I have quite a bit of Ruby for the server-side. But on the client-side I've been using Dart instead.

While Dart could be good for the server-side too, as it's VM will be as fast as any other dynamic language VM out there and the language is still quite cool, on the server-side we get to choose the tools more freely so there are many options.

Then again, why would people use Dart or Ruby on the server-side if they could use Go instead?

Go and languages like it are more lower level and sometimes more demanding, making mixing and matching while programming harder.

Mixing and matching is a way of programming for today rather than for the future. Say, dealing with the issues as they present themselves rather than trying to go around them. Say, dealing with the UI as they are popular rather than doing things in an unusual way while trying to guess the future.

I really liked watching an Intel guy say that if your approach to parallelism isn't about sharing the load to over a hundred threads, then forget about guessing the future.

For now as in the past, people have been successfully using threads for doing what they were originally meant for as Guido Van Rossum explained in a recent video. Threads were meant for concurrent I/O work. Now people want to push them to doing more parallelism. Not sure how we are going to get there.

Because like supporting many GUI front-ends has taught us, getting the most out of GUI often means that you need to target them on a one-to-one basis. Creating programs that support 1 thread or 100 threads from the same codebase will be quite a challenge going forward. Because if you want most performance from just 1 thread, it could be that the program needed to be written one way. Whereas to make it better for 100+ threads, it could need to be written a different way.

So, why would people write Ruby? Because it works. The Internet is unreliable anyways. Depending on a central server is too all-eggs-in-the-same-basket for the Internet.

Also Ruby is getting more stable. Depending on new tech can lead you to unstable nightmares.

If you were worried about bigger codebases and still wanted a language like Ruby, I'd first recommend Dart than Go. But for its current stability concerns. It will hit 1.0 soon though.
Cleanliness is subjective, but:

* Everything is an object, without exception.

* The object model is pleasingly orthogonal and its behaviour is easy to understand and predict once you know how it works.

* The syntax is high on alphanumerics and low on punctuation.

* Most of the core library method names strike a good balance between brevity and clarity.

* `Enumerable` is simple and powerful.