skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just like mvleming, I use a bilateral personal audio cable that jacks into my processors directly.

There are two major things wrong with the post:

1) "Nobody else can hear it" - Well, no, when I was listening to music with my hearing aids (Before I got my implants), well, even the best seal on 130db music can't prevent some of it leaking out of your ear and annoying your coworkers.

2) Induction loops are extremely prone to interference. There are many buildings in which Telecoil mode gets you really raw static noise. On airplanes, it's intolerably loud - you can't use induction loops on airplanes. At all.
Learning Rails now is the equivalent of starting to watch Coronation Street (British Soap) last week (The show has been running since 1960).

I agree that it is incredibly difficult to get up and running on Rails. Efforts are under way to get one click installs working so that you can get working in no time at all but these all take time and money to develop.

Just because a software engineer completed a college course does not mean they have finished learning, they're just beginning. That's why I love this profession, there is always something else to learn and apply.

Stick at it, you've learned a lot, BUT there's ALWAYS going to be a lot more to learn no matter the domain.
You're whining pussy.
Learning any web application framework involves.... sorry for saying that... learning.
I too have experienced frustration at a lot of what the author gripes about here. Most of them aren't specific to Rails, but there's enough that are to make it overwhelming for newcomers. The barrier to entry has become rather high.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Will.I.Am Encourage Students to Code
I'm not sure which is worse, that people read this and upvoted it, or that they didn't read it and upvoted it.

Disclaimer: not a Rails dev or even a fan, but still the Rails hate is going a little overboard.
I'd think learning it on your own would be harder than in a college course.
Sounds like he's ranting about the difference between using Rails and really mastering Rails.
I have two spare tickets to Launch Festival
I have two spare tickets to Launch Festival in San Francisco, March 4-6 ($400 value) - do you want to go? Direct-message me on Twitter: @ReadCover if you want to go.
Yeah. I think probably getting approval from the police would be easier than the IRB.
At the end of the day, Rails is just as complex as any other stack if you try to understand it completely.

The difference is that Rails makes it easy to get started without understanding everything. In my experience over the last 6 months, I was able to make useful stuff before I fully understood everything. I've continued to learn as I needed and it's been fine.
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Built at DowncityJS Hackathon http://downcityjs.com
Report: Google Worried Samsung Is Getting Too Powerful
Ooh ooh, now write a rant on boiling water being too hot and the price of fuel... If you're comparing Rails to PHP you're doing it wrong. And who seriously builds a Rails app without an understanding of basic CSS and HTML? A few parts seemed to be just thrown in there to pad out the rant if you ask me.

I agree that the whole premise of Gems is frustrating and deploying isn't as straight-forward as FTP'ing a folder of PHP files. This is where services like Heroku come in very handy but then that's another problem: relying on a 3rd party service to simplify deploying a Rails app.

Disclaimer: I'm a PHP developer.
Panera introduced free wifi in 2005. Starbucks introduced free wifi in 2010. Nowadays pretty much every coffeeshop IN THE US offers free wifi. There's demonstrable progress and the pace is picking up.

EDIT: added clarification that I was referring to the US.
Self Made Men
PHP has always had PEAR, but it isn't all that great. Composer[1] is a relatively new dependency manager for PHP that's been getting a lot of love lately though. It's very similar to Node's npm.

[1] http://getcomposer.org/
What sort of credit card penetration do other parts of the world such as Western Europe/Eastern Europe/Middle East/SE Asian Countries/Australia... other places.

Where do you get the information that you wrote about? I'd be very interested to read into it further. Anybody know any relevant works off the top of your head that you could share?
Kids don't need to learn C or parsing XML. In fact nobody needs to learn to parse XML because either put that data in JSON or GTFO.

But seriously, no it's not concepts like that that matter. That's syntax and strategy. It's "here's how to talk to computers, and here's some aspect of problem solving".

Teaching kids to solve problems and how to think is part of every single subject in school. 100% of them. Coding should have this as a part, history should, english REALLY should, etc. But the primary function is to introduce how to talk to computers to kids, the secondary is how to talk to computers to solve problems.
Independent person from the industry here following this (as I am sure there are many more onlookers to this thread).

drorgill i think now is the time to provide some hard empirical evidence on your part, given the initial claims and a sample test done here it is my feeling that it should be relatively trivial to provide a counter example. cheers.
The closest thing in PHP is PEAR/PECL.
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Or just email me at vlad at readcover dot com.
It would be unfortunate to get these tickets go to waste as two of my team mates cannot make it - it is Demo Pit access too.

Event details here:
http://festival.launch.co
Possibly the dumbest thing I've seen on Hacker News. Is this what this site has come to?
Great ideas! Thanks kindly.
> And who seriously builds a Rails app without understanding of basic CSS and HTML?

One of the times I was at the Seattle Rails Meetup, 4 of the 8 people there were trying to do this. One of them has been trying to do this for at least 2 years with only puting in a few hours per week. It's been pretty painful to watch.
One thing about people that make this argument that I don't understand is do you all know about libraries? You know they've been around for a long time. I'll grant you search engines make some parts marginally easier but to get the fundamental knowledge, you don't have to have that. So why is the Internet the great panacea for this ... Or is it that autodidactism is not really that common but it's much easier to call casually watching a YouTube building a blog engine as learning?
does mjg still work fo rh I tought he went to openstack?
Thank you for this, you are absolutely right. I've had to watch a coworker (who's new to Rails) struggle through this same bullshit. After the 5 days it took him to set it up and run our Rails app locally, I showed him Smalltalk's Seaside and how it takes a minute and a half from downloading to having it work, so that at least he would have some perspective of how so far off the Rails experience is from what it could be.

Please keep this up at least until I get to the office tomorrow so I can send him the link. :)
Disappointed to see the continued use of wide strings in new projects.
My recent trip to Bestbuy convinced me that the future of computer lies in touch screen devices both mobile and desktop. No wonder Windows 8, Gnome, Unity, etc. are so eager to grab the touch screen market. Like several of the other Apple products, there is a strong resistance in Apple to accept new realities that originate in non-Apple camps.
It seems that your English is good enough that you'd benefit from an English/English dictionary instead of relying on a German/English dictionary. That way, you're understanding the meaning in the same context as native speakers and without being tainted by connotations of words used in the German definition. (I have this problem all the time with English/Japanese dictionaries; I look something up and it doesn't make sense. Then I look it up in a Japanese/Japanese dictionary and everything makes perfect sense. Of course, sometimes that requires a few more trips to the dictionary to understand the definition, but...)

Anyway, if I were learning English I'd pay the $300 for an Oxford English Dictionary. You'll learn a lot that way.
Composer? (http://getcomposer.org)
Big Data Puts Linux Talent in Hot Demand
You know, I bet they would. I think what's made so many people able to use a computer is not the new modes of interaction but something more powerful: time. As people have more exposure to computers, and as they become more aware of the interface conventions that develop over time, they get better at using them no matter what the interface style is. I wonder if people might be more useful to people if they had preserved a higher ratio of critical to non-essential visual data — which I think terminal applications do.
That's a great course. Its actually on Coursera for free ... https://www.coursera.org/saas/class ... I did it in April last year; that's how I learnt Ruby & Rails. It is quite fast paced though and you definitely need some decent programming skills to get through.
I dropped out of college, too. I like to say I ran out of money, and I did to an extent, but I could have made it work. Truth be told I just didn't like it.

Nine months ago, a friend of mine suggested that I consider Rails for a new project I was thinking about. I had never even heard of Rails (remember, this was nine months ago), but I gave it a shot anyway. I started working on my app on Friday night after work, and I followed Michael Hartl's tutorial as a starting point. I had a general idea of the MVC pattern so I was good there, but up until that weekend I'd never written any kind of code other than C#. By Sunday night I had an MVP for my niche ERP that I'd been wanting to build. By the end of that month I'd fleshed it out and sold a license for $$$ to a company in my niche. I've been maintaining it ever since, I've worked as a contractor on Rails projects, and I'm happy.

I'm not special. I'm not some kind of super-programmer. I couldn't even pass college-level calc. I don't want to sound like an ass, killahpriest, but I learned Rails "in a weekend" because I didn't blame my tools for my shortcomings. I didn't just follow instructions; I did my best to understand the steps I was taking. Learning new technologies is like reading books. They all have certain things in common, and if you learn those commonalities, you can pretty much breeze through just about anything. I suppose that's what they try to teach in computer science departments...
I use 'pecl' a lot. Eg:

$ pecl install mongo # MongoDB driver

$ pecl install imagick # ImageMagick wrapper

$ pecl install apc # Bytecode cache

There is also pear which I never use, and Composer, which is similar to Bundler (Composer is better IMO).
Most places where there's WiFi, speed is terrible. I always end up tethering to my phone. Heck, LTE ends up being faster than my home connection. (Obviously used judiciously given the small dataplans you can get)
Do you count whitespace in the character count for the measure?
I started reading the article and gave up after a bit.

If Gates, Zuck, and everyone are pushing to have programming in grade schools, I fear more articles that are similar.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Some of us can wander into a new language, start making a mess but at the end of the day something works. Others, wander into a language, look around, try and slap something together and then blog about how things don't make sense. Put me in a garage with a disassembled motor? I'll be lost, open a book, but I won't blog about it...

At this point you're probably asking what's the point of this comment? I felt the same about the blog. A waste of time.
A lawyer from a top 14 school is literally top 1%. A top 1% programmer with 3 years work experience (law school = 3 years) easily clears 160k. Heck, a top 5% programmer can clear that after 3 years.

I would agree that on average lawyers make more, but that's because you're looking at a skewed distribution. It is not an apples to apples comparison. Law schools are selective and someone who doesn't get into any law school (or does get into law school but fails the bar) is probably forced to change careers. Anyone writing shitty code can call him/herself a programmer.
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Having worked on both the revamped tutorial and http://django.2scoops.org, I approve this conversation thread. ;-)
I like a lot of this approach. But, please replace the pie charts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_...

Humans aren't that good at telling more than very rough ratios in angle rather than length. Yes, when the differences are large you could tell at a glance the overall distribution of answers, but when it is close, you lose that. A horizontal stacked bar would achieve a similar visual flair but would be much more intuitively accurate.
Assuming the OS does/does not do this in the future, it would be great if applications that are data intensive considered this in the interim.

Apps like Backblaze, Dropbox, Spotify etc. should be "aware" of the type of network they are operating on and the user able to specify the desired behavior such as only sync files smaller than x, don't do anything on this network etc.
Citing "Tweet" is something they've previously done on the IE webpage. It didn't come off to me then as an ironic joke but a genuine marketing blurb.
I've read that before, but this was the first time that I noticed the file size for /usr/bin/emacs.
What do you mean by "put my Amex into my phone once...and let apple handle it"? Is this a component of Passbook or something?
If you start with knowing php/python and being able to use html, css, and javascript effectively, you should be able to be more productive than not in rails in 3 months.

If you don't know any of this, you will have a hard time and you will find a large amount of the community unwilling to hold your hand as you struggle to figure out the basics.
I find it interesting to see how many new developers, and perhaps problematically teachers of new developers, set out to learn programming via web development in Rails. I like Rails. Rails enables developers to solve a common class of problems efficiently and productively. There's tremendous demand for developers who can be productive using Rails. Those are all good reasons to learn the language and framework but if I had to go back and learn to program again I wonder if I would have been successful or enjoyed starting with Rails and Ruby.

Providing a beginner friendly environment and introduction to programming was never one of the motivations behind Rails. If that's a role it can play well then that is all the better. I want tools to exist which help more people learn to program and which give them the satisfaction of being able to build useful applications quickly. However I think it unfair to take a framework which set out to make reasonable decisions about a fairly well defined class of problems in order to make experienced developers more productive in that domain and blame it for being a poor platform to learn programming on.

When is it fair to "hate Rails" and when should we being saying "wow, I guess there is a lot to learn about building software"?
I am a front end web developer. I mostly don't care what is going in backend and I just call the API endpoint to get my JSON blob.

Recently I interested in learning a bit of backend programming. I did start learning Node.js and Rails together.

I hate Rails too. All Rails tutorials and guides are like reader knows everything they know. I feel it was easier before but now there is so much you need to learn to make a real world Rails app. Sure that Twitter clone is easy. But it gets hard when you want to make a bunch of "gems" work together. You need to know a lot of history of Rails in order to get it.

I liked Node.js over Rails not because I know JavaScript better than Ruby, I never had problems writing or reading Ruby code. It's a beautiful language. The reason I love Node is that I know what is going on. There is not much unnecessary magic.

I know it's not fair to compare a "framework" with a "whatever-we-call-node-js". But Node my points are:

- Rails itself is very skinny that can't do much without gems

- By adding multiple gems to make the framework usable you get into truble of making them work together.

So if Rails wants to solve all my problems it should include all functionalities I (usually) want or if it tries to be skinny and light it should be like Node.js
Using your logic, even the CEO of a company is working for someone (the Board of Directors, the shareholders, activist shareholders, etc.). Even the majority shareholder of a Fortune 500 company is working for someone else, using your logic.
To go further with this - perceiving this to be in bad taste is social and culturally relative. Is it beneficial to have that? Among Australian entrepreneurs, tall poppy syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome - apologies for bringing yet another phenom into this) is a real and oft talked about stigma.

Surely we are better off accepting that resentment at the achievements of others is the problem of those resenting? I'd love to have arguments either way on this.
The worst is when you spend time typing in a post and it gives this errors on submission. Although one can back-tab, copy, refresh, paste and resubmit.
I haven't looked at the benchmark, but I'd assume that the comparison is supposed to be "idiomatic C" vs "idiomatic C++".
The problem here is stated in your first sentence: "I'm not a programmer."

A lot, if not all of this, just kind of "clicks" if you've already worked with something similar in some shape or form in the past.

Things I'd mark off your list as it isn't Rails specific (You came from PHP, right? None of this should be new if you've built a modern web app):

- HTML

- CSS

- Javascript/JQuery

Things I'd mark off your list as it's Ruby specific (PHP was built for the web, but you can run things in isolation if you want. You want to learn Rails, need to learn Ruby - It's just modular in this setup.):

- Ruby

- ERB Syntax (It's just Ruby inside an HTML file wrapped in <% %>, there's nothing really special here)

- Gem Management (gem install my_gem isn't hard and is second nature for anyone who knows Ruby)

- Bundler (Make a Gemfile, type gem 'my_gem' - Done)

Things that are left:

- Rails Philosophy

- Rails Commands

- ActiveRecord

- Rake (Not Rails specific - Just you there are rails specific tasks)

- Routing

- Deployment

Those 6 (5 if you don't count Rake as it's pretty common in a lot of Ruby projects) can be knocked out in the first few chapters of Agile Web Development with Rails(http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-r...). Some things will take practice before getting used to, but for the most part things should be making sense after playing around with it for a few days.

I think the issue here is you're jumping into RoR without a lot of background knowledge that is there for anyone who has dealt with something similar. You're tackling a lot of different things at once so it's overwhelming. Learn things in steps and you'll be all set, don't bite off more than you can chew. Good luck!
You can have multiple Firefox profiles, but it's not very well integrated in the UI.
I wish we could have one tab, or one window per profile, integrated.
Thanks for the feedback. Regarding the presents; Ah the Christmas theme. Just one of the small things that escape you when you're very busy. Have updated that now.
I'm still not quite happy with the design of the TMR page. The whole thing needs to be scrapped when time permits and redesigned, fortunately people like the software beneath so it hasn't been the highest priority lately.

I just looked up your landing page for Tiny Piano. It's nice and informative but the grey background is a bit striking for the black iphone. The contrast would be better with a lighter color. You can pickup some really nice templates from themeforest for a few $ if you're not a designer at heart.

Best of luck cracking 10M downloads! I'll add an extra download to your totals shortly.
OK, it seems hard at first, but all you got to do is watch a bunch of recent railscasts that seems interesting to you and you'll be up to speed in no time.
Even if imgur did use a lossy format (which it didn't), you can see a difference between the top and bottom halves of that single image.
I think this is a good place to bring up the law of conservation of complexity. Every task has a certain amount of inherent complexity and, short of some revelation or major step forward, you can't get around that.

Gem management, ActiveRecord, SQL, rake, ERB syntax--these are just some of the ways in which that complexity is manifested in the Rails stack. Any sort of large community-maintained and developed web stack is going to have these same pieces of complexity, possibly in different forms.
Google accused of privacy violations yet again
I'm particularly sympathetic to the discussion of gems / rvm. Every non-trivial ruby project I've worked on has started with at least a tour of the outer circles of dependency hell, and I bailed on at least one Rails project partly because I couldn't get the environment up on my machine after two weeks of effort.

I really like Ruby the language. Not so sure about the ecosystem of modules, tools, and frameworks, but maybe that part gets better after you put in a few years.
Its not that we don't have the right tools to teach kids how to code, its that (as usual) we don't have the right teachers. I taught myself/was taught by my brother when I was in 6th grade. In high school, I took the compSci AP (and spent about half the time taking a nap). The year after that, I took the 1 programming class my school offered, which was a project based intro to programming (with an awesome teacher who made sure I got something out of the class).

What struck me about the class was the way it was taught. We used Java (actually, Processing [1]). In most of the early lectures (which there weren't many of), he would say 'for now, this is just syntax, it will make sense later' instead of explaining the more advanced concepts needed to understand why we write certain things. The main flow of the course was (I am inventing the details):
Calling a function tells the computer to do something. Here is a bunch of drawing functions, make a picture.
Then, using that he would ask students to make minor changes, like shift the entire thing 5 pixels.
Then he would introduce variables and assignments.
Using that, he would ask them to draw parallel lines.
Then, he would introduce loops.
Then he had them make a bouncing ball simulator (just 2 balls)
Then he introduced objects

Every time a new concept was introduced, its use and benefit was clear because people had already seen the code duplication that it solves. After the initial lessons (which only took about a month), the class was pretty much entirely project based, where we were given (loose) guidelines and had to design and code a program.

Most of the time spent in that class was problem solving. Because math is an incredibly powerful problem solving tool, much of that time was spent doing math. But it was spent using math as a tool to solve a larger problem.

After (and during) that class, many of the other students (whom had never coded prior to taking the class) asked me for advice on programs they were writing that were completely unrelated to the class.

So, it is quiet possible to teach kids how to code without scaring them off. It generally helps if you don't show them pointers, or bit shifting, or linking, ETC until they are ready.

[1]http://processing.org/