skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that when it does happen, you are screwed, hard, and numerous other languages with powerful module systems and powerful metaprogramming and powerful everything-else-that-Ruby-does, and has as many libraries as Ruby (or more), provide a concrete demonstration that you don't need monkeypatching to do awesome things.

Also, the mess only gets bigger as you have more and more people using Ruby. That's part of the seductive danger of the monkeypatching approach... it seems to work so well when you have a small community. Unfortunately, it anti-scales; it gets actively worse the larger the community gets.

So, you are suffering these difficult and often effectively intractable problems (short of modifying other people's libraries which is not something you should need to do in the general case), and in return for this difficulty you get nothing not provided by numerous other languages without such problems.

It's a terrible, terrible trade in the long run. (And the long run is here now.)
Coffee. I know English well enough to understand the term "ad hominem."
The next step would be a "commit" feature that automagically persists your changes into your source code in exactly the same way you'd do it manually.

I'm getting a bit sick at the "read-only" nature of most source code.
If only there were folders, I could use Gmail. I don't care for the "conversations" at all, but to each his own.
Good points. Thank you.

You've clearly articulated why I rejected Pascal's wager when I thought of it. I'm not sure I would have communicated as well to some other if I needed to.
Can the video games industry make a 'B Game'?
an open-source MLS would be great...I know it's been talked about many times in the blogsphere, but right now, realtrac is spamming trulia, for example.
Then don't you mean that the original statement is false? You always change the software to fit the company, and never change the company to fit the software?
It's getting kind of lame being among people who want to divide their attention. I imagine being in the Bay Area I would find at least a few souls willing to spend Friday night programming hard core than carousing.
It's important to pay attention to what other hackers are doing in your area. One of the awesome things about silicon valley is all of the people from the startups hang out there, but there are hackers everywhere and there can be meetups anywhere.

Once I started paying attention to what was going on in Orlando I met a lot of smart people. We're having a barcamp tomorrow too. http://www.barcamporlando.org/

There are other great things about silicon valley, but it's not the only place with hackers.
lol i hope electroshock interface is mandatory
Tabelacilar
turkey tabelacilar blog web sites
Cloud Computing Savings - Real or Imaginary?
Whenever I worked in a corporate setting and wanted some alone time to do work, and not in a bad way, people always came to my cubicle for chit-chat, it was always nice to take my laptop and find an unscheduled conference room by looking at the paper schedules printed on each one.

Yes I could've used the scheduling software, but it's far easier just to get up and go.
How about an iPhone app for when the oil runs out, that shows you which fuel stations still have fuel? ;o)
Whilst this may be true, the problem I have with this statement, and ones like it, is that it implies that there is an unavoidable trade-off between development effort and fit with the business. I don't accept that. My previous company had an online expense system from Oracle that was truly one of the worst pieces of SW I have ever used. I find it very hard to believe that the counter-intuitive UI, the tendency for it to lose data, or the appalling up-time were the result of a unavoidable trade-off between development effort and business fit.

I think the author is dead-on right: this is about a lack scrutiny and feedback.
Meeting rooms can change, but if you have a regularly scheduled meeting you will go there out of habit. Another thing is I've had my meetings bumped to a different room (particularly if I reserve a large room but have few attendees)

(Not all engineers carry their laptops to all meetings.)
I just don't equate that as accessory. What about the valet that parked his car? What if the man had stolen his coat?
Yes, like motivational quotes, there is always a bit of untruth to a statement like that.
From the Stoic Entrepreneur to Flavors of Modular Innovation Openness
Why are you trolling Ruby for this?

There are safe ways to metaprogram Ruby very successfully in an extensible and readable fashion. That's why there's a movement in the Ruby community to kill alias_method_chain for one.

Nor is this a problem that scales with community size. There are bad programmers everywhere. If using their libraries causes your project to explode, don't use their code. Rails is fully admitted to be too clever for it's own good, which is why the push to Rails3 and cleaning out the kludges in the Rails code base is so important. That's why the Merb project was getting so much attention in the first place.

Never the less, this is still about getting numerous different packages to work together. It's a package dependency problem. Granted Ruby's ability to reopen classes anywhere it likes makes this problem more difficult, but i hardly see this as an indictment of any use of the language.

So yes, package management is hard. People should metaprogram responsibly. But that's true in other languages as well. :p
I think it depends on how integrated vs. modular the business is.

Disruptive business ideas usually require many deals between different parties - there's the business integration, and the technical integration that you mention (as video ads become more common, technical and business standards will probably emerge, making it modular).

But some business ideas are more modular, in that customers can just slot the produce/service into an existing business role, and into an existing socket in their system. They are plug-compatible, in both senses.

This plug-compatibility also applies to partners. If you need to interact with content providers and hardware manufacturers (e.g. as Apple needed for the iPod and iTunes), some kind of Pond is essential, not just for access to those parties, but also access to helpers of the connection (e.g. lawyers who understand the issues in these kinds of deals). I think this is probably true whether you have a novel disruptive business, or just an ordinary one: if you need to make deals, a Pond makes things much easier.

But if you can modularize (systematize) your interactions with your "partners" to such an extent that they become "customers", you don't need to be in the same pond. An example is the "partners" of Google Adwords - there's a standard interface that people use all over the world, and it works well even though there's no customer service.

New ideas tend to not be modular - standardization comes later - so a Pond there.
Hi Charles! reBoxed was actually more of an experiment in how quickly I could build something - I just had the idea for it last Friday. It's not going to be reMail's main product. :-)
Another good argument in favor of doing so is that establishing a connection has a non-zero time cost. Further, your server may not have the workers to spare (so that extra connection is going to sit until the server's queue isn't backed up.)
"Vitrification" goes a long way towards addressing the specific problem of ice formation. Very rapid cooling is unnecessary. The downside is that you currently have to have your body removed prior to neuropreservation.

I don't discount the other serious challenges of cryonics, like fracturing and cryoprotectant toxicity.
It's bad because if you change your company to fit the enterprise software, then you can be no better (at XYZ) than any other company using the same software. No competetive advantage is possible (at least, in that area).

If you can customize the software, you can try to fit it around your company's strong points. If you can write the software from scratch, you can tailor it for your company. That's the dream, anyway.
dimitry - thanks for your feedback! I didn't mean the 77 hours as "look at how much of a rockstar I am", but "keep your expecations low": reBoxed doesn't have a fancy website, a product video, etc., simply because I didn't have enough time for those things.
My wife has been trying to get something going in our neck of the woods: [foodmake.org](http://www.foodmake.org/), and it seems to be going pretty well. The goal is to get people talking and then get them off the web and connecting in the real world as soon as possible.
He's (she's??) a little confused by moving to the Bay Area or not. He feel's he's educated by classical standards but still has technical knowledge. He has experience learning technical/IT knowledge from the Internet, and values such knowledge, but thinks by being in the bay area, that such knowledge can be accrued faster. He doesn't like the greed he finds in the Bay Area, and is basically trying to justify the loss of potential technical knowledge by leaving (or not even going) through weighing it up against his classical knowledge that his grandmother values more than he does.

Tip: stay out of the Bay Area but not too far, maybe to San Jose and keep in touch with a few buddies, but not to those who you truly don't like.
Which is Latin :-)
"you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems"

A few thousand failed login attempts caused problems? Sounds like they need a new systems administrator/DBA. A well configured authentication system should be able to easily say "no" to practically unlimited numbers of login attempts. "High value target" production systems often decline many thousands of invalid auth attempts per minute.

Unless the client is unbelievably badly coded (ie keep trying to login every second, indefinitely), that's not even the beginning of a good explanation.
Ask HN: Possible loophole for angel investing net worth restriction?
In order to be an accredited angel investor, you either need to have a minimum salary (250K/yr?) or a minimum total net worth (1 MM?).

Question - what if you incorporate a company, and use that company to make investments? Would that be sufficient to bypass the restrictions?

I'm not necessarily recommending that anyone actually do this, I'm just curious whether it would be legal.
Yeah, it's pretty good. pngout is good too. But I found some really good compression with pngnq. It's lossy, but can help you with some larger optimisations.

I had an image that pngout got to 218K (221K for optipng). pngnq chopped that thing to 74K. When flipping between the images you could see some pixels change, but only if you looked really hard.

(Running pngout on that image brought it down to 71K. Nice.)
I noticed that this is almost a year old - does anyone have any updates?
4. Figure out browser caching - what to cache, how and for how long. Frequently changing code files - not a good idea to cache them for long, but images and other files, in most cases you only really need to download them once to the user's browser. Stuff to Google: etags and last-modified.

Improving site speed is a broad topic, and there would be other stuff on the server-side too where improvements can be made, like cached queries and using "prepared statements" to optimize the SQL.
Why File Sharing Will Save Hollywood, Music
is this the same guy that told me (and all bloggers in general) to stop blogging, in some snarky Wired article? yup, it is. http://bit.ly/S85ya
A big part of it is that once you get to a system for many tens, hundreds or more people, the basic requirements are so big that there are no real choices beyond the main one or two competitors, and one will be ahead for one reason or another.

Users have no voice, but that's only part of the problem - the time it would take to evaluate New Competitor C just to cover all the unspoken requirements is prohibitive. You can be pretty confident that because they claim nice sounding features and a simple interface, that's proof that they haven't been around to gain enough of the unspoken requirements - if they had, they wouldn't have nice sounding features and a simple interface anymore. Bit of a catch 22, really.

Unspoken requirements in the Windows world are things like "... and has a web interface", "... works on a terminal server", "reports integrate into central management program X", "has an Outlook plugin", "tolerable support for user permissions", "incomprehensible massive logfile", and so on. Either things that a program which incorporates all of them will be cumbersomly big by necessity, and/or an established competitor for several years with a few versions under its belt.
More goodies from the comments section:

"Enterprise software" is a social, not technical, phenomenon

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/0...
Microsoft already has that and they are much better, it syncs with Exchange and so on.
...it works...?

(I believe the system is not being expanded due to time/money/whatever constraints though.)
Interesting feature. Good that it doesn't keep recommending people ad infinitum. It stops after it thinks the group is big enough.
Extremely lightweight repository creation is my reason.

`git init` and you've got a local repo. One .git folder in your root directory and that's it. Blow away the one folder and you're back to where you started. None of the .svn folder spam you get with subversion.

There are a few differences in commands and concepts, but you can keep it simple and the experience is about the same for small to medium independent projects.
Eight reasons I'm going to miss books.
I had not heard of this man till today when I came across the comment below by Alan Kay; I thought to share it:

"I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past, so most people haven't gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought."

For context.
Some very cool ideas there. The article struck a chord on "people don't want to learn to use their computers": especially, they put a high premium on interchangeability. Examples: people asking to borrow my computer but recoiling from "a linux", me not wanting to switch to xmonad because I can't use it on lab computers.

I think personally I'm going to make an effort to learn some more of the command line instead of using Ubuntu's GUI tools for config.
Very interesting. I would like to see some hard numbers though. I am not sure how that got to these stats.
Imagine my domain name is OddName.com. The email address we gave them is something like emusic_XX@OddName.com where
XX is the checksum of "emusic", and that is the address to which spam is being sent.

I think the evidence is overwhelming.

I'd also love to hear their side of it, but given that they didn't bother to reply to my email I suspect they either don't care, or don't accept my evidence.
What a cock and bull story (sic.)

You know how Fred Brooks said to "build one to throw away"? You just can't do that with Enterprise software because the businesses that use it need it to keep living.

You know all those little things you learn as you go along, and you begin to really understand the problem, and how to solve it properly? You can't do that with Enterprise software either, because everything else relies on what you choose already; and even worse, changes in the environment are coming in all the time that you must adapt to first. That's hard enough, even with a stable (if flawed) foundation to work from.

You can iteratively adapt it, but you can't iteratively improve it.

It's a problem of legacy, of network effects, of debugged/tested/working code and of something relied on so strongly that you can't afford to mess with it.

Joel says you can't improve these things. You can - but it's a research problem. "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" (rewrite code from scratch) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Gmail has folders now. Sort of. Use the "Move to" drop down menu button. It applies to labels, but it will work like how you expect folders would.
Nobody has mentioned the latency issue when gzipping. If you have to construct the whole file before gzipping, in situations where the file is large or dribbles out as the server processes the data, this could mean a significant slowdown.
In virtually all situations, I agree gzipping is good, just like I always leave write-caching on my hard drive turned on so that the slowest part of my system can run at the fastest possible speed. There just might be consequences you do not intend.
To address the obvious replies: yes, your server should not dribble out content. And, yes, if you are using a framework that spits out the entire page at once already, you will incur no additional latency on top of the gzip/gunzip time.
Are you serious? I want a solid relationship with everyone, no matter what they've done in the past. I'm also going to protect that relationship in a legally binding way, and not just take someone's word.

But I work with some great people that are total jackasses. But they know I'm not going to take their crap, so they don't try and dish it to me. Or sometimes they do, to test the water, and I say 'nope'.

I mean, I hate to be so basic as alpha dog level analysis, but that's how you get through to some people. And I don't mean blustering and cursing up a storm. I mean growing up and dealing with stuff head-on.

_EVERYTHING_ is an opportunity.
I made a pretty sweet graphing weather monitor using this screen. Plots the indoor and outdoor temperature and of course doesn't use any batteries when it's idle. I packaged it up in a 1" thick display and have it hanging on my wall. Data is also stored onto an SD card in CSV for archiving.
Incidentally, I often get unknown or expired link when I submit comments, which is presumably HackerNews' way of saying that I took too long considering and drafting my comment. This seems to discourage thoughtful replies.

It seems to me that intellectually stimulating discussion would be served better by a longer timeout.

(fortunately, the back-button and cut-and-paste circumvents this problem, but it gave me a start the first time).
Those numbers come from the SEC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor

http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm

If you want to incorporate a company in order to make such investments, then you're going to have to register with the SEC. The phrase that comes to mind immediately after "OMG! NO!" is "you'll be sorry!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_Company_Act_of_1940
Code size does not imply functionality. Does Perl have more core functionality? Does Ruby have more expressiveness in its tests, or how they test? Are the Perl core tests testing the core libs, the language itself? Both? What are the Ruby tests doing? This benchmark, like most, is meaningless.
> It's a package dependency problem.

If you solve the package dependency problem, you will be left with the meta-programming collision problem. However, I feel that if you solve the meta-programming collision problem, you will also solve the package dependency problem.

Which is the point of this post. I am not saying anything about the size or severity of the two problems, just noting that I think solving one will solve the other.
Thank you. I picked up Python from assorted online tutorials; maybe it's time for me to look at the book mentioned elsewhere in this thread to improve my style.
Chinese spies put chips in US planes
Using Promotional Laptop Conference Bags In Marketing 
Let me tell you this; promotional laptop conference bags are really good idea to promote your company. It's not expensive but it's nice. Read more in this article
It's interesting how very few randomized studies of nutrition there have ever been. I remember one study from the 1970s, reported on by my town's TV news channel, in which students and other persons who could stay out of society for a while were literally confined to the laboratory and fed only by the researchers, with no opportunity to eat at liberty. But I don't recall any report of clear results from that study.
Thanks a lot. This is interesting and helpful.
"I've been an American citizen longer than you've been alive"

Funny. Thanks for posting that link. Pullum is a good writer. One of the other ripostes is much funnier, and fits Fark well. I'm glad to see Pullum recommended Style: Toward Clarity and Grace as a style guide. That is a good book.
Keyboard layouts: Dvorak better than QWERTY ?
I can type about 100WPM on Qwerty.

Tried Dvorak for a while, only could get up to 45WPM after months. Not worth it to me at all.
Who puts multiple addresses in the "To:" field? That's just asking for a nightmare.
Well vaksel has more karma than most small countries, so I don't think that was a consideration for him. :-)
Facebook is losing for several reasons. But, in the end it comes down to over-engineering and under-monetizing.

I don't think there is a good reason for Facebook to ignore traditional web advertising. Sure, they have the potential to do more interesting and lucrative things in the future. But, I think shunning banners now is being a little too stubborn.

I don't think that any of the new features Facebook has added over the last few years have added real value to my experience or the experience of most of the people I know. The profile, wall and photos make Facebook. I think that has always been enough. None of the other nonsense will get you laid anyway.
Also, even with the 3% revenue drop, net income increased 9%.
Aaron thought to himself, "If only there was a inexpensive device that could display the room reservations, we'll save all that paper ...."

seems like an interesting side project but i can't shake the feeling that, at least in this context, the solution is being over-engineered. i mean...isn't this what whiteboards are for?
My guess would be that Google is still smarting from this:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/huddlechat_campfire_rip...
How so? I email two to four people very frequently. That is much easier than creating a mailing list for every possible combination of PM, Tester, and Doc Writer who works on any feature with me.
Great Presidents That Suck (The Value of Multiple Sources)
New Female Condom aka FC2
No. A business can only be an accredited investor when all of the owners are accredited investors themselves.
Creating a Culture of Innovation:  Why 20% Time is not Enough
Perhaps they should add RubySpec then come back with those numbers. IIRC, there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 assertions in there and growing everyday.

Unlike Perl, Ruby has elected to make these specs an open community process usable across all implementations. Oops.