skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"you can also call the method with a name that will always work; $instance->Role::Name::method."

I'm coming at this from a Perl and C background, but I'm not really understanding the fuss. It seems obvious that diddling with base classes is not scalable unless you have have some strong social conventions. But why do it at all?

For those not fluent in Perl's syntax, Jonathan's suggestion is equivalent to "$instance->Package::method()", which is in turn equivalent to "method($instance) from within a given Package. This seems foolproof. No one's followed up on it, but at a glance I don't see any downsides to this approach.

I may be illustrating my ignorance (and I'm definitely ignorant of Ruby syntax), but why is there such strong desire to have array->sum() instead of sum(array)? Or as a utility function Utility::sum(array)? And is there no equivalent in Ruby to array->Utility::sum()?
it's called don't use mysql for that. (sorry i'm a trolling postgres user, please don't mark me below -1)

in a non trolling way, I'd like to see a PostgreSQL for MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle users.
Ask HN: Have you created alternate accounts to post questionable responses?
Obviously I'm unable to post a poll at -8 karma. Karma is precious on it's own of course but what about your image? The accounts you use to post comments or articles that are genuinely good are precious. The image associated with your online persona is more pervasive and timeless than person to person connections. Everything we type is documented for easy access in the future. When you have an idea that isn't normal to your status quo have you ever created an account to post a article or comment? If so, how many alternate accounts do you have and what prompted you to create an alternate one?
The next level? Outer space computing?
How would they send the shut-off signal? Over the internet?
Probably the whole of number 1. And no, objecting to this does not mean that the answer is one of the choices you gave.

The answer would simply be that there are all kinds of people...some good, some bad. Just like every other place.

I can point to the UAE, for example, where i know of several high positions occupied by qualified people who happen to be Indian.

While in KSA, a number of my friends hold high positions in various fields. Most large companies are owned by a member of the royal family. But newer generations of the royal family all hold college degrees and so are far off from the stereotype most often described.

Again, i really don't like picking the worst possible scenario and then generalizing it and setting a stereotype. I apologize if i came off as rude, but i still suffer in my work every day because of such attitudes.
Google "bacon cmu scientific discovery".
Nonprofit News Web Site Wins Investigative Journalism Award (audio)
Are you using CUDA directly or sticking with something more general like OpenCL?
Nokia N95 8GB Unlocked
Nokia N95 8GB Cell Phone along with the necessary clothes and food needed for the duration of the trip. With the built in A-GPS you’ll have no problem finding directions to your destination. 5 Megapixel camera included with the Nokia n95 8gb.
Taskfox Prototype: Ubiquity in Firefox
This article really hit on something I've been wondering about Google: will it grow beyond Adwords? Search is an expanding business as it becomes more important in our lives and it's nicely monetized through Adwords, but none of Google's other ventures have seemed so great. In fact, many of their purchases just seem like they're solving an excess money problem.

Blogger? Feedburner? Picasa? Dodgeball? Jaiku? Even the much talked about YouTube has yet to show that it will ever justify its purchase price.

Google is wonderful, but it leaves me wondering whether everything they do will have to be underwritten by Adwords on search. Can they build sustainable revenue streams off other products?
1. You're changing the subject, from 'courage' to 'desire'.

2. We're talking about a woman who goes out and picks up random strangers, either in a bar or online. Is that the 'average' woman?

3. I wasn't talking about AFF in particular, just the idea of cheating via the internet vs. cheating via the bar scene.
Backtype obeys robots.txt rules. That said, the value a system like this adds outweighs the cons for me.
a book on postgresql 8.3 (or the to be released 8.4) with some good strong chapters on various PL languages. I'm thinking one on PL/Perl a few on PL/pgSQL, one on PL/SQL, one on SQL/PSM (maybe). several on the rest of Postgres.
Dynamic Languages on Google App Engine - An Overview
I agree on grouping the comments independently. That's easy to add and should hopefully be in version 0.2.

But it will probably require some manual template editing.
True, the income and security brought in by followers is a powerful incentive. Whereas if you communicate clearly about atheism all you get is fewer people hating you for no damn reason.
I'd agree that sometimes the comments don't work - that's why we let you control which sources you want to display.

Regarding replies to comments: I'm not too concerned. People who write entire articles often don't see the responding conversation that happens on Hacker News. Conversations are fragmenting. Lots of people use plugins to pull in tweets and FriendFeed comments, so we thought we could give them all in one.

Regarding grouping: We have an option to push all the comments to the end of the comment section, but we don't group them distinctly right now. We want to do that in our next release.

Thanks for the feedback!
Complex business logic constraints depend on "the object model and polymorphism"? Can you give an example?
This one needs a little background. There's a meme going around these days that the demise of newspapers is bad for democracy: who will report on city hall, hold local officials to account, etc? This story is a great counterexample.
Counteracting the "you're not being open-minded" argument
I've heard this in person and now here, but I can't find info on it - care to link me to these macros you speak of?
That reminds me to get a good coffee and get others to clean up the mess, not my style :)
How about "I'm sick of Ruby's mediocre support for metaprogramming in-the-large"?
I loved this article. One of the best I've read for months.

this bit:

> What problem do we think we have besides who are we, what business are we in, and what ever. It’s like, are we going to be risking trying to understand our customers and we ought to try to focus on that.

> Or is the focus truly inside the building. Because Steve, it doesn’t matter what customers think unless we really nail this technology. None of this matters
This is a great point.

The California Department of Justice has a huge private network (On RFC 1918 space) that police stations and other government agencies must use to connect to the databases that the CA DOJ provides.
Sorry, maybe this isn't correct Ruby nomenclature, but I see Array simply as a global object, which can be modified, with rather obvious consequences. It's sad that I feel old enough to say this, but isn't this a problem that we solved a long time ago?

"Don't do that" is one solution, Alan Kay's idea of "worlds" is another.
If the reason you have an alter-ego is post childish content you have bigger issues. Creating another account to berate others or to add content that has no value should not be tolerated.

I see no problem with creating another account if you want to post valid content and don't want it associated with you. There are a number of ethical or questionable topics that I would refrain from posting for this reason.

That all said, I haven't, and probably won't create another account for this reason.
As usual, Ryan to the rescue. :)

Thanks for the link.
Very cool stuff.

The world needs to think more about UI design. I like pdubroy's comments. All these paradigms are much more intuitive, it'd be nice to see how new users (or children) like it.

It'd be the greatest thing ever built if it also ran on *nix...
What Google should have said to the Newspaper Association
New Way To Split Water Into Hydrogen And Oxygen
Yes, but the programmers working on business applications are already wearing suits or at least business casual. They are service programmers not product programmers which, I think, the piece more accurately targets.

The hordes of engineers working on the latest incarnation of BigRetailBankOnline.com do not produce a product, the banks services are its product.
Short answer: no

Why would you go through the trouble? Why not refrain from posting it when you think it is questionable?
So what? A lack of a robots.txt rule doesn't imply "I can take other people's content, reproduce it wholesale, remove it from context, and put it on other people's sites or otherwise do what I want to it" does it? A lack of a robots.txt rule doesn't imply "I can ignore copyright law" does it? A lack of a robots.txt rule doesn't imply that the /author/ of the stolen content, perhaps with some suggestion of an implicit endorsement, wants it shown on some random 3rd party site does it?

I'm sorry for being so old fashioned as believing in the simple concept that when I comment on site A it doesn't mean I automatically want it reproduced in full on site B, C, D and E. I'm sorry for being so old fashioned in believing that as the author it removes value from /my work/. I'm sorry for being so old fashioned for complaining when these "advantages" aren't "advantages" for me but rather some 3rd party company or blog who are trying to profit from my work instead, perhaps even suggesting some implied endorsement, and being so old fashioned to /dare/ raise an objection when they try and do so.

Sorry for being so old fashioned that thinking that any company that is based around the concept of taking other people's content and reproducing it wholesale without considering the wishes of the copyright owners or authors is fundamentally flawed as a business and raises many dubious ethical and legal questions.

Or, perhaps, I should put my objections in a more concise manner that you'll understand. How can I, as an author, do this:

User-agent: *
Disallow-Author: Halo

Or, perhaps the bigger bolder question I want answered is /why/ should I have to do that, and what makes you believe you have the right to take my rights away from me? Why is it more acceptable to take this same prose and put it elsewhere as I wrote it as a comment instead of an article? And, no, "adding value" isn't a one-stop shop get-out clause; grave robbers added value as well, afterall.

Oh, and your site doesn't seem to support people who edit their comments correctly; they appear as duplicates.
Silicon Valley Goes from Libertarian to Keynesian
Great Students Are Great Employees Not Founders
The Andrew Warner Story
No nonsense photo sharing
I would like to summarize this thread by saying "it is not the end of the world, some cool shit have been built!"
Why do they really need to know whether I am male or female on sign up? And this "cloud" guy on their site is really scary.
In case some of you don't know Andrew Warner, he has a ton of great interviews on:

http://blog.mixergy.com

and here is his Hacker News profile:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AndrewWarner
The only way we'll know is after Dr. Schmidt's tenure as CEO of General Motors.
Yes, it might be a reach to say "the next level".

Looking beyond the marketing, the product definitely seems interesting. It has loads of potential and the basic applications, such as the desktop and the document explorer are quite good.

As a developer, looking at the software (written in XML), it seems like a huge advantage to write something in one language and then having it simply just work on all (supported) platforms. The source code for all applications is COMPLETELY VISIBLE XML and it seems that the service can use external webservices.

As a user there are I have to that it would feel very nice to have my apps patched directly without any additional downloads and to always have the latest features.

Any thoughts about interesting applications that could be useful for the service? They seem to have the documentation in place to experiment...
You're right! Just tried it now and it shows:

"Tip: These results do not include the word "module". Show results that include "module"."

This is very, very annoying...
good video, basically explains every nut-job that believes in intellectual design
Arg, more crazy thoughts. But, a (rhetorical) real world question:

Once pasta chef Katz is done turning the rails spaghetti into merb-style ravioli and all the rails monkey patching is self contained in an extlib style gem, how many projects will begin including that monkey patching as a dependency?

If someone wants an array#sum there's a good chance they'll just depend on rails' array#sum. With its massive influence the rails project has the, perhaps small, potential of becoming an autocratic second-level Matz with a default set of widely used ruby extensions. What Facets wants to be but isn't.

Given that scenario, is it better to let rails be the guardians of a defacto "standard" extlib or to have a more fine-grained system that allows the marketplace of popularity to decide what gets to be considered standard?
Can they build sustainable revenue streams off other products?

Do they have to?
I think they will feel the pinch and need to create other, sustainable, revenue streams when they begin to observe a loss in search and advertising marketshare.

I for one, beleived that Google would be smarter than that. But as the article points out, many of their other ventures and business units have not been successful.

Maybe complacency in some areas is a result of being so successful in others.
I have one other account here. I started this account one day when I wanted to express a controversial idea I felt I couldn't articulate well enough to warrant associating my real name with it for the rest of my life. Sometimes my positions aren't P.C. enough to associate with my family name and sometimes I just want to explore my opinions in discussion form even though I haven't got the time to express myself with exacting clarity. I'm afraid if I use my real name (a unique name for sure) I will either make a mistake I might later regret or I will be tempted to wordsmith my comment for longer than I should.

Anonymity can sometimes be very liberating. Maybe when I become a better writer or my startup is wildly successful I will reveal my identity. Until then I don't see why I should silence my most authentic voice by closing this account or use my real name on every comment that I write. What's wrong with using a pseudonym once in awhile? Some people only use a pseudonym - is that so wrong?

I treat this account more like a diary. I take more risks under this account. It grants me creative license to be myself but not the self I want shown when someone googles me.

What if my startup doesn't work out? I'm going to need a "real job" and if the economic environment gets much worse I might find myself interviewing with a conservative pointy-haired boss. This is a real life possibility and if it turns out that is what happens I'm better off if my interviewer hasn't read my honest ramblings on corporate life, sex, philosophy, politics - all of which I feel free to discuss under a pseudonym. Look at it another way: in a worst-case-scenario, let's assume one day I am wrongly accused of a terrible crime - do I want the prosecutor to take out of context my most controversial, intimate musings? There are after all some things you can't say. I haven't exposed much under this account - I just started it a few weeks ago - but <edit>my reaction to the negativity in this thread</edit> is What is wrong with someone detaching themselves a bit from their ego? <edit>Downmodders,</edit> how am I hurting the community?
Executive orders to impacted entities would involve a much more formal chain of command and control than a direct kill switch from White House.
1-800-PetMeds Coupons| 1-800-PetMeds Coupon Codes | 1-800-PetMeds Promo Codes
Now you can save money with 1-800-PetMeds Coupon Codes and 1-800-PetMeds Coupons.Just Click above link for 1-800-PetMeds name Coupon codes and 1-800-PetMeds name Coupons. Deals365.us is the best source for the 1-800-PetMeds name coupons,1-800-PetMeds name promotion codes,1-800-PetMeds name coupon code or offer codes.
http://github.com/raganwald/rewrite/tree/master
I question the numbers regarding downloads as music available through online services takes a big chunk out of the download space, legal or otherwise.

Why download and manage the storage of music when sources like Pandora, last.fm, skreemr, seeqpod, etcetcetetc... will do it for you.

I haven't downloaded any music in years, as I can just get it online whenever I want it.
What I've found helps with concentration is to listen to a piece I'm really familiar with, or at least something with a simple, predictable melody. It uses a lot less of my attention that way.
The smurf/ghost or the guy to the right?

It seems that they recently added features for social interaction between the users. So they are either moving more towards being a social network or doing some kind of mix between a web desktop and social community... The sharing features are understandably quite interesting in this aspect...
No, never. On most online communities I use my real name. On one very useful online community, the community rule is that no one uses a real name, so I came up with my current screen name. As I join other communities where the use of a screen name is the norm, I use the SAME screen name, so that people can tell who I am. I let my reputation build from the content and appropriateness of what I post. So far HN and Newmogul are the only sites I am active on with an explicit karma system, but on two other sites where I use this screen name I have been tapped to be a moderator by the forum owners, because they recognize how I interact with the community. Anyone can do this.
Introducing the Collaboration Curve
Very interesting service! A number of questions...

What User-Agent do you use?

Do you crawl non-textual resources?

Do you save all headers from the crawled responses?

Do you perform any processing on the returned content (like de-chunking or de-compressing) or can it be retrieved verbatim?

If two customers request the same URL/site be crawled, are their requests merged so the site is only crawled once?

Do you save the exact time of the request (not trusting the returned 'Date' header)?
The Hype of Personal Branding, Explained
Facebook And Digg Using Frames To Hijack Web Browers And Spam Users
Yea, next to all the good names in the industry, good stuff!
I'm much rather have a business I care about than clothes I look good in.
Using a Happstack Web-App Authentication Framework
before you could just search for "red fish" and get the same results. Good tech, but really doesn't really change anything
I must not have been clear enough in my question. The content for alternate accounts doesn't have to be obscene or uncivilized. You may just not want it associated with your core account. Everyone has many facets to their personality to which they show different faces in different situations, alternate accounts provide this functionality.
If you want to start a genuine conversation or discussion on hot topics is a valid reason for alternate accounts.
And here I thought the story was about some sort of return & refund scam...
But you're relying on people to use the word "red" in the text accompanying the picture.
Sounds like he owes a lot to his brother.
Lesson learned: There is nothing wrong in copying other peoples ideas, just make sure you execute it better than they do.
Someone already got Helma running on it: http://helma-ng.appspot.com/
I like.

Surprised to find some nice international selections on there; usually have a hard time locating some non-Western music so it's refreshing to find some good World genres out there especially in such high quality and with such a nice, clean interface.

(Y)
I cleared with J Crew. I told them I wore the clothes. Their policy was that you could return clothes any time in any condition. I don't think they expected anyone to take them up on it.

Laziness and embarrassment are two characteristics entrepreneurs don't have.
Dear Facebook's 200,000,000th user, here's what you missed...
You don't need to "believe", you just have to know it. CS is a discipline, not a church.

As an exercise, get a full list of all your processes and do the math by replacing them by hypothetical JVM instances [one per process] and I suggest paying attention to "shared pool" size for each process too. I guarantee you'll be shocked by total RAM consumed by an "empty" OSX or Vista. Just imagine: every little tiny process, even simple background services, will have a full copy of your entire userspace layer in its address space.

Moreover, with 12-core CPUs becoming a reality very soon, the issue becomes even more important. With proper code sharing on OS level 12 instances of a process should (theoretically) take not much more RAM than just one. But because of VM overhead you'll be essentially duplicating it 12 times.

More code duplication also means more I/O hits on disk and system bus and CPU L1/L2 cache drain.

This is why Java is for enterprise/web software only. It is simply retarded to build on it in a true multi-process environment.

OS-level code sharing is hugely important. Your hard drive is full of code, gigabytes of it, and you can't just clone big chunks of it into every process who needs it. Without code sharing you'd have to wait a few more years for an iPhone. He-he, actually because of lack of it, you aren't reading this in a JVM-powered browser and probably never will.
Variable pricing spreads to Amazon, Lala, Rhapsody, Wal-Mart
How Yellow Tail crushed the Australian wine industry.
If Mike Faulkner truly was not involved with the alleged illegal actions, he and his family ought to do well, living off of a considerable settlement from the FBI. Hopefully enough to start a new business or two...

Unfortunately, that ultimately means I, as a tax payer, will be funding it. Sigh.
I think that the biggest problem with not sharing libraries is with the initial spin up of the JVM. If you shared even just the standard java libraries, startup times would be better.

If I remember correctly, the Apple JVM does/did this. I'm not sure about other though (IBM, BEA?).
How would they go about with creating a sufficient genpool so that the species can reproduce itself successfully... or for that matter how would we go about to teach the animals how to reproduce? Are they to live among animals or similar character while they are young?

It sounds very nice, I wouldn't mind to see dodos in real life.
There's no reason to think this is lies, or any kind of intentional deception.

As they say, nature abhors a vacuum, and Congresscritters see a piece of important infrastructure that's not under their control. Believing their jobs are important, they believe that this lack of regulation is a danger.

Journalists see the concern of the Congresscritters, and hey, these are community leaders: there must be something to this, so lets do some research and see what we can find -- but we're writing for the public, we've got to present it in a compelling fashion.

So all this takes is a a bunch of people who are acting according to their own world view, following whatever natural incentives they have.
"Millions of people used our greeting card engine each month. Venture-backed firms paid us $1-$3 every time we convinced those users to sign up for their services."

Kind of reminds me of RockYou's Facebook advertising model. (If there is a gold rush, sell mining equipment instead of mining)

I wonder what the ROI was on the users "purchased" by the venture backed startups.
Hey amohr - email me on Sumon [at] Snaptalent [dot] com - would love to hear how we can make the service even better
I owe him more than I can say. It's not just that he's an incredible developer. In the early days, I had to deal with a lot of rejection when I pitched our company. Michael helped me stay optimistic.
And equally, his brother owes a fair bit to him.

There is a lesson here...