skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you know this is true? Your own experience, or data? I live in a big area, so perhaps I can't see the effect even if its there.
> Seeking asylum isn't an endorsement of Venezuela. It's a last-ditch-effort to stay free against government oppression.

It's not clear that jumping out of the pan and into the fire is the best option though.
I think the tension between centralized panopticon infrastructure run/controlled by a power system that's trying to maintain control and the long-tailization, balkanization and echo-chamberization of the ideas that get spread across it will be a defining factor in the chaotic world we're moving into.
Showing people boilerplate instead of attr_accessor isn't really a way to convince people that Ruby's great.
If you click the unfortunately named "List of ALL hackerspaces"[1], scroll down and click on "further results"[2] then adjust to show all 500 results[3] and finally search the page you will not find Null Space Labs (but some references to Queensland). That doesn't mean NSL isn't on the site... just that the site fails.

[1] http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_ALL_hackerspaces

[2] http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Special:Ask/-5B-5BCategory:Hack...

[3] http://hackerspaces.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Ask&offset...
Paper reveals NSA ops in Latin America
Perhaps you don't want to host a db just for user data.
Excellent article.

I would like to say that I was aware already of Venezuela's tactics, but I knew nothing until this article and the follow-up research I've done. Makes Snowden's choice seem rather odd/silly now.
They also appear to let you bring your own food and drinks. I've seen moms break out a box of Capri Suns to give to their herd of children and people unwrap a footlong from Subway in the Barnes and Noble Cafe.
I suppose the author was trying to be explicit for the sake of a reader unfamiliar with Ruby. The typical way to avoid that boilerplate is by using 'attr_accessor :sanity', which defines those getter and setter methods (and it is possible to implement attr_accessor or similar directly in Ruby, should you need more boilerplate-reducing helpers).
They are, which is why Ruby's Module (class comes from module) has attr_accessor method.

http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Module.html#method-i-attr_acc...

The above can be written as

attr_accessor :sanity
I believe it'd be idiomatic to use

attr_accessor :sanity

def initialize
@sanity = 0
end

On that note I like Go's default values for primitive types. An int sanity would be zero by default.

Edit: seeing five simultaneous posts saying the same thing makes me feel trolled a bit :)
I agree. I tried web development professionally; loved Ruby, thought Rails was pretty decent, but hated web development (and ultimately wasn't at all inspired by the product we were building).

Now every Ruby meetup I attend, 99% of the presentations are from web devs about rails and associated infrastructure.
Any QoS would be a big help. A lot of the shops only have what appears to be a T1 connection and once you get someone streaming video, it can ruin it for everyone else.

Don't stream or download huge files, be courteous.
One is sorting "intelligently" numerically, the other is just comparing ascii values, on the first numerical field.
Amen! Efficiency to who's standards or values? It's a financial issue for big Internet but what's the real values cost the rest of the Internet? It's obviously a minimal financial costs, as everyone I know that wants to publish can. Why sacrifice durability, readability, and the original core values of the Internet for saving "big dollars" from "big providers"?
Yup.

I'm pretty sure that if Congress did in fact vet each person appointed to the FISC, that at the very least there would be a more bipartisan makeup of the judges on the FISC instead of being overwhelmingly Republican. Unfortunately, it still wouldn't be adversarial, but the presence of bipartisanship would at least help prevent groupthink and mitigate the expediency at which the court can damage our democracy.
Sure, but the founders didn't bother clearly deliniating all the physically impossible ways the government shouldn't be permitted to violate our rights. It is quite possible that something newly possible is a violation of rights we were supposed to have, whether specified implicitly, explicitly, or not at all.

At an extreme, the constitution says nothing explicit about brain control rays, but if we invent them I am quite confident in asserting that use should be deemed unconstitutional because of rights we should be assumed to have.
This is only one story of the many, many times opponents to the Chavez and now Maduro government have been recorded, and exposed to public ridicule live on national TV by government sanctioned programs.

Hugo Chavez even used to call in and congratulate the guy that used to run La Hojilla. What more approval do you need than getting congratulated by the leader of the revolution!

During the last presidential election this guy even dragged out what he said was a statement by a former police officer that said the he caught Capriles (the opposing presidential candidate) fellating another guy in a car outside a house. I don't know if that statement was true or not, but it was constantly used to ridicule him live on TV.

My sister is friends with a girl who is married to a journalist. These guys hacked her e-mail and found some personal pictures of her in the beach with her husband and he showed them on national TV and exposed them to ridicule, saying that he was a cheapskate that wouldn't pay for his wife's boob job,etc.

Karma is a bitch though. The TV show is now cancelled because the guy used to report to his cuban minders in regular meetings that were recorded. Somehow one of these recordings was leaked and he was caught bad mouthing a ton of people in the government, including Cabello, the most powerful guy in the govt right now (even more than Maduro).
What year is this, 2005?
Yelp’s New Maps Help You Find Bacon, Avoid Tourists
Sac vanessa bruno pas cher,cabas vanessa bruno lin solde france en ligne
L officiel autorisé sac vanessa bruno pas cher boutique en ligne.Toutes les cabas vanessa bruno cuir,sac vanessa bruno lin à prix solde! Prix fous --66% et plus.
Sac vanessa bruno grand france pas cher 37% réduction
sac vanessa bruno grand,sac vanessa bruno grand format,bonne qualité, livraison gratuite, livraison rapide.Tous les services sont prêts pour vous.
funny thing is, i was working on a simple note taking app too. just for fun of course, but i guess this makes us competitors aha ;). i'll see if i can post something within a few days.
It is my impression that Python does exactly the things listed here, but more explicitly. With the python approach, instance variables are public by default (as attributes). There is never any confusion between when you are calling a method, or referencing an attribute. If you are doing something something more complicated than getting or setting an attribute, you must either call a method (this is so you and other developers actually know what is going on), or alternatively you use a property decorator.

You could do something similar to Ruby's missing_method, by setting the class's __getattr__, but you'd really have to ask yourself why. What kind of creation are you building that you are expecting to not know which methods are available while running your program?

These are the kinds of things that drive me batty with Ruby. Perhaps if I spent about double or triple the hours on Ruby that I have, I might have an "aha" moment. However, from what I've seen I can't help but feel that what it's really trying to accomplish is much more comfortable in functional form (say Lisp?).
Question:

Do all the justices in SCOTUS have access to each and every ruling made by FISC? If so, can a SCOTUS justice unilaterally promote a FISC ruling to be heard by SCOTUS?

In other words, can SCOTUS provide a secondary source of oversight over FISC in addition to the oversight from the intelligence committee in Congress?
I started programming in Ruby in early 2000 and I really liked it back then, but when I look at it today, the language feels very old.

I don't know if it's the lack of types, the fact that you see streams of "end end end" like Pascal used to do, the abysmal performance of the default VM or just the heavy reliance on monkey patching, but Ruby is not aging very well.
Framing the Entry Level iPhone
There are more than a few steps from surveillance of Facebook accounts to Orwellian dystopia. There is more to 1984 than just surveillance (mind control, etc). Whether one leads inexorably to the other depends in large part on what you think of democracy. If you think that an educated people can be easily manipulated and controlled with doublespeak, as they are in 1984, then some sort of dystopia is likely, and frankly that's the case whether we have a surveillance state or not. If, on the other hand, you think people are mostly rational and capable of determining rationally what sort of world they want to live in, then that will always create a bulwark against tyranny.

I'm personally in the latter camp. I think that a generation of millennials, who don't particularly value privacy and don't see much wrong with the government monitoring certain communications when they voluntarily post every little detail of their lives on Facebook for hundreds or thousands of people to see, are still nonetheless rational people who will stand up against any infringement of the things they really care about: house and home, family, their means of making a living, etc.

My bigger concern is actually with regards to automation and robots. Despotic regimes depend on having military force. That is they only way they can suppress the will of the majority. But soldiers are just people, and pitting soldiers against their own countrymen is an unstable equilibrium in the long term. It's not sustainable in the face of actual public opposition. But automation and robots changes that equation. It makes it possible for a few to rule the many without relying on the inherently unstable situation of trying to keep hundreds of thousands or millions of soldiers loyal to the despots against their own families. To the extent that dystopia keeps me up at night, that's what I worry about, not surveillance.
I hear that. It's nice to have both (money / culture), and certainly one can be traded for the other. Few people go into investment banking or corporate law for the culture (although the culture certainly teaches them that they are "the best") - they are in it for money.

The thing I don't like is when people are misled about the bargain - hearing "we're not about money, we're changing the world, you need to work 18h a day" from someone who will benefit exponentially more from a successful outcome than the slave he's whipping.
Snowden didn't leave the US to escape surveillance (as he's made clear, that doesn't really help). He left to escape a lifetime in prison.
Excellent question. I'd definitely like to know the answer to this. If it isn't classified, that is.
HN is not the world but a tiny microcosm. I am also not sure the profanity in the URL is responsible for the position. The HN title would have been enough if it is indeed the deciding factor of popularity. By using profanity he has shut out every kid trying to learn at school or a person at a library or business sitting behind a filter in order to pander to the programming "elite".
I think most people would prefer the US's version of government oppression to Venezuela's, but might change their mind if they thought they were going to go away for long time if they stayed in the US.
I didn't pickup any attitude. The author is quite up front about his position but I didn't sense that he was belittling those that took an opposing pov, he simply thought they were wrong and attempted to provide evidence (the veracity of the evidence could, howeve, be debatable)
I can think of any number of blog posts that pack more buzzwords per paragraph than this, but your experience may vary. http://mobile.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/d...

To your substantive point, no one skimped on reliability here. The content was pushed into Akamai precisely so it would always be available, quickly, to end users. Reducing servers in this context isn't skimping -- it's saving money by using modern Web tech. Developing this site also wasn't an option, as your comment implies: the law required its development and deployment. If you'd like public funds directed elsewhere, call your Congressional representatives.
Nah, Rails devs are just really excited to finally have their chance to shine in the HN comments ;)
This project will never take off.
What kind of creation are you building that you are expecting to not know which methods are available while running your program?

Well, metaprogramming is all about exactly that kind of thing. Python is a fine language, but it's not cut from the same cloth as Ruby. That's not a value judgement; plenty of sane, creative, and intelligent people use Python. They're simply not the same kind of language.
On front page? Really?
They are. (And generated behind the scenes by "attr_accessor :sanity", if you'd prefer the short version.)

The benefit everything-is-a-message is that you can swap out the implementation of sanity (or sanity=) if needed, eg.

Before:

attr_accessor :radius, :diameter

After:

# Refactored radius to be the new source of truth.
def diameter
radius * 2
end

def diameter=(val)
self.radius = val / 2
end

In PHP (for example), MyClass->diameter and MyClass->diameter() are completely different things. Any existing code (including code you don't control) needs updating to change references from the former to the latter when moving logic into something that was previously static.

This article is flawed by holding up those six lines in themselves as something great, but I think the point the author is trying to get across is valid.
Try listening to Sandi Metz on the Ruby Rogues podcast. It's a longish episode but she'll give you an appreciation for message-passing OO and how it makes an application design more pliable.

In a pinch the (free?) "Barewords" episode of Ruby Tapas will get you close in five minutes.
Welcome to America's War on Democracy.
The website you love to hate about the browser you loved to hate: https://vimeo.com/70004797
And this is what Hacker News is, now? And the first comment, to boot?
It's important to note that this means that your code is instantaneously updated to the cloud with remote box SSH directly from your OS X machine, not that you can somehow virtualize your favorite text editor and use it to edit code from a browser.
You really think less people forget their toothbrush?
Dropbox grows to 175M users, launches platform to ‘replace the hard drive’
It definitely wasn't their whole hardware team. I personally known one EE still at Valve and I think there are a couple more that I follow on various social networks.
If something wrong happens, don't punish the one who did it wrong - work out why the hell it was possible to do it wrong in the first place and solve that.
Mysterious privacy board touted by Obama has deep government ties
The Rise Of The DIY Data Scientist
Glad you like the spaces in names! It's not hard to implement without too much ambiguity. :) There are a few tricks I need to pull to make things like: `if x then y else z` be interpreted correctly.

Fun fact: The slowness is bottlenecked by how fast I can update the text editor - the calculations themselves usually only take 10% of the update time. It's a big area that can be improved.
While I do appreciate the OP's enthusiasm, there is a lot more to love about Ruby than its simplicity. Spend some time learning about metaprogramming, and you may really be impressed.
Most academics don't want to be teachers. They became academics so that they could do research. Many see teaching as a nuisance that "pays the rent", so to speak, and do the absolute minimum in order to scrape by.

Some professors love to teach and everyone remembers them fondly. I had one professor who'd taught about 2/3rds of the courses at my university over the years. You could always tell he'd taught a course in the past because subsequent professors always retained the assignments he'd created -- they were just too good to replace.

I was lucky to have him as my honours supervisor.
Gonna Godwin this one a little:

What if most of the team isn't comfortable with the new hire because they're a woman, or they're black, or they're queer? Is it still implicitly a mistake to 'compromise' on keeping the team comfortable and protecting your culture? This isn't hypothetical, we've had recent examples (Kixeye, Stardock's Wardell, etc).

You simply have no evidence to support a claim that she was the problem. I think it's a bit ridiculous to jump to the conclusion that she was, given the things we all know about the game industry. Lots of other explanations are quite plausible in this scenario.
To add to this: Both of these are things we used to do extensively in PHP, years ago. Not only does that pretty much kill the 'unique' angle the article wants to take, it wasn't a good idea or readable practice back then.

I don't doubt that there really are great reasons to use Ruby; hopefully, when the author figures out what they are, he'll revisit this and contrast the real benefits with this unfortunate cruft.
It also complicates caching: do you cache the response by request, or cache the resources individually by update time (or whatever)?
If you're planning on being uninformed about what's going on around here and how you're missing out on purpose, please stop posting here.
"Even when special expertise defines who is most likely to develop fixes, the big picture view sometimes only afforded to outsiders is important, or sometimes just enough disruption so different voices within the system are heard."

Yes! This is not unlike having a child solve the problem of the 18-wheeler stuck underneath a too-short overpass. Have outsiders review the data, the situation, suggest possible causes and solutions. This extends to so many venues, IMHO, beyond accidents like the Challenger/Feynman, Chernobyl, Fukishima and Asiana Flight 214. Some of the most successful and impressive businesspeople I have know are those that discuss their work with outsiders openly, and really listen to what the outsiders have to say.
Great quote:

What advice would you give companies who want to hire a data scientist?
If you want to hire a juggler for your circus, you would have him juggle for you and see how many things he can juggle. If you are going to hire someone to create predictive models, look at how well predictive their models predict.
Amazing Resources & Useful Tools for Web Designers
There may be other options apart from flat-management versus hierarchical management.

Management is basically there to provide accountability. But peer systems can also provide some accountability.

Semco has an interesting model because they do insane things like allow employees to set their own salary. But your salary will be public, and if you can't prove to your peers on a regular basis that you are still needed, you will be asked to pack up your things.

This is just one of the way that they've delegated management functions downwards, which by all accounts works very well. There is still an official hierarchy but it's more about mediating disputes or very high level strategy.

http://www.freibergs.com/resources/articles/leadership/semco...
Something I feel like I frequently read in these discussions is that Ruby is nice "because it looks almost like English". When I think of people speaking English, I think of people equating quantity with quality, exchanging clarity for context. This is why I vastly prefer Python even though they are really not that dissimilar.
What is this coded in, wouldn't it be possible to create a Linux or something version too?
The reason the cost of healthcare is so high is because medicare pays roughly 15% of a bill, others are somewhere between 20-50% of a bill depending. That is to say if the doctor charges you $40,000 you pay your 10% co-pay of $4,000 and the insurance then only pays maybe another $8,000.

Another reason is the supply of doctors is artificially restricted by the AMA.
How video games use architecture
Thank you for indulging our rather off topic curiosity. Just so I am clear are you saying the reason for the difference in sorting has to do with locale interpretations and is not a bug in sort?
RAM has to be powered.
Sports scientists have pointed out[1] that people who are innately good at a thing will do more of it, with less resistance to training, than people who aren't.

The 10,000 hours are done by people who enjoy a subject or activity enough to do it almost constantly. And that usually comes about because of early successes.

This is sometimes called "talent".

[1] http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/08/talent-training-and-...
yes. that's an amazing piece of research. this article really opened my eyes. after studying that article it's much clearer how healthcare can and should be reformed.
Dealing with your house keys while travelling
He didn't flee the country because of the things he blew the whistle on.
Most of the complaints are around the ascii vs binary. Can we just make it accept both and move on?
I found this article fascinating, more because of the background it gives on the current situation in Venezuela than because of suggestions of Snowden's possible exile there. It truly does sound like Venezuela is close to dystopia, exactly the sort of dystopia that Snowden (and many others before him) have warned about. The routine use of surveillance on television shows to discredit opponents at all levels of the system is terrifying. Who hasn't said something in private which could easily be taken out of context, and used to construct a plausible smear and destroy a career? Even the TV host who abused access to recordings, Mario Silva, was eventually hoist by his own petard - the whole story resembles the show trials and purges under Stalin, where no-one was safe, not even party members.

While this might be useful ammunition for the US administration to smear Snowden by association, and is probably darkly amusing for residents as they watch their government talk about asylum for a whistleblower on the very powers they abuse, I actually think it's far more interesting as an example of a surveillance state gone awry.
> 2. There are very few Ruby shops that aren't just Rails shops.

If you think about all the shops out there using Puppet and/or Chef, there is still a lot of non-Rails Ruby out there (in a roundabout way, I'll admit).
I don't know if it's the lack of types

Ruby is a dynamic language, so no, there are no types as such. There are ways to create types, but if you're doing that a lot, you're probably doing Ruby wrong. It's not meant to have types. Different way of thinking.

the abysmal performance of the default VM

That's a myth, a pervasive one. I'll point you to one source that debunks this, but there are many. http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/06/ruby-is-faster-than-...

the heavy reliance on monkey patching

Monkey patching is generally considered an anti-pattern. I'm not sure what in particular has "heavy reliance" on it, but it's not Ruby's libraries themselves, and it's not Rails. (Metaprogramming is not the same thing as monkey patching.)

Ruby is not aging very well.

IMHO Ruby is just now coming fully into its own, and is, for a young language, just reaching maturity.