skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you can't assume that a property is a property or a function. In other languages, the property versus accessor distinction is more limited and less confusing.

Ruby does not have "properties." All data is private and you interact with objects using messages.

As a user of an object's interface all you need to know is how something behaves when sent various messages. Whether "foo = 12" is really setting an instance variable named "@foo" or something else entirely should be irrelevant. It's an implementation detail.

I realize this sounds possibly condescending and pedantic, but I've seen too many Ruby tutorials that try to present the language in terms of behavior found in other languages where the result is a broken mental model of how Ruby actually works. Hence, confusion.

Unfortunately the conflation of methods that happen to get or set instance variables with the notion of properties (AKA "attributes") has become ingrained.

method_missing, which is a bit of a hack and is at least a double edged sword, makes Ruby rock? Sure, it's handy magic, but it's a pretty dangerous form of magic.

Thinking in terms of messages sent to a receiver, "method_missing" is far less magical. It's more something you'd expect in a message-handling system.
I don't really have a scenario in mind, I'm just thinking that including this with a project means spending another $35 for a wifi or ethernet module (for either shield, it's about the same), the pinouts they'll take up, and the extra code to operate the modules.

But there are many projects with those modules already integrated, and for them this looks like will be basically just a bolt-on of code.
Does anyone know of an OSS alternative to this similar to http://helios.io/ that supports Android/iOS?
Every time I start learning Python, after a few hours I remember "I already know Ruby", and that's the end of that.

I already know it, so it rocks. Python is fun but I already have Ruby. It's just a language and there's nothing I can really do in Python that I can't do it Ruby, and vice-versa (at my level, anyway).

I guess I'm just lucky I have the option of using either instead of say, ______.
What advantage does this have over mounting a network file system (or whatever it's called)?
Gitignores for (almost) every language
Operation troy
Mcaffee just released some pretty interesting infos about the Operation troy and how all the secret of South Korea army went on the black market
I seldom agree with you (I think maybe once), and the first paragraph of this post alone is loaded with statements with which I'd disagree.

But you cannot be accused of being uninteresting.

I mean, you spend so much time here smacking down people's concerns about very real things that are happening in the news as we speak. NSA-spying, growing government power, curtailed liberties, etc. You have a tendency to characterize people on the other side of that argument as conspiracy theorists, or otherwise irrational and on the fringe.

But, what keeps you up at night is the possibility of an army of killer robots controlled by a couple of multi-billionaire megalomaniacs holed up in a subterranean fortress.

Wow.
So the takeaway here is that Ruby is great because it has core OOP concepts built into it? Color me unimpressed.
Could you explain what you mean by "ensure that foreign surveillance is firewalled off from the rest of the government"?
This is exactly it. I would commonly use the shorthand for something like this, but I felt that it would only deter from the point I was illustrating, which is that a couple methods can seamlessly act like a variable.
I would hardly say the performance of the default VM is a myth... just look at performance characteristics under multi-threading and GC pressure.
Awesome, will do.
> and it's not Rails.

Yes it is. ActiveSupport (part of Rails) monkey-patches the core library.
What I like about Ruby: Bundler, Gems, Enumerable, concise syntax, Ruby2, Rspec, RubyMine, Scripting, rbenv/rvm

What I would like to have: better support for concurrency, less memory consumption in production
You might want to participate in https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8564
And Murphy coined his Law after being screwed by a part that was installed upside down!
This reminds me of a comment under the Asiana Flight 214 discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6012214, that outsider views can help. In this case, as in the case of the Mars Climate Orbiter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter), perhaps review of the work by someone who hasn't been scrutinizing it all day would have caught the errors? You stare at the same thing all day, and it's easy to get lost/not see your own mistakes. This can apply to supervisors, who might be inclined not to review their supervisees' work carefully because they always do such good work that it really doesn't occur to them that something this big could go wrong. And at the same time, they may well have been staring at it too long themselves.

And as an aside, isn't the Russian space program always "beleaguered"?
Ruby has many awesome features, like metaprogramming. But methods without parenthesis, method definitions with operators, etc.?

[edit] I am NOT a native English speaker. Is OP's blog supposed to be a joke and I don't get it?
Show HN: Arel inspired/clone Relational Algebra for Go.
"In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out there, with deep interconnections, then there is some really exciting work to be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-level searches." - TimBL
>FISC also doesn't issue opinions on "the meaning of the 4th Amendment"

The FISC most certainly does use the Fourth Amendment as a major part of the justification of it's rulings. The "secret ruling" that the EFF and ACLU are trying to view was a FISC ruling that held that on at least one occasion the government had conducted surveillance that was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment (http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/05/29/ron_wyden...).

> "The most important way the courts have shaped 4th Amendment jurisprudence in the last century is through application of the exclusionary rule in criminal cases."

I think this ignores a large body of civil case law built up around wrongful arrests and vehicular searches. Both of these are examples of active jurisprudence over the last century that directly pertain to Fourth Amendment violations.

A violation of the Fourth Amendment is not acceptable simply because they don't use what they obtained in a criminal proceeding. There are a massive number of ways that the government can harm you with the information they collect without ever filing a criminal case.
GCC has had this warning for a long time. 4.2 certainly does it, and I'm fairly sure I've seen it since at least the 3.x days.
I'm sure it does, but I can write the same class in C# just as easily:

class Person
{
public int Sanity { get; set; }

public Person()
{
Sanity = 50;
}
}

And to call it:

var programmer = new Person();
programmer.Sanity += 1000000;
Console.WriteLine(programmer.Sanity);

I don't see much difference between Person.new and new Person();.

What are the real ways in which it will knock my socks off?
I'm honestly asking. Even though I program C# at work, I'm very interested in the advantages of other languages.
Yes, his is incredibly bad stuff. But let me put it into context:

I would love to read a similar run down on what amount of money, intelligence and human resources the US has pured so far in the Venezuelan opposition.

After the Cuban fiasco these actions became definitely less outrageous, but it seems save to assume that the US is not standing on the sidelines at election time in counties with a US critical government.

Morales' European grounding shows quite clearly what kind of globally coordinate hell the US services can create for countries unwilling to surrender. Consequently almost no democratic nation is able to withstand this kind of internal and external pressure politics - as demonstrated so vividly by the outcome of Snowden's asylum requests.

And it still remains a big question mark in how far these three nations are not just going to use him as a bargaining chip for future negotiations with the US.

I am wondering myself how a nation could theoretically withstand US pressure without having a well oiled internal spying and propaganda machine.
75% Of Buying Decisions Are Made Here
I also found that your second professional job depends heavily on your first professional job, which in turn depends on your GPA.

I wouldn't discount the importance of your GPA.
Consider f(x) = 0. f'(x) = 0, so never changes sign. f has infinitely many zeros.
This isn't necessarily true. I had a 2.9ish GPA as an undergrad history major but I still got into a respectable engineering masters program (NC State) based on career merits. Granted, that was 10 years after I entered the workforce as a technical professional, but even so, there are many ways to reach any given end state, via hard work, excellent communication skills, and [hopefully] a strong network.
Seems like a pretty weak set of arguments - I'm not for or against Ruby but is that really a good "five paragraph" description of why I should learn it and love it?
the German welfare system (healthcare included) is taxing the living hell out of the working families. It's insane. I'm pretty sure that like anything else, there is a ton of beaurocracy in Germany that loves to "list" prices. Unfortunately, in the beaurocracy side of it, the US is in a worse state. Hopefully this is the beginning of free market competition in the healthcare sector.
Generally, I find programs that are useful to me are good places to start. Is this something that you do regularly that could be automated or generalized? I've made programs that help with my classes and sometimes even published them for the rest of the class to use. Is there anything aggravating and repetitive in your major that you think you or others would enjoy no longer dealing with?

Going in a different direction is there some technology that you know of but aren't too familiar with but might be useful later? Learn it by implementing something basic using it.
I think the most interesting page is, of course, http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Bugs.html

There's technology to enable for most webapps (form processing), and search engines right there. And of course, "Gateways: JANET and DECnet for example" are a "Real need."

Really makes you wonder whether the priority decisions you made today will seem similarly ludicrous in 30 years.
Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs.
America is not against democracy. It is about restraining itself from making that whole area over there a glass parking lot. It may come to that, anyway.
Which is why that reference has been included in my comment from the beginning.
Now every Ruby meetup I attend, 99% of the presentations are from web devs about rails and associated infrastructure.

That's pretty much why I lost interest in not just local groups but most online activity.

I use Ruby and JRuby all the time, but for Web dev I'll start with some simple Rack stuff and evolve to a Ramaze app if needed.

Listening to someone discuss installation and assorted config params for a gem that only works with a specific framework is not terribly interesting.

There are some bright spots online, Greg Brown's Practicing Ruby site being a solid example.

https://practicingruby.com
Also, it means we're one step closer to Rep Rap!
Or forget them in the restroom, try e.g. this search https://www.google.com/search?q=cop+restroom+or+bathroom+lea..., it happens quite frequently.
i wrote a synchronous twitter push model. single machine, 4GB RAM x86_64

GIST: push 48 M messages in less than 5 seconds.

some data from experiment:

Total Super Users : 100 Each Super User Follower Count: 1234567

Total Connections Made 123456700 Time To Make NetWork : 32 secs

Making New 40 messages Time To Push 49,382,720 messages : 5 secs

Making New 40 messages Time To Push 49382720 messages : 5 secs

Making New 40 messages Time To Push 49382720 messages : 5 secs

Making New 40 messages Time To Push 49382720 messages : 6 secs

--------------------------

code at : https://github.com/akuchlous/Twitter-TimeLine-Push-Experimen...

--------------------------

with distributed, + twitter constraints (filter messages, links .. etc), 5 seconds seems to be decent.
Looks like standard 80-character wrapping to me. I don't see linebreaks on this file, for instance: view-source:http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Helping.html
They've done a nice job of implementing seamless ssh and tunneling, and it is free to start with. Aside from that, not much.
I admit I'm being myopic here but that's exactly why I ask. In what scenario is a genuine message passing/arbitrary methods useful?

I tend to look through everything in an OOP/type safe way, so the idea of having an unlimited, highly dynamic vocabulary for method calling is very... Foreign to me.

When does this pattern outshine static interfaces?
OK, I'll be more constructive.

>There are various interwoven reasons for this, but the biggest thing that makes Ruby shine in my eyes is its objects

Learn Smalltalk-80. Its been around a long time, and has a rich history.
> true competition can exist.

True competition can always exist unless force is used against someone to stop it (in 99.9% of cases, that's done via government regulation).

> the justice system

The justice system isn't an industry, it's a proper function of government.

> emergency service providers (think fire/hazmat etc)

As someone who has been screwed over by government emergency service providers, I beg to differ.

> Lets not let the bizarre state of the US medical industry act as some sort of straw man to support some ultra libertarian viewpoint.

Actually, lets. The US medical system is a total clusterfuck and is only getting worse. It is hard to get good medical care in the US. There is only one way this complete nightmare could have come about, and that's because people aren't free to act in their own interest.

We could never remotely approach this nightmare in any non-highly-regulated industry.

In fact, practically all non-highly-regulated industries make amazing advances over time, whereas healthcare delivery has seen amazing regress in the last few decades.

This is not an appeal to some ideology that is divorced from reality. The empirical evidence is all on my side, plus a causal explanation for the results. But liberals are covering up their ears and shouting, "We can't (won't) hear you!". As a result, my lifespan and those of my loved ones will likely be significantly curtailed.
Pretty terrifying that Venezuelans have to live without protection of the 4th amendment! So glad that here in America oh wait...
"each of those sensors had an arrow that was suppose to point towards the top of the vehicle"

It's a little unbelievable to me that aerospace designers today would design a part who's only means of ensuring proper installation and alignment is a sticker with an arrow.

If it was truly the case the error was one of engineering and not the fault of the technician who installed the parts. Engineers working on such projects should not make these kinds of mistakes.

As an EE I had to learn mechanical design on my own. I quickly learned that it is paramount to have DFM (design for manufacturing) become a part of your design DNA. You need to think DFM for every little part you design. You need to think assembly for every little part you are designing. You need to ensure that parts or assemblies can be put together almost by a blind person and do so correctly.

The tools available are simple: Alignment pins, unequally spaced holes, alignment tabs or machined features, unidirectional mating or clamping methods, non-rotatable insertion of sliding elements (d-pin into d-hole), etc.

The same is true of EE design. Don't make a bunch of connectors exactly the same unless swapping the cables or daughterboards that mate with them is OK. One common technique is to use different pin count connectors. If a connector is reversible (such as a pin header used for, say, an RC servo) you need to make sure that reversing whatever mates to it will not cause damage. A more sophisticated approach, when it can be justified, is to make smart connectors that can deal with reversals by actively flipping signals around as required --common on ethernet switches and routers that can deal with straight and flipped signal pair cables.

Again, I find it hard to believe that aerospace engineers would make such a basic error. You never know.
Reading Ruby code makes me happy, reading Haskell code makes me want to pull all my hair out. Enough said.
I personally love the fact that it's all method-based. IME at least it shouldn't matter whether something is a property or a method. All I care about is the state change or return value or exception thrown.
I'm stunned that nobody has made one of these that's CLI based and scriptable...
Original source article: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/proton_glonass49.html
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

Where are you getting this idea from? I'm a millennial, I value my privacy. Most of my non-CS/IT friends also care about their privacy. The key difference is that they had been unaware up 'til now that giving your data to Facebook meant giving your data to the gov't. They had weird, inchoate notions about what it means to share and what some potential implications of that can be.

A recent Pew poll said 6% of Americans use Reddit. Reddit is overwhelmingly used by millennials, so just from there you get some idea of where millennials stand on this: and I think it's pretty clear (there's almost certainly some NSA-related post on frontpage any given day nowadays), they're not happy with their privacy being violated.
And with C# 4 dynamics you can even pull off that method_missing routine.
And your sensible, viable alternative country is?
Adam Devine's advice for young people: 'Don't go to college, follow your dreams'
http://tree.io/en/download says Creative Commons but in the repo .README it says MIT.
Thanks. Off topic but slightly related if I'm going to rely on your service as a developer: as an engineer at Dropbox, can you tell me why I am seeing random photos that are not mine in my dropbox Photos folder? And does this mean that other people get to see my random photos? Edit: only on iOS. And maybe it's not a "folder" per se, it's the second tab from the left at the bottom of the screen.
You always prepare for the last war you fought, but that's never what actually hits you.
How Government Regulations Saved Lives On Asiana Airlines Flight 214
I'm not considering big rig trucks as inherently more "valid" participants of traffic than passenger cars. I just consider any road where two types of vehicles of very different sizes which behave very differently to be an inherently unsafe and inefficient road for all participants. Obviously, the occupants of the larger vehicles are much safer in collisions with the smaller vehicles, but that's not my primary consideration...
As I've gotten more experienced, I've found it hard to work with people who don't optimize for safety and efficency...not because I'm a worrywart, but because experience had shown that fucking up (royally) is much less likely caused by lack of skill, industriousness, or moral character, than by unforeseen weaknesses, stress, and cascading errors. Virtually every ER surgeon has spent more energy and time into their work than I have in mine, and every day they deal with life and death, and yet failing to wash their hands is not a rare occurrence...why should I think I'm any more foolproof?
I'm not sure this really sells what's best about Ruby. Python and many other languages offer very similar tools, and the example given is nowhere near idiomatic Ruby anyway - it should be using attr_accessor as others have pointed out. I can't see that this is markedly different from many other languages which now have shortcuts for accessors.

method_missing is interesting because it has been criticised in projects like Rails, precisely because it leaves you with an API which isn't documented explicitly in the code. As Rails matures they've moved away from dynamic finders, and more towards defined methods which take options, so instead of

Post.find_all_by_xxx or Post.find_by_xxx

People often use:

Post.where(xxx)

I've never been tempted to use it explicitly myself, in quite a few years of using Ruby, it just feels too hacky somehow and too akin to monkey-patching, another early Ruby practice which Rails has moved away from.

In contrast I do love the automatic accessors (not as shown in this post) in Ruby and the philosophy that everything should be as simple and predictable as possible, just having to edit header files is so jarring when going back to something like Obj-C. Ruby feels comfortable to me mostly because of the attitude of the language and the standard library which is pretty surprise free and covers most of the bases, but it's not markedly superior or different IMHO from other languages like Python, and choosing between them is really a matter of taste.
So because there is a "threat" from a foreign nation, the government is allowed to spy on its citizens critical of the government and expose them and ridicule them live on national TV?

Sounds very similar to the "terrorist threat" excuse another surveillance state is using.
Google "nicaragua neighborhood watch". It doesn't need to be high tech.
Snowden never claimed to be an idealistic saint. He's only human. He's facing the same, or worse, inhumane treatment as Bradley Manning [1]. I doubt he really cares at this point the politics of the country that keeps him safe. I know I wouldn't.

Besides, if this whole ordeal can even partially force the US to return to being the shining beacon of human rights it pretends to be, it'll be harder for countries like Venezuela to point to them and say "see? Look they're doing it too."

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-...
>As I understand it, the warrant process used in domestic criminal law is also not adversarial, implying somewhat that the second part of the topic sentence of this graf might mislead.

No. What you're missing here is that he is not speaking about the FISA court's warrant process being non-adversarial. He is saying that the process by which laws and permissions are being extended to the NSA/government is based solely on the representations of the government, without rebuttal. That's what's non-adversarial.

It's a huge distinction. Effectively, laws are being created based solely on the statements of the government. The example he gave:

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the "special needs" doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.
And yet, his book on the subject, published that year [QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter] does about as good a job explaining it to the average person as humanly possible.
From the intro to the 2006 edition: "According to Feynman, to learn QED you have two choices: you can go through seven years of physics education or read this book".
Collaborative screen sharing with two cursors? Engelbart would be happy.

http://screenhero.com/
Spanish Sub Too Heavy Thanks to Math Mistake
Ellsworth's comment about the workplace being akin to high school is what I've found almost all my workplaces to be like.
This doesn't make sense - the apps that aren't in the list of the top 300,000 downloaded apps may not get many downloads as far as we know, but without further information, how can you arbitrarily declare that as the threshold for "zombieness"?

Realistically though, it is really hard to get some attention in the App Store nowadays, and Apple really should build some mechanism into the store to combat this.