skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Drupal or Joomla?
I have won a contract to build a site. Given enough freedom I would have chosen to implement it in RoR. Because the features that will be required in there are best built with RoR.

But the client wants to me to use either Drupal or Joomla.
I have worked with Joomla and I know whatever he is asking for is doable with Joomla. But with significant amount of Pain.

I hear that Drupal is framework rather than a CMS. Since people call it a framework I felt that it might be easier to implement my project in Drupal rather than Joomla.

Can a wise man quickly tell me the difference between Joomla and Drupal?
Proggit has gotten terrible of late.
Reading Hacker News?
Yeah, sure. Good luck with that defense.
Yes but those generally require more than a birth certificate to get as well.

Also you can get a state ID card if you're not licensed to drive, with generally similar ID requirements. But they may vary by state.
I'm sure you could take a grant from telecom providers.
Those resources won't really help you to learn much! Do something that requires an attention span! I have started reading SICP when I have a free hour to goof off. I also have it bookmarked on my phone.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html

I recently switched from coffee to green tea, and I am amazed at how much more information I can absorb, because my attention span is longer. I actually think it's analogous to the NFL, where rookies aren't any good until "the game slows down for them", well live has slowed down for me!
So remember Tom Williams? Looks like there is a little more to the story
Friends challenge you to quizes on facebook... why not 25 pushups. Not only make it a stats analysis, but make it a game, offer rewards for activities, let your friends (or trainer) put a bounty on certain activities.
I've always thought Warren Buffett's early partnership model was far more intelligent (for the LP at least): he received nothing if he delivered less than a 6% per year return, which he justified because it was a reasonable rate an investor could achieve at low risk, and 25% of all profits above and beyond that 6%. He only ever earned anything if he was generating returns for his clients.

I've never understood what justification GPs use to charge 2% management fees. Imagine you could just sit around and earn 2% on other peoples' money, year in and year out! If your fund is big enough, actually earning returns on your LP's invested dollars is just a way to get richer, but not necessary to get rich.
Emphasizing Specialization
Professional Tree Company, Certified Arborists, Heath Tree Service, Atlanta, GA
Since 1959, Heath Tree Service has provided a variety of tree services for Atlanta area homes and businesses. Certified Arborists specializing in pruning, tree removal, bracing, cabling, fertilization, and preventive care and treatment programs for diseased and insect-infected trees.
Good point, I didn't consider that interpretation. I'll hand that one back over to the copywriters for refactoring.
Massif, a heap profiler
You know what's funny... no ones talking about a bank but you. For most apps built by most startups, Oracle is absurdly expensive, so yes, it doesn't scale well.
Gmail and Other Google Apps Finally Shed ‘Beta’ Label
I like the idea ... I'll probably get lambasted for this, but I think it's something that would work well built on top of Twitter. That would make it easy to keep tabs on your family/friends, plus it might have more potential to get viral.

My thinking is that it would work well with a game/challenge aspect to it ... earning points, trying to keep up with a friend, beating your mile time, etc.

Good stuff ...
I used to have big problems with bracing styles, but for me modern text editors have basically solved them. I can match braces and colorize code, so pretty much anything is readable.

And ultimately, consistency is most important. Your "style" only matters when you're starting your own project; I really hate it when people let their personal disagreements chop up a source file.
Microsoft Warns of Serious Computer Security Hole
CPU core. Not CPU (which is generally taken to mean CPU die).
not really - I used K&R in PHP which got me in the poor habit of compressing any code. :)
This sounds somewhat similar to Pushup Fu, except theirs is competitive:

http://www.gymfu.com/
So did you get this done? I was on http://code.google.com/p/hackerexchange/ and I see nothing.
Not what I expected - interesting point.
A Reactive Model-based Programming Language for Robotic Space Explorers
Drupal is about 1000x more extendable than joomla.

I used to solely develop sites in joomla, moved to drupal, and will be moving to RoR.

The freedom drupal allows is like night and day over joomla.
> the GNU folks - those "first kernel developers")

First kernel developers like Linus, Ted, Randy etc aren't really GNU folks.
Note: The closed form solution is given in the article.
An Agile Bibliography
Social Network Marketing Meets Small Business
You have a point, I guess it would be impossible to define a better format for use with the Office package. (Sadly, that wasn't a joke.)

I talked about compatibility in another comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691268
Daring Fireball: Mobile Phone Keyboards
Sheesh, and scribd.com too.
Definitely Haskell. May I add one more resource for learning it that worked great for me, the official "Gentle Introduction to Haskell":

http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/

For those already proficient with programming that just wnat to pick up Haskell, it's ideal.

Then I would suggest an exercise that involves manipulating abstract syntax, for example parsing and interpreting a little language. ("Build yourself a Scheme..." might be good though I didn't read it myself.) This is where the language really shines, and you don't need any of the recently popular trickery like arrows or GADTs.
Look mom/wife/mother-in-law we are in the news!
It's interesting quite how much "defensive" blog content those couple of HN comments sparked off.
I think you could summarize this article as "Gamer dislikes griefers, thinks gaming is serious business". It sounds like it was partially on the game designers to limit this griefing activity and make this character able to be killed. The professor's purpose was to study this community and in doing so he put it under stress and watched it react. I think this is valid research given that no one was actually hurt-just annoyed.

It seems like this guy should be more upset with the developers who did nothing (that's cited in the article) to stop this.
The Rise of the Modular Robot: A Review in Videos
Gmail is out of beta
It works in non-lazy languages, too... it just happens to be a waste of cycles. :-)
I can't really complain about them. I used one this weekend and it saved me from having to buy a very expensive train ticket. In normal instances the shortest route between 2 points is a straight line. Which would have taken me through a very busy downtown. The Satnav had me drive 5 minutes out of my way to find an artery and saved me 30 minutes. I arrived at the station with 10 minutes left.

If I had chosen the logical route I might still be waiting for the next train.

Also, if you are in unfamiliar territory local knowledge is useless. And if you are local then the navigation is barely useful.
It is indeed. I took a look into David Baines and have to say, Im not seeing him as a bad guy here..

Yeh he's a bulldog and yaps about a hell of a lot - but when he calls Bullshit hye usually appears to be correct (though sometimes takes it a bit far by extension).

(edit: some background -> http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/top-stories/2005/07/01/mo...)
I'm have a skunkworks port of part of my company's software to a different hardware platform. In addition to being fun, and interesting for performance comparisons, it's also a useful discipline for keeping the code portable.
I think this would have been a good addition if you were able to merge/interface this into some existing todo/task management platforms.... for example push tasks to Remember the Milk or Google tasks when they have an API.

It would have been wonderful addition to "I want sandy", (although not sure if they already had some auto-prioritizing feature).
If a "promise" holds any weight in court, why do contracts ever have to be written and signed?
How? Giving f(N) in terms of f(N) hardly seems useful, in any language. (It's hard to tell if you're joking without a smiley.)
The original study is entirely valid research and fascinating to boot.

I'm looking forward to reading the book.
Almost any response was guaranteed fairly decent coverage from news.yc.
Years ago, Massif used to have a nice feature where it would print out a postscript graph of the memory usage vs time.

This, sadly, seems to be gone. (Along with exp-omega, the leak checker that would tell you on what line you leaked the object, as well as the line that it was allocated. I really miss that one, and actually have an old version of valgrind installed so that I can use it.)
I like this idea. This really reminds me of the whole sort of "social" aspect of traditional games that we're seeing (I'm seeing it mostly on iPhone games but I'm sure it's happening on Xbox Live and PSN). Specifically I'm talking about "Achievements". In traditional games it might be "Finish the first 5 levels without losing any health". In your wellness "game" it could be "Do 25 pushups for 5 days in a row". Getting this "achievement" would display on your profile. I think Foursquare does this with "Merit Badges".

There is the problem of having everything run on the honor system though. No way to keep people from just saying they've accomplished the task.
Ask HN: Please (re)review my startup - CrowdMind.com
Hey Guys,

A few weeks ago I posted for a review of my startup, and got some really good feedback. We went back and re-designed the site to be more intuitive and easy to use. Please take a look and provide some feedback.

Things I am interested in:

1. Would you use this service?

2. Are you a contributor or a reader?

3. What is the best way to grow and maintain a community?

4. Should we focus on a particular domain (Technology, Travel, etc.)?

Example Decisions to take a look at:

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/55_What_Is_The_Best_Fitness_Website_To_Track_Progress

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/65_What_Is_The_Best_Iphone_App_For_Twitter

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/70_When_Should_You_Seek_Funding_For_Your_Web_Startup

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/69_What_Is_The_Best_Website_For_Plane_Tickets

About CrowdMind:

CrowdMind is a collaborative decision making tool. We imagine a better way to make decisions, one where you can start by finding similar decisions that you can reuse as a template. Where you can pull in all the things the people before you learned about the options you are considering and what matters to you. Where you can reach out to your friends and to the crowd, find out what they think. Where everyone who is part of that decision can rate what's important to them and you can see what your overall collective best option is.
Believe it or not, budgets are a reality. We use a lot of foss software to build our services and we pay for other essential tools. So which one are we... moochers, or not?
Clickable Links:

http://alpha.crowdmind.com

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/55_What_Is_The_Best_Fitn...

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/65_What_Is_The_Best_Ipho...

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/70_When_Should_You_Seek_...

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/69_What_Is_The_Best_Webs...
It's almost like they just wanted to ruin palsecam's argument: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691365
Due to the nature of our products, offsite hosting is not an option -- so really we're talking about $2500/month.
Michael Lewis on A.I.G.
Code may be trivial, but it's still the critical path.

Even if you do everything else well, your chances of success decrease geometrically with the crappiness of your code. Or...

Success = (A+B+C+...+Z) * SQ^2

where SQ is Software Quality and A thru Z are everything else.
It's been 8 days, that's the equivalent of 4 weekends. It must be 4 times better than SO by now.
True. I was actually looking forward to see the guy attempt the "clone". For all the meta discussion about what exactly "clone" completely entails simply the idea of trying to roll out something along the same lines in a weekend is intriguing.

Could it be done? How would it go down? Would working processes change? Is there stuff to learn about the development process that speed highlights?

It could make a great discussion!
I've been thinking about something similar. There are a number of different items that help make up what I would consider to be a 'good day'. (this will vary from person to person)

1. Exercise - Did I run or bike?

2. Food - Did I eat healthy and moderate amounts?

3. Budget - Did I not spend too much money?

4. Personal work - Did I focus and spend my time wisely?

For me a 'good day' is doing well in 3 of those categories, and making up for any lapse the following day. A 'great' day is excelling in all 4 categories. (I get about 1-2 great days and 2-3 good days a week)

I've been thinking of building a simple pocket watch type thing that I can enter 'good' or 'bad' for a couple different categories. It then maintains a running balance that let's me know if I'm in the positive or negative overall, for the day, week, and per category.

My point being, a website that let's me know if I'm 'up' or 'down' would be cool, kinda like a highly inaccurate weight watchers, but more like 'life watchers'.
I believe he meant a direct response to the 'in a weekend' claim itself. Which he doesn't respond to, aside from citing Benjamin Pollack.

The rest of his post is more of what we've had in every thread on the subject: Doing It vs Doing It Well

(edit: sp)
It is astonishing how few people I take seriously anymore, precisely because of this. Most blog posts I read now seem to have a blatant typo in the first paragraph, if not first sentence. It's profoundly irritating. If I can read my drafts 50 times before publishing them, couldn't others be buggered to read them once?
I'm with the professor on this one. If you can't play-act like a villain, or a villainous hero, in a game about heroes and villains, then what the hell is the fantasy world of gaming giving other than all the worst weaknesses and faults of the real world?

Have any of the detractors stopped to think that perhaps their sense of community and socializing isn't what all gamers want? Societies values are not always intrinsically good. The fantasy world of gaming gives a person the chance to transcend normal forces and values, within the rules of the given fantasy world.

It is entirely fitting that this experiment was done in a world of heroes and villains. The majority want to claim a moral prerogative to insist on status quo, just like in the real world, when far fewer of the foundational reasons for the status quo exist. Your real world nor fantasy world freedoms, life, limb, rights are not affected by a rule-abiding player who entered a fantasy world to play out their fantasy of heroes and villains. The genuine and rule-abiding fantasy players rights are impinged by the majority rule.

A summary of wrongs here, (1) death threats conducted in the real world against a player who played the intended fantasy in the fantasy world (2) support by the majority of enforcing real world rules as if they had the same weight and imperative in the game world which was being used by design (3) Editorializing in the title of this post, and not least (4) a direct accusation of dishonesty which constitutes a personal attack in the title of this post.

If we transcend mob rule and the establishment for a moment, step into the realm of ethics and what is truth, necessary and unnecessary social norms and rules versus individual rights, we find a sad sad tale of the majority wanting to forcing their way on every individual in an mis-balanced sense of societies rights and needs.

Kill my karma, if you must, establishment supporters, but it's the professor, not the establishment, who has my support.
Jeff's conclusion reminded of an adage I read recently about creative work (pardon me for paraphrasing and savagely butchering the author's idea -- I can't seem to find the source now): "Creative work of high quality is not the end. The real work stars once you're done with your work, for making people interested and know about it is as important as your creation itself." In other words, the real work starts once you're done coding.
The Rise of the Data Scientist
You're not going to get "most of the advantages" of Erlang in a language that includes imperative OOP and runs on the JVM. The reliability of Erlang is built around features like:

* Upgrading code while it's running. In Erlang, this works because all program state is explicitly passed as parameters to a tail-recursive main loop, so there's a clear place where one version of the code can cleanly take over the state from a previous version. This won't work in a language with singletons, and mutable objects that mix code and data.

* Modularizing a program into tens or even thousands of lightweight shared-nothing processes. Erlang can do this efficiently because of key properties of the language and VM. For example, the entire language and all of its libraries use persistent or copy-on-write data structures, so that processes can share memory without sharing mutable state. This won't work in a language that's interoperating with Java libraries, and whose own data structures aren't 100% immutable.
Hah, I thought the exact same when I saw this!
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-apps-is-out-of...
Mousing off the "rate" buttons in the good bad columns doesnt hide the options again. No biggie - it just looks a bit odd when moving the mouse around.

(I wouldnt use the site, not my thing, so usability comments are all I can contribute :))
Reiterating common sense is not scholarship, systematically measuring it is.
We've already seen a partial mea culpa from the original author of the comment. His project[1] now suggests StackOverflow can be cloned in "over the course of the[sic] weekends", instead of, you know, already being finished.

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/hackerexchange/
Does anyone have additional hints for #27?
I never thought I'd live to see the day-- I figured this would be something for my grandchildren's children to joke about.
I learned a new word!

Vitriol:

1a. See sulfuric acid.

1b. Any of various sulfates of metals, such as ferrous sulfate, zinc sulfate, or copper sulfate.

2. Bitterly abusive feeling or expression.
Well, we had a compilers class in college in which the professor told us to compulsorily use the K&R style or he would cut marks(!!). He even made his TA write a C code which would check whether we were following the code style. So mischievous as we were, my friend and I used yacc and flex and wrote something which would make code, written in any style, into the K&R style and sent it to all our friends, that was really fun :)
The technology for sat-nav, in other words, was around for several years before it was developed. All these different inventions simply needed to be brought together.

The computer revolution hasn't happened yet. It's still in progress. In any tech revolution, culture lags tech. Galois fields were around for well over a century before we figured out the practical use for them. The electric arc was discovered in 1802, and we still might find additional uses for it. (Relatively low-tech high-impulse+thrust drives using electric arcs to superheat hydrogen.)
Short n' Snarky

1) Technical skills are all the same as web dev in general.

2) Building product.

3) You are at the right place.

Seriously, from a pure dev perspective, it is just web dev. The biggest difference comes in on the product design side -- breaking from 1:M to M:N as a central aspect of the product is surprisingly difficult mental shift to make if you are used to a more traditional "here is an app or some info for you."
It seems like you could easily build this into idea into remember the milk, or something similar.

Just have your 'to-do list' be all your possible wellness tasks.
Already!?
here's a more future-proof link to the article

http://technologizer.com/2009/07/06/im-an-ex-xm-subscriber/
Google Grows Up; Removes Beta Tag from Gmail and Other Apps
2009: The Year of LBS (Location-Based Services)
caveat: I have done no deep research on HTML 5, but I work with AS3 and JS daily.

The whole web space is just client/server distributed computing environment with relatively thin clients and high powered, cluster back ends. AS3 or JS is just as much a programming language as C or Java, particularly AS3. They're converging to the new JS standard anyway. I looked at the w3 HTML5 page and it still looks like HTML is the view component. My understanding of UI work is that it's general best to break it up into the view for displaying stuff, the model of what is in the view and the controller that mediates user action and model changes and keeps the view in synch. So that is one problem to address and if HTML5 is also trying to be a proper programming language, it shouldn't. Programming is about managing what data is in ram and how to manipulate that data, coordinate communications with other computers and signal changes to low level view components. Maybe AS3 and JS will merge, maybe HTML5 will give some scripting language as well but if it's not one of the EcmaScript varients, why are they reinventing that wheel? We need a solid view component and we need a good engine to render it in. The flash VM is a pretty good choice with a solid API, maybe it will standardize to something else in the future but it's what we have now. There's only so much that a typical view component can do, they're usually easy to swap out if your code is designed properly (or easy-ish typically). I think the flash VM is a stable, well supported environment and I'm quite skeptical that HTML5 will replace it anytime soon.
What I don't get is why the game developers did not fix the loopholes in the system.

I am also skeptic of the research motives. "People get angry if you annoy them" - hope it wasn't funded with tax payer money...
I guess they would have been unable to capture a section of the corporate market with the beta tags.
Ask HN: Review My App (Simple Group Chat)
Hi. If it's not too much trouble, I'd like some feedback on a super simple AJAX chat app that I coded up in my spare time. It's called Yakeze.

I'm aware of the excellent Mibbit, but I was shooting for something even more simple. I also have what I think is a unique feature that puts people into the same room based on the HTTP referrer. That is, if you follow this link, you'll all end up in the same chatroom:

http://www.yakeze.com/chat/

Here are some other useful "tricks": http://www.yakeze.com/help/

Like I said, it's very simple by design, but please be honest with any criticism or ideas you may have. And feel free to use it too!

Thanks!

P.S. If anyone is interested, the back-end is powered by Google App Engine (Python).
the problem is that assert is defined so that if NDEBUG is defined, it's a no-op.

I'd use an explicit check and an abort() call.
ive been ignoring that "beta" label forever. completely forgot about it. huh.
Hmm - apparently links in the summary aren't automatically created. Here's the referrer link example again:

http://www.yakeze.com/chat/
I have created a related twitter bot a while ago: http://twitter.com/officeworkout

It twitters a random exercise for screen workers every 30 minutes.
remind me of http://www.hunch.com/
I just take a card from the Hopper deck:
http://thehopperdeck.com/

Anyway, I like the SMS part - it makes it accessible for people with old mobile phones and it's very simple, too. Maybe if a competitive factor is built in, it's a win.
clicky link: http://www.yakeze.com/chat/

> puts people into the same room based on the HTTP referrer

That's a cool feature! Unique as you say.

It's a teeeeny bit slow for me but it could be this machine (it wont play youtube vids w/o locking up anything else)