skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course there's nothing actually magic about it, because you can read the source. As with any large system, it's quite impenetrable in places, but I do suspect some of the design choices have made it more complex than it could be.

Trying to make a "literate" DSL which reads as much like English as possible means using it can become subtly surprising, as well as complicating the framework implementation. I am questioning the trade-off of terse readable code vs slightly more verbose code which is still readable but uses predictable language features.

That said, I like Rails, and it works very well for the things it's designed to do.
Happy users tend to share links with friends, and depending on the site, contribute content. If keeping a user happy means a decline in impressions and a bump in click-though rate, so be it.
Apache (originally NCSA HTTPd) was originally written by Robert McCool. He also drafted the initial CGI specification.

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

http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/people/robm/
A canary is a kind of bird. The parent poster is alluding to the phrase "canary in a coal mine". Coal miners supposedly carried caged birds down the shafts as fore-warning of suffocating conditions or gases, as the small bird would be affected before the humans. The generic idea here is to use a cheap sensor to check for impending failure in a system.
I have only clicked an ad once in my life. I was searching Amazon but couldn't find anything suitable. Then I noticed they were showing me an ad from a 3rd-party site for exactly what I was looking for. I clicked it, and bought the product. So at this rate, ads help me out about once every 15 years.
"It's like hitting on women at a funeral."

Am I the only person who was reminded of Ryan O'Neil? (For those who don't know, he accidentally hit on his own daughter at his SO's funeral not long ago.)

But back to the point, I agree that exploiting Google's desire to be sensitive is tacky.
If you don't understand the difference between "public" and "private" methods, no amount of object orientation is going to help you. Note also that Rails isn't even close to the first environment to use public scope to export methods.
has anyone got info on 'piggy backing' on google to create a search engine that shows a subset of the google items, where of course the subset doesn't include irrelevant advertisements, etc? google would try to stop it, i suspect, but might have difficulty getting help from the courts, since such an alternative engine would be basically a provider of pointers to someone else's content, which is of course what google is.
Am I the only one who is disappointed to see this rise to the top of HN with 32 points?
If you're driving, I'd recommend a brief detour to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It's just off 101, next to Microsoft and Google. On the weekend you can see a Babbage engine run, and on the first and third Saturday of the month a PDP-1 fully restored and running Space War (and the docents doing the demos are the guys who wrote Space War, among other awesome stuff).

Schedule:

http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/

I go every month or two, whenever a friend is in town who hasn't visited. It's always fun.

It's no startup, but it is an enlightening experience for an entrepreneurial nerd. Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, you know?
After working there for 12-20 years they may have more invested in the company than just punching a time clock each day. 20 years is actually a pretty full career. So, are EDS employees being treated as second class citizens due to being outsiders who were later acquired, or are the cuts equal across the board or proportional to performance?
Fast vector graphics word art with HTML canvas
Wow, what a great way to arbitrarily lower the quality of the applicant pool you end up with.
I dislike what I'm about to say, as I'm way newer than you, but please refrain from putting this kind of thing on HN, especially with the inflammatory remark.

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Rails has a more explicit method for hiding controller methods: hide_action. It sounds like the author wants to add methods explicitly instead.

You could also use routes for this. I never use the default ':controller/:action/:id' route in my apps.

It could get around the issue of having methods that clash with Object. #profile is a hilarious one, don't try it :)

Anyways, the author makes some valid points I suppose. One suggestion to make #layout more obvious would be using ruby Method objects:

layout "foo" # loads 'layouts/foo.html.erb'

layout instance_method(:foo) # calls #foo to get the layout string

EDIT: I'm not really serious with this suggestion -- but I can see how the difference between a string and a symbol could get confusing. Fortunately, this topic is documented pretty well too: http://rails.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Layout...
I ignore them, but the links to interesting stories from sites of my interest I click on them frequently.

Ads to a blog post I guess those are what you'd call them?!?
Old to us maybe, but the author probably had more of a consumer audience in mind. I'm not sure how it got on the front page here though.
Definitely. Convenience is key for digital goods. I could never bring myself to install iTunes, but I spend -loads- of money on amazon mp3, because it's as convenient as any regular download link, it just happens to charge me money. The downloader for amazon mp3 (which isn't even required for single songs) is also extremely lightweight compared to iTunes.
Please define "monster hit"
The "I Made Something People Want" t-shirts are actually for purchase. You have to be Google,etc. and armed with 7-8 figures :-D. Shipping is free at least.
phew. I wasn't sure if you were being ironic or not.
I sometimes feel guilty because they may adversely affect my work.

This is the difference between people who are creative for a living and people who merely wish to be creative while earning a living. For 95% of programming work, if you're reasonably bright and experienced, getting it done boils down to the very difficult and subtle art of not being bored to the point of depression. Creativity requires the opposite art: being easily bored, tormented by the familiar. That would make any programmer miserable and unproductive.
On one hand, I hate the fact that comments can be edited after they're replied to, because the whole context can be changed.

On the other hand, I'll often edit comments rapidfire for about 45 seconds to a minute after I submit to clarify or clean up grammar. It would kill me if the remnants of my sloppy editing were stuck there forever. I suppose I should just use the delay setting.

Either way, I don't know if it's that huge a deal. Miscommunciation happens; there's no reason we can't give people the benefit of the doubt.
I use Thunderbird to check my GMail. Am I freeloader now too?
I really can't take anything Steve Ballmer said there. He claims:

>> any changes in reported share numbers are just "a rounding error." Share gains by Apple "cost us nothing,"

but then he says:

>> "Hopefully, we’ll take share back from Apple. But they still sell only 10 million PCs a year, so it’s a limited opportunity."

They haven't lost market share to Apple, but they're going to take it back? That makes no sense. And his attempts to make their market share sounds good are laughable.

And can anyone explain how raising netbook prices ISN'T going to result in the same situation cited in the article, where Acer/Linux netbooks undercut Vista? Seriously - if there is an explanation, please explain it, because I don't understand it. To me it just sounds like a random decision because they're desperate for something to say to their stock holders.
Re: that Credit Suisse analysis:

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090617/credit-suisse-fa...
Dota irc - Recherche Google
The thing that bothers me most is that Google's [..] trying to be sensitive.
If the site charges per ad served and you never click, you merely shift the 'ethical burden' of 'stealing from the website' to '"stealing" from the guy who paid for ads'.
Ah...

Enlightenment! There is a method to the madness of those insane autocrats who demands ridiculous things...

The thing is, it is madness all the same...
Have you ever read, in any of his rants, criticism of coworkers or subordinates?
1) Why doesn't he do it, if it's so "easy"?

2) If someone started doing this wouldn't all the big players just ante up and play the same game?
I am very aware he meant domestic. Its not a valid argument to only select violence in your own neighborhood/state/country when you are discussing if someone exhibits radical behavior. It just makes you a wealthy radical.
'For example, the View code is executed in a different context to the Controller, yet the @instance variables are magically available, along with the magically included helper modules.'

What - what? How is this magic? How else could this possibly be implemented without breaking MVC?
Microsoft identifies 37Signals and Ruby on Rails as competitors
hopefully you are already separating creation of a program from coding it. if you are not making the separation, you will find any programming language a visit to hell. with this separation, use of most programming languages is a pleasant diversion.
And without the government backstop, your savings would not exist today (and anyone else with cash in a money market or savings account).

The chain of collapse without a backstop is not a robust argument in general, becuase at the point you say Morgan, etc. fail without a government backstop and then try to assume that those firms were the only (or majority) beneficiaries, it becomes shaky. Why? Because if the banks failed as you described, nearly most would have as well and then anybody holding cash in a bank (read all of us sans the mattress crowd) would have been in horrendous trouble. Remember, the government had to backstop not just investment banks, but money market funds as well (which were failing due to the related crisis of confidence issues). Remember the northern rock episode with huge lines of people unssucessfully trying to withdraw their money in the UK?

Imagine not being able to withdraw your cash from a money market or savings account. Banks being structurally exposed to runs and therefore requiring government backstops is actually a well understood issue. The point is we all benefited from the federal backstop, and this argument that, why should banks benefit from an implied or explicit backstop ignores the fact that all of us are backstopped by this as well, whether you realize it or not. Nobody can claim that people keeping their life savings in a money market or savings account and earning 5% interest a year is not also implicitly benefiting from government backstops in general, so let's not single out the investment banks in this case.

As for AIG, this has been discussed in infinite more detail so the interested reader can look up articles on this, but the essence of the point is that of the 13 billion owed, most of it was already collateralized (which means they would have just kept the US treasury collateral had AIG collapsed). Yes, there was a smaller portion that was hedged via CDS that could have failed as insurance, but let's not claim this is the entire 13 billion, in fact, it was far from that. And let's also remember had CDS truly failed it would have reflected a state of the world where most banks were in default, and forget about some investment bank not being able to collect their insurance, we are talking about ATMs not working anymore at this point. So the point is the backstop prevented things from getting to this nightmare, saving banks but also the rest of us as well.
one thing to keep in mind: there is no distributed filesystem (HDFS in Hadoop's case). So depending on your workload, you may need to make a choice about which DFS to use along side Disco.
All mp3 players used to be like that, remember paying $100 for a 32Mb version.
"Apple caved when it came to developing full blown apps for the iPhone due to the outcry from developers. Remember, they originally only wanted to allow Safari based development."

I personally don't think that this is true. I don't think they did develop the full SDK for the iPhone from the point when the reaction to "Safari only apps" was bad. They just were not finished with the SDK. Apple does this a lot. They only release stuff which is reasonably ready to be released. A half-assed release of the SDK would have been worse than a late SDK IMHO.
I thought part of the value of RedBox was in driving store traffic. Maybe you'd go to the grocery store once a week to buy groceries, but if you're also grabbing $1/day videos from them, you'll come back sooner to return your video. And while you're there, maybe you buy more groceries - and if you pick up a new video that time too, you'll be back again.

It was originally conceived by McDonald's for exactly that reason. Does anyone know if redbox pays to be placed in stores, or vice-versa? I'd love to know if they're subsidized for the traffic they bring to stores. That's something netflix can't do.
Do you have any stats on that?

I never click on ads, but I know impressions do work on me, lodging brand names into my head and all that.

It seems a bit odd to me if advertisers suddenly start ignoring the value of impressions.
This is an ideal time for me to post my recent blog post...

"The Grad from HP"

I remember, in my first year at University, I went to a talk in the business school, where a guy, a graduate from this University who was giving a talk to us, told us he had got a job (management I think) with HP after graduating. All well and good, until...

He pointed to a chart, and said HP has profits of 60 billion dollars.

Profits? Shouldn't that be revenues? Is this guy barely competent?

It was then that I realised why the world of technology is so fucked up - it's suit guys like this guy, who don't know a damn thing!
i need to change the layout of the physical keyboard (as opposed to the on-screen keyboard) on my palm centro.
This looks potentially promising: http://women20sf.eventbrite.com/
Then there's the recruiter-checking equivalent of "pink box testing":

http://neilbowers.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/pink-box-testing/
There's some rock star ego involved in most clever hacks.
Actually, the main article is a good argument that it can be both.

Yes, the organization method mandates that a person be fired for merely forgetting the pizza because ... this, arguably, makes it less likely that anyone will be fired for something more serious.

But at that point, the organization method itself kind-of ... sucks.
It's more like if every movie that had a woman wearing a long skirt, that could possibly be pulled up, but isn't actually pulled up, was rated R.
Excellent! You must celebrate with a glass of Champagne. Something classy, like those rappers drink - you can put it on your card.
Well, I know more hackers, that are not lucky at all, then that they are lucky.
This is an interesting question, but I am not sure about some of the assumptions behind it.

Consider how I do things: the net has indeed made me impatient, in many contexts. When I read an HN post, I usually give it at most a paragraph or so to convince me it's worth finishing. If I'm not convinced by then, I usually skip the rest. If I am convinced, I still often just skim the rest.

However, I still read novels. I read them the old-fashioned way, cover-to-cover, in order. But I do so in a very different context from my web browsing. So, the way to write a novel for me is much the same way that a novel was written 50 or 100 years ago.

But that's just me. Other people might be different; I wouldn't know. However, in that case, I must ask another question: if someone isn't going to read a novel, then why would you want to write one for them?
Well it was going to be number 8. But, you know...
I like this idea for security reasons. Running community laptop with vista. And keep all my settings in a stick.
I loved reading it. But keep in mind...

Anyone can drink, gamble, smoke, eat oysters, dress well, have sex(1) and use their credit card.

However, creative people create, and this is the only common attribute of creative people.

I did a lot of creative writing in college, and a lot of folks acted the part, but when you asked to read what they'd written, there wasn't much to show. Even something bad. Just nothing.

(1) may require use of the credit card.
Warren Buffett gets it right for now
Good luck with that Microsoft. I don't think Microsoft quite groks that prices always go down on commodities, assuming there are many competing products and improving efficiencies in manufacturing.

While regular folks still prefer the OS they know over Linux, they will begin to think more and more about it when the price difference is 20%, or 30%, or 40% of the purchase price (as it will be on netbooks). Since the importance of Office and other stuff that requires Windows is declining every day, and nobody is gaming on netbooks, I just don't see how they can have any confidence that they can hang on to that market while charging full price for Windows.
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to be able to edit a comment that has a reply
(Or as they say in Texas, "all hat and no cattle".)
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, as less than 5% of Goldman shares are owned by insiders. Perhaps you mean to argue that no large-scale businesses should exist in a healthy economy. If so, could you provide an argument?
Serialized. One chapter/scene per post. RSS feed mandatory.
List of Oldest Companies in the World
Brilliant. Obviously the front page is full of spam but this will be super-cool as soon as subcommunities establish what their page will be (yourworldoftext.com/whateverpagehere) and I figure out how to find them. I love it already.
Where's the hacker interest? Seems like ordinary "A-lister" douche vs. douche.
I've been away from the UK for 15 years. Many things have changed in that time. It doesn't surprise me, but it upsets me.
Thank god there's another of us :)

Also, you don't have to go straight to YC -- pick an alumnus.
Dos Equis 'Most Interesting Man' Is a Great Beer Salesman - Sales up 17%
Assuming, on the examples page, that there is no javascript being executed on page load except the initialization of the examples:

For six form fields, it took 500ms (according to firebug's profiler) to initialize on a 2.4ghz core 2 duo. Granted, I'm using Firefox 3, and not 3.5.

I'm assuming that this scales linearly with each form element that this trick is applied to, in which case a page with 12 form elements would take 1 full second to initialize the javascript.

I'd stay away from this if you have more than two form elements using it. It's bound to slow down the user experience unbearably.
Um, who are you, what are you doing, and why do you want to see a startup office?

Here's pics of one of them:
http://blog.earlh.com/index.php/2009/07/building-a-zip-line-...
I question the premise of this question and analysis! There is an enormous breadth of work done on clusters vs supercomputers already. It turns out that sufficiently parallelizable ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel ) tasks can be accomplished much more efficiently on clusters. They've been en vogue in academia for years, I remember playing with the cluster at ND in 2002. Just wow.
In the article, the guy needs more than one month of writing. That's not a FAQ. I don't know the details, but if the iPhone app is an adventure game with a captivating story, the writer is worth a lot.
I'd work with him. He's smart and not dogmatic. People act differently online than in person.
I suspect that the number of people willing to read a novel cover to cover is or will be decreasing due to the internet.

But maybe there is a way for novels to remain relevant in an impatient world. Writing very short chapters would help, but I suspect more is needed than that.

For example, how do you help people remember what they read in a novel fragment? What sort of technology might you use?
I think a more appropriate analogy is how could we move a hundred tons of earth more efficiently? With a dump-truck or with N commodity pick-up trucks? How hard is it to separate a load among the N trucks and how many are there?
obviously because the entire Ruby community hated him.
The unbearable heaviness of mobile applications
Listia is very qool, er, cool!

I really like the clean interface; this site is one I will put next to Etsy on my list of good content site designs.
I'll edit comments to clarify as long as there are no replies to it, and I'll edit them for grammar / typos after that. Any additions after replies have been added get marked with an 'EDIT' as seems to be common practice here.

English being my second language I just about always find a way to put my foot i my mouth the first time and I don't want to leave a trail of garbage behind :)

Part of the cause of this I suspect is the terribly small input form. If it is an attempt at enforcing brevity then it fails miserably but it certainly serves well to lose the overview of what you are writing.

I'm not sure if 'one size fits all' with this, I like your idea of a history but I suspect that it is computationally quite expensive to do.

Keep in mind that HN does not run off a regular webserver but on 'arc', which keeps just about everything in memory. And that adds up with the volume of traffic that it is receiving.
I read about it a few years back, the goal for it is to be the current generation AE86 RWD Corolla, for $12K

http://www.blog.automotiveaddicts.com/toyotas-return-of-the-...
Google Reader Speeds Up Sharing With PubSubHubbub
Lots of ads are per-impression not per-click. Really that's the only sensible way to do a brand-building campaign.

Anyway, I have no problem clicking ads if they're relevant and for something I really want to learn more about. It's just that they rarely are.
I was expecting you not to miss the chance to mention the reality and evidence you claim you are attending to. Here's a second chance.
Recession not a threat to America’s dominance of the world economy
How is screening out people who don't read the listing going to lower the quality?
Actually only a small minority of people we fund are still in school. In fact we probably fund more people who are over 30 than who are still in school. It is good to have at least one person in the startup who can program though.
I think sense disambiguation is certainly one of the most interesting applications of semantic technologies. Here at TQ, the focus tends to be on the exploitation of referential semantics and structured data to establish master data models, merge data models and provide a platform for model driven application development and analytics. However, the focus here tends to be more towards corporate IT than mainstream web dev.
Embrace the ads people. They pay for all of Google's free services, which these ad-hating people obviously are using.
Also, I find that whenever I glance at the GMail ads there's always something interesting or amusing there (more of the latter).
It makes more sense to slash salaries than to lay people off. Sure it blows, but if you can't find a job anywhere else, it's because the economy thinks you are no longer worth what you were paid.
Stop your whining about VCs. Choose wisely and understand the rules of engagement. You lose freedoms, but gain capital in exchange. Many of the companies we love today wouldn't have happened without them. Yes there are asshole ones, but that comes with any profession.

If you whine about being rejected by VCs, odds are you bought into the " OMFG I NEED TO RAISE CAPITAL LIKE THE COOL TWITTER DIGG KIDS", when in actual reality you don't. You most likely need to finish getting your prototype ready and have some trial customers. Also keep in mind, few markets and ideas are "big enough" or even warrant VC funding.
There’s a New iRule Editor in Town
Warren Buffett Makes $1 Billion Profit on Electric Car Maker BYD
"1. Sign up and get 500 free credits"

I signed up and got 100 credits.

Why????