skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surreal Giveaway – Prizes Worth $1200 From Surreal CMS
My current boss is cool, but still I envy you. (good envy)
How I killed my start-up (a post mortem)
30 seconds on Google:

http://www.torctech.com/company/news/jaus-standard-emerges-d...
Yeah - after that picture I am somehow not surprised he has hard time to answer: "Why is it so hard to meet people? Why can’t I just find a girl who loves me?"
My preferred phrasing is "The only difference between practice and theory is that, in theory, there is no difference between practice and theory."
Open for your input
Sure — does that mean then that you're in favor of halting production of tomatoes? Potatoes are a more efficient use of the land, after all.
Rails in the Enterprise
I'm all in for empowering the user too, but then again, it's all about the defaults.

In my experience power users find features like the 'change language button' a lot faster and easier than the average user. Even the tiny flags in the top-right corner of most websites go unnoticed for most people.
Both still needs javascript to make awesome looking web applications.

Not so much "looking", as js would not help with that, but working, yeah.
This is also one of the best ways to teach computer programming. Let also students write programs by hand on paper first. Too many students acquire bad programming habits by brute forcing solutions rather than solving by thinking and researching.
Ask HN: How did you really learn a foreign language?
I took French for 3 semesters in high school. Yet I can barely say "hi" in it. Back then I took it just to fulfill the requirements.

I've decided to take Spanish101 next semester. Unlike when I was taking French, I genuinely want to learn Spanish and be able to communicate in it. I'd love to hear how you went about getting somewhat fluent in a foreign language.
Or use PersonalBrain: http://www.thebrain.com/
They've successfully navigated in the real world, so I'd say yes.
Why Twitter's Growth Cannot Be Stopped
I have seen this before and this is what i have tried to solve. Cannot today say i am successfully but I can see some light.

As Fred Brooks noted Software has to be Organically grown through Incremental development.

Currently this leads to most software becoming a Ball of Mud through continuous change/fixes.

It is allready well established that loose coupling between components will lead to better systems, then it means that no coupling will also lead to better but useless systems since a single component may not have all the features required.

If I can take the coupling and abstract it out from the component, then i should be able to build a framework which uses a meta data of coupling to create useful functionality from zero coupled components.

This way i can grow the complexity of the component organically and replace components.

This is what I have achieved using my experimental rudimentary framework by taking a simple domain as a web page, but hoping to extend it for building a new contract job work which involves building our own simple document management system/simple workflow management system for the Architecture firm.

My question is why is tough? sorry for being Naive.

Then how
The exact type of weapon used is not relevant. (Except for things like white phosphorus, obviously.)

It isn't obvious to me why incendiaries (such as phosphorus or molotov cocktails) fall into some special class of "bad" weapons. Could you explain?
I took Spanish I in college, then I went to live in Spain for a semester. I highly recommend this language school: http://www.rondapiee.com/

I learned so much in four months at that school that I was ahead of most Junior spanish majors when I got back. (I was also highly motivated to learn the language, and lived with a Spanish family. It's definitely possible to go to any language school and not learn a lot if you don't make the effort.)

I went back there a couple years later and did another semester... but at this point I have full command of the grammar, and just need to work on vocabulary. For that, all you need is some spanish speakers to talk to.
Hacking Economies - What makes places rich?
This maybe true, but I cringe at the thought of writing code on paper.
What can you steal from an iPhone in 2 minutes?
This brief video demonstrates the kind of information that can be lifted from an iPhone 3G[s] in under 2 minutes, after breaking the passcode PIN and backup encryption, as shown in this other video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peQrovkTcac
Also, check out http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AoA/
The most effective language tuition I've ever had consisted of daily one-on-one lessons with a tutor who would make me talk and correct me on the fly. If I made systematic errors, he would go over the point of grammar and we woudl do some drills. Every night I had to write a one to three page essay, which he would eviscerate the next day.

Having studied a number of languages, I've come to believe that being forced to speak and write at the outer limit of your ability is the most effective way to learn a foreign language (listening and reading will come effortlessly as a side effect). However this is somewhat expensive, emotionally tiring (adults aren't used to the experience of constant failure and correction), and it can be hard to find someone who will really pounce on every mistake.

I've found intensive immersion programs with small classes to be a good second-best, especially at the beginner level where progress is very rapid and you have a chance to internalize proper phonetics and grammar.

A possibly useful image: you have about ten thousand wrong sentences you have to get out of you before you are speaking the language well, so you need to find someone who will help you get them out of your system as efficiently as possible.
> eval()/exec() are simply evil in both languages. They make debugging more difficult.

I stopped reading at this point. More complicated debugging is a reasonable tradeoff for intuitive APIs. To call them evil indicates the OP is quite inexperienced.
A class can only take you so far. I took four years of Spanish when I was in school, and then spent 2 months in an intensive Spanish course ( several hours a day, every day ). I still felt very much the same as you do now. Then I went to a place where I lived, worked, and socialized with native Spanish speakers from several different countries - within 6 months, people I spoke to on the phone thought I was born and raised in Colombia.

The best way is complete immersion with real Spanish speakers. It also requires good social skills to connect with those people in a way that actually changes the way you speak and think to sound more natural in that language. People don't follow text-book rules in their own language.
How to port one-to-many db's to key-value based stores ?
Android scripting environment supports JRuby
Hm, maybe because there's a decent freeway between the GC and Brisneyland it doesn't seem such a long way? I admit that 100km by freeway doesn't seem that bad. But 100k through Sydney traffic and you'll want to go on a killing spree.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=169479
Can you post this on your startup wiki, so that folks could add the founders they would like to see interviewed on Traction?
How to Negotiate a Pay Raise With Game Theory
I studied several languages. Here is my conclusion: books and classes are an inefficient way to do it and don't give you the ability to speak and understand the real language. The next time I want to learn a language, I will go live where it is spoken. I'll still have a stack of books with me, but they won't be my primary medium. If I need more bandwidth, I'll try to hire some locals to teach me.

The coursework system of language instruction is broken, because it measures your ability to pass a course, and this has little connection to really knowing a language.
Which factors should be considered when choosing the appropriate engraver?
While Python is always a safe choice, another strategy would be to investigate what the new programmer is trying to accomplish. Most people aren't like "I'm going to learn a programming language as an academic exercise!", they want to actually do something.

If they are interested in writing web apps you might suggest Flash. If they are interested in writing a 2D video game you might suggest Python. If they are interested in performing numerical analysis of math functions you might suggest getting a girlfriend.
If you can find a way to swing it, being as immersed as possible is the best way to go.

I don't know what part of the country you're in (or even if you're in the US), but if you can find a way to start buying Spanish newspapers and watching Spanish television, you'll be in much better shape than if you just tried structured education.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=169662
Inside a Netflix Warehouse
thanks calambrac. obviously I didn't look hard enough.
On the flip side, the cost of caution also decreases.

Scenario: a person is approaching a checkpoint and does not obey verbal commands. No civilians are present near the checkpoint.

Human soldier: "Oh shit, shoot him, I don't want to get blown up!"

Robot soldier: "Direct extra scrutiny towards target. Do not allow him to approach civilians. Allow him to approach the checkpoint. I only cost $100,000, no reason to kill a human to save my metallic skin."
Damn Magic...
The World's Biggest Military Boondoggles
Let's play a game. It's called "don't link to sites which have popup balloons when you hover over links". Here's how you play..
Also he's rather overlooked that the web is a tiny corner of the Python world. Ruby has nothing that's even close to NumPy/SciPy.
Mark Madsen: Clipper, ex-Laker and domain name speculator
I completely agree. I look forward to my AT&T contract ending with the hope that the Android phones will have caught up with the iPhone's sexiness. If so, I'll definitely consider an Android handset.
The epiphany about the typewriter cracks me up. I had a similar one a few weeks ago when i found K&R's The C Programming Language for sale at the library.
Alumna sues college because she hasn't found a job
The tone of this article is pretty off base (lots of people buy domain names to resell later) and I thought it was interesting that they would paint this NBA player as some kind of dodgy Internet citizen up to no good.
I'm sorry, how is that the story of Mac vs. PC?
This list certainly puts into perspective the typical software project's cost and schedule overruns. OTOH, the resources pumped into what's essentially tribal warfare belies our species' moniker of sapiens.
Having been at Defcon 17 this year, I can say that this was not the highlight of the weekend. Speakers were arrested on CCW charges, ATMs compromised, potential Korean spies playing press, arcade games erroring out, etc. None of that was the big show. What they aren't talking about is the SSL Strip null byte attack, or the mobile phone fuzzer app that was released.

If you ever get the chance to go, take it. Defcon is an experience you will remember, and it is extremely valuable for us hackers to attend, if for nothing else, for the contacts and friends you'll meet.
Sure, I set up a page: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Traction

I've been having spam problems with this wiki lately, so it had been locked. I unlocked it and am looking into how to fix those now...
I'd agree with the conclusion, but I'd also agree with nudded - the article is nearly free of useful content. Listing popular libraries of each language does not a comparison make.
You're still not getting it.

You constructed a set of components, and are now assembling them together to create an application.

That's great, as long as all of the functionality that you want to include in the application is exposed in the components, in a way that is intuitive to assemble, and flexible enough to handle future changes/debugging.

The car analogy is not appropriate; once you create all of the components of a car, you can make as many instances of that particular car as you like. But only that car. You can't reassemble them to make, say, a pick-up truck, or an airplane.

If you want to create a bunch of applications that are all very similar, and only superficially different, you can create a Domain Specific Language. And it appears that that is what you have done. But this is different than a General Purpose Language, and there still will likely be times when you need to go back and create new components, so the separation between coding and assembly is far from pure.

Just out of curiosity, where did you study Computer Science?
Indeed. Just take a look at Murphy's laws of combat: http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-war.html
That's the wrong question to ask. A drone is just a regular combat aircraft whose pilot operates it by remote. If you get bombed by an F16 or bombed by a Predator drone, it's a human that flew it there, it's a human who gave the order to attack, it's a human whose finger pressed the trigger. There is NO autonomy in any of the hardware in either case.
Any 'solution' to the 'quality problem' that fails to acknowledge that some people are obviously voting up the (politics|techcrunch|zed|etc.) articles you perceive as low quality is going to fail.

You need to account that some people love the hyperbole that you always find in (politics|techcrunch|zed|etc.) articles, and some people don't. This suggests implementing 'cliques'. If you upvote a submission, you grow one vote closer to the clique of people who also upvoted that submission. People whose vote history match yours very well will very easily influence your front page, and the articles of a kind you rarely upvote will be less likely to cloud your front page.

(More feasibly, you could just add some 'coolfinders' manually, whose upvoted articles automatically jump to your page.)
Did Slashdot actually beat HN to a story for once?

My head just exploded.
Cottages in Arran, Arran accommodation, vacations in Scotland
Arran - General Information

Nestling in the Firth of Clyde between the Ayrshire coast and the Kintyre Peninsula the island benefits from both mainland shelter and the warm currents of the North Atlantic Drift. Yes, we have a few Palm trees and the occasional Basking Shark visiting our surrounding waters!
It's a fair (and quite reasonable) conclusion but the article in no way supports it.
"Reflection a.k.a Meta Programming a.k.a Monkey Patching"

Really? These are all the same thing? I think not.

"Python comes with webbrowser, urllib2, smtp, http, SocketServer, HttpServer, and more, while Ruby only has net/HTTP"

Untrue. Seems the author knows Python, and spent a little time with Ruby.

More useful points to make would have been how objects are implemented, how inheritance and mixins are handled, and the key paradigms in the language (e.g., in Python, foo.bar() means invoking the method bar; in Ruby, it means sending foo a bar message.)
I believe the feature request link at the bottom goes to an appropriate place to have such conversations.

Indeed it does. I count on the curators of the site to read that thread.
I learnt French as follows: I did French at school until I was 16 when I did French O-level. I wasn't very good, but I wasn't very bad.

I then forgot about French until I was in my early 20s. I met my wife. She's French. I figured I'd better make an effort to speak French.

Having someone to talk to meant I could make all sorts of errors and get corrected. But she was the wrong person to tell me about French grammar. I tried taking classes in a local college but they were awful. Eventually I paid a Swiss woman to teach me French grammar. Very quickly I realized that the rules of French drilled into me at school were lurking in my head and that all that rote learning was very, very useful. I took lessons for about 6 months for two hours once a week.

Now I speak French fluently.
The advice I've seen on fake wallets is to toss the wallet one way and run the other, hoping that the money is more attractive than revenge for a petty slight (and, let's face it, if he's going to take the time to kill you when there's a wallet with cash in it in easy reach, he was probably going to anyway).
This suggests an important difference in the cultures around the language.
I wrote code in various languages on paper for tests in college. Even C++ and Java are not horrible if the teacher just asks for you for a code snippet that demonstrates one thing. Obviously "write a whole program that works" assignments were done on a computer :)
I don’t know. Seems fishy.

They won’t tell the name of the company or give details on the types of applications. Then they claim what seems like unbelievable numbers. If 16% of my apps were on Rails and they were only generating .5% of my support calls I think I’d be inclined to move all my apps to Rails as quickly as possible. That project may very well have the greatest RoI in the history of business. If those numbers hold your support calls would go from 1800 a month to around 37.

Also, what company moves 16% of their apps to an alternate platform and doesn’t bother to hire one single support person for that platform (when they employ 40)?

Could be true. But I have no reason to believe it.
Because all text editors were created equal, it should be mentioned that a similar plugin exists for emacs:

http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/
So the first picture on the web had several good-looking women. Whodathunkit.
This redirection is not happening at application layer, perhaps due to scale?
Thanks. I've considered it but honestly I have so much code that I maintain already... I'll check for some of the tools - the problem that I've had is knowing which tool's marketing copy to trust. None of them will come out and say, "We'll let you do stuff you aren't supposed to!" but I've read that many actually can get you into trouble.
This is true - if you really want to learn a language you have to go to the country and speak the language. I'm fluent in English because I lived in London for three years, and spoke the language every day from dusk till dawn.

I also lived in Spain, but never became fluent in the language because I spoke English to everyone. Immerse yourself in the language, speak to natives all the time and you'll be fluent in 6 months.
I'd like to sign my emails the way Presidential candidates sign off on TV commercials:

I'm [enter my name here] and I approve of this message.
could pair well with the 3D scanner that was featured on here a few days ago: https://www.nextengine.com/indexSecure.htm
Listening to the radio is crucial, and there is a lot of Spanish on the radio in most parts of the United States. Going to ethnic restaurants where the language is spoken each time you eat out also helps. My bibliography on the subject

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

has some detailed suggestions. Read as much as you can in Spanish, and listen to as much Spanish as you can at every opportunity, and you will improve in Spanish.

I majored in Chinese in university, back when following my advice above was hard for that language in my town, and then lived overseas in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. Listening to the radio helped a LOT when I first arrived in country.
The GIL (in Python, can't speak about Ruby) is a controversial issue because people assume its bad and Python is therefore bad at concurrent programming etc. Without the GIL, the implementation would be drastically more complex and slower because all built in datatypes, dictionary lookups (for method lookups) etc would need to be made atomic, through locking. I think I can live with the GIL in this case - use threads for asynchronous (rather than parallel) code and use processes (and Python 2.6's multiprocessing library makes this easy) for parallel code execution.

Having said that, I welcome Google's unladen swallow and hope they succeed in removing the GIL.
It's believable just because app development in general has improved from 10 years ago. Maybe it has nothing to do with Rails but the improvements could come from developers using current best practices?
I use NERD_Commenter for code comment.But tComment also looks good.
Agreed. Reflection != metaprogramming != monkey patching. They are loosely related, but FAR from being the same thing.
Well, hopefully nobody is asking you to write legal Java down to the last namespace and semicolon on paper. (I know some classes do this; I think it's foolish.) But writing semi-legal Scheme or pseudocode on paper is easy and no more strange or demanding than doing mathematics on paper. I don't think it deserves a cringe.

Also, if it's some small degree harder to actually physically write the program, I'm not sure that's a bad thing in terms of learning; it encourages you to do more thinking and understanding and less fly-by-wire programming and testing.
The numbers sound encouraging, but I imagine the bias is in the details of the developer.

In a big company, who is going to be allowed to take the new technology risk? Senior developers. I imagine that the average dev on their Rails projects is much more competent than on their Java projects. Not becuase it's Rails, but because it's risky.
As Joel Spolsky says "With a contrived example you can prove anything"

Are the rails apps simpler because they are just bringing rails in, and want to test it on something simple?

Have the java apps mushroomed into something that customers can't figure out because they're part of an old legacy system?.

Does this even have anything to do with programming? Maybe the people that develop the rails apps have great designer and UI people that make apps that are simpler to use.

Let's not judge on this kind of anecdotal evidence.
I don't think either of those are terribly good metrics.

Using two of my own submissions...

Compare Google's blog post on robots crawling news articles:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=708417
to an inflammatory post about Techcrunch:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658308

One of those is 'quality', and the other has comments (and 'dead' status).
Does Startup Location Matter?
Nikon's Digital Camera is the First with a Projector
> What OSes would you recommend that budding OS developers study

Try this one:

http://www.memetech.com/

It is just a 512-byte bootblock demo, and yet it does something which no braindead Unix clone can: orthogonal persistence.
The NYT link that was provided appears to be dead now.

Google News turned up this source for what appears to be the same NYT article with a slightly different title:

http://www.starbulletin.com/news/nyt/20090804_Giant_particle...
That's the brilliance of this document - it's an excellent and free recruitment tool for the very high-performance/talent people Netflix is trying to attract.
As others are saying there is nowhere near enough data to make a platform judgement. (and I'm a Rails guy..)

Likely the Java apps are much more mission critical and likely have been under development for longer and more robust... ergo more moving parts and more to break.

there's a lot to like about Rails - I think its great for intranet type apps, but this story is meaningless. Tell me these apps are mission critical or something, not the company blog and I'll buy in a bit.
I have no doubt that it's true. Even though large corporations move slow, that doesn't mean that they don't have forward thinking people that work for them. I personally think that it's only a matter of time for large corporations to choose technologies where they can be more agile. Yes, Java has served its purpose for a number of years, it's become bloated and fragmented. One key determinant for corporations to make the move will be the availability of quality Rails resources. They won't be able to rely solely on their current Java resources because (IMO) many of them will not want to make the move (i.e. learn something new). Corporate america can definitely benefit from Rails. Just the same, Rails can benefit from corporate american using it in its enterprise technology stack.