skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Updated recommendation on Rails versus Django?
Hi guys.

I realize this post is an infamous "versus" question, and undoubtedly redundant with older posts. However, most of the information I find on Rails versus Django is out of date and based on much older versions of the frameworks, so please forgive me.

First and foremost...I'm a Rails guy. I came to it three years ago and really enjoyed a lot of what it brought to the table. I'm not solely a Ruby guy...I have around 11 years of total experience, including Java, C/C++, Perl, Tcl, (some) Python, and more.

Anyway, I have an idea I believe will take over the world. I've already convinced a few folks it will as well and have friends and family funding to take on some offshore developers and get it in beta as quickly as possible.

Now, however, I am left with the decision of what tech to use. While I've really enjoyed Ruby...I'm growing tired of the magic, and the abuse of open classes. It's very nice when you need to inject some behavior quickly, but it can become a real pain when you have to maintain your project, or any of the plugins it depends on. I personally prefer Ruby over Python (largely because of blocks), but I envy the clarity-first attitude in the Python community. Given this frustration, I'm seriously considering a deep-dive into Django and using it for this project.

The pluses I see on the Rails side are:
1. Size of community (which, given some of this "community" includes PHP refugees, is not necessarily a plus)
2. My familiarity and experience
3. Number of companies using it and striving to improve it
4. Availability of offshore resources

Drawbacks of Rails include:
1. Too much magic
2. Documentation continues to be awful in places
3. Inconsistent API
4. Did I mention magic?

The (perceived) pluses on the Django side:
1. Clarity
2. Performance...I believe Unladen Swallow will really change the Python landscape and give it a competitive advantage
3. Google's support of the language itself (see #2)

Drawbacks of Django:
1. Learning curve
2. Smaller community
3. Slower development cycle of the project itself?
4. (un)Availability of offshore resources

So, this is my thought process so far. I'm pretty comfortable I could come up to speed quickly on Django, and I have the basics of Python still in my memory somewhere. But I wanted to get your opinions as I really respect the vision and experience of a lot of the folks I read on here.

I appreciate your help. I really think this idea will take off, so it's very important to me to make the right technology decision.

And saying to choose Rails simply because I have experience there just doesn't sound right. If that were the case, I'd still be using Perl or C.

Thank you!
Jobs are not created, only reallocated.

Since we live in a world of scarcity, there would alway be work to do.

The only reason why people don't have jobs is that resource are not reallocated yet, or worse, something is preventing the reallocation of resource.
How to change root password : one more way
a simple guide on howto reset root password in linux distro's also talks briefly about init parameter usage while booting.
Google will HEAVILY penalize you if they think you are doing "arbitrage" (paying for ads to get visitors who you hope will click on ads) because they think this makes for a sucky user experience. It is fairly easy for them to figure out who is doing this, considering they own the best CPC program in the world to get traffic (AdWords) and also own the best CPC program in the word to sell your traffic (AdSense). That gives them plenty of data to be a law unto themselves, but they have other sources if you decide to be tricky and try something like Yahoo CPC -> you -> AdSense.
Let's not forget minimum wage. Though there are arguments for it, minimum wage creates a floor on the price of labor above the equilibrium price, which creates a surplus of labor, and that surplus is part of what goes into our unemployment numbers.
Why Girls Have BFFs and Boys Hang Out in Packs
I was replying primarily to

> Again, too much supply, not enough demand.

And adjusting prices is the orthodox mechanism to match supply and demand.

Anyway, in a physical sense there is enough work to do. We haven't reached Mars, yet. Diseases afflict the world's population. And where is my yacht?
Tips and tricks for Debian newbies
Re: The triangle problem.
If you've figured out that parity matters then you probably have it. That seems to be the stumbling block for most people trying that problem for the first time.
Perhaps. But re-industrialization might not be the answer.

Looking at GDP figures, Germany was hit much harder by the global downturn so far than the US. And we do produce things you can touch with your hands here.

(Ironically, a few years ago Germans were worried about the heavy reliance on industry. Pundits worried about how Germany might close the gap to more modern service economies in the UK and US. They imagined a ladder of value adding that starts with agriculture, goes to industry, and then to services.)
A lot of the things that amaze me - 500$ 2.5Ghz PCs for one - took decades to happen.
Government employee unions is #1 on the list. California government employees make about twice what equivalent private sector workers do and retire 20 years earlier.
Mail and commerce. Those require separate and unique and crazily difficult to guess passwords. The problem is too many people just can't bother with the perceived hassle
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...
the post would have been a more interesting read if it didnt have so much rambling
Just an UI improvement: How about using sliders to control the invested amounts?

Use some Javascript to ensure that all sliders add up to 100% (or so). If you need an inspiration for the finer points, look at how the game `Master of Orion' (the original, not the sequel) does resource allocation.
Mostly. But there are some other factors, too. Wages tended to be sticky on the way down.

There's an interesting book full of interviews on the subject: ``Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession'' by Truman F. Bewley. It used to be that managers rather fired a some employees instead of letting them work for less money.

See http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/news/bewley/tfb_00-02_wages.htm for a copy of the book's review in the Economist.

Lately we have seen wages fall, so that this rigidity might be on the way out.
Evolution, baby.

You try hunting a mammoth with a BFF instead of your pack.
Jackson's death treated as murder: TMZ
BFFs are optimizied for hunting the caveman; the hunter, not the prey (teach a man to fish, an all.)
I love this one:

Seasoned Hacker

% cc -o a.out ~/src/misc/hw/hw.c

% a.out

Hello, world.
It does for me, the link to Google Docs from my Gmail is HTTPS. Same for Calendar and Sites. Going directly to docs.google.com redirects me to the secure version--I think it works off the SSL by default setting in Gmail.
Moore's second law states that `fabs' to produce chips are increasing exponentially at about the same rate as chips get better.

If this law holds in the future, the building of fabs will force GDP growth on a race of its own. (However even if world GDP would stagnate, the cost of a producing a single fab would overtake GDP no sooner than 2040 or so. (I should dig out my calculation for that..))
Some companies have made a lot of money on the internet.
I am obviously biased, as I run a django development company. That said, Ill start with answering the drawbacks of Django,

1. Learning curve.

Not more than any other framework. Plus the Documentation is top notch. (The documentation was what sold me when I was evaluating.)

2. Smaller community

Definately true. But beyond a critical size, size of community does not matter. Django is well above that size. (Irc: any given time ~200 Devs. Google group: 14000+ Users )

3. Slower development cycle of the project itself?

Why? If you give more details, I can answer that.

4. (un)Availability of offshore resources

Definately less than Rails, but still not as bad as you would have thought. A very small list, http://uswaretech.com/blog/2009/03/web-development-companies...

Thats said, given the information you have, I your case I would choose Rails. Even if most of the work you are looking to offshore, your existing Rails experience would be a huge plus, helping you evaluate vendors, keep track.
If prices reflect this already --- or especially if they have over-reacted, it might a good opportunity to buy anyway.
"… but Good King Barack seems determined to saddle us with the same unaffordable entitlements that have scuttled the rest of the west."

Why not just come out and say it? Letting people spend all of their savings on healthcare and die of disease before they get old is a feature, not a bug.

Interesting idea, but I doubt it will be popular. Not sure what is being suggested here other than that.
Why Wages Do Not Fall in Recessions
The Internet Is Alive And Well (As An Investment)
My rationality is thus: High volume means general interest. I do not want to be the filter feeder for general interest. Importantly, I don't care if I miss a few things; I'm eliminating the vast majority of false positives. I run the risk of missing a few false negatives, but I'm already roughly at my limit for dealing with the true positives anyhow, so it doesn't really matter: nothing I miss is going to cause me to lose a hojillion dollars or anything serious.
A Crowd-Sourced National Communications Census
34 is a ridiculously small sample; not very scientific. Inconclusive results that basically boil down to "boys and girls think differently". Reporting via Time magazine . . . it's surprising.
I agree with the above comment -- I wouldn't use it to conduct a traditional poll on a web site.

But the 'Complexity' might be more like 'Entertainment' if you turn into a Facebook app and/or a Hunch-like destination site.

I think it is obviously a GAME which doesn't mean it can't have utility, too.

Also,

1) Nice graphic design. Nice UI design.

2) Way too much copy.

3) A lot of the copy has a great playfulness to it but what's with bludgeoning polls? It feels like you're protesting too much and I bet PollDaddy isn't your competition, as much as social prediction market sites, etc.

4) Cool site!
Girls hang out in packs... seriously, have you never seen a gaggle of girls tittering away?
That's just about the worst excuse I've ever heard for unethical conduct. In my mind, this is the equivalent of "I trashed your house, peed on your couch and stole your wine cellar to show you how important a axe proof front door is."
Better Vision, With a Telescope Inside the Eye
So if a hotmail account expires, they allow just anyone to re-register it as their own email address?

That sounds completely irresponsible.
Download Lisp to my brain.
If I were a character in the movie The Matrix, I could ask an operator to download a program to my brain so I could fly a helicopter or something. I would like to learn Lisp and, well, download it to my brain as rapidly as possible so I can start working with it to write a roguelike. I am looking for good online resources, preferably including a sand-box or similar. I learned to code my websites by having a template (gifted to me by a friend) and playing with it and I still learn new things when I want/need to do something new on my sites. I know a little (X)HTML and CSS already and had intro to VisualBasic about 7 years (which I don't particularly remember, of course).

Yes, I know I can google this. But since I know nothing, I can't judge the quality of the sources. So I am hoping folks here will indulge me.

Thanks.

PS: Am I supposed to do an intro? I just joined today and this is my first post.
Actually, as a (somewhat) large AdSense publisher, I disagree with you on both points.

My experience matches up with what drp is saying: Once you start serving a high volume of AdSense ads, the CPM drops dramatically. The result is that you essentially receive a fixed income from Google based on your audience and clickthrough ratio.

In addition, the "Premium" program has not existed for several years. I have 60-90k uniques, but do not qualify for any special consideration (I've asked). The features of the old "Premium" program are now offered à-la-carte to publishers based on factors which are much more strict than before.

And the figures he gave are just examples set to scale. The numbers he quotes are irrelevant, because the amount of money one makes an an AdSense publisher varies greatly depending on many, many factors. Just because "ask the builder" makes $1,500/day from AdSense doesn't mean that most publishers with the same traffic will.
Why is 34 a small number? 10-20 subjects is the typical range for fMRI studies. While this is probably underpowered, even this number is not ridiculously small. A satisfactory sample size depends on the experiment; sweeping statements don't make much sense without the context.
Here's a study that looked at the statistical validity of the usual sample sizes in fMRI experiments http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

34 is NOT ridiculously small. It is good enough.
You wrote that tutorial? Awesome :)
This is fantastic. And there are some cool stories and links on that page. Thanks for the link :D
Nothing in that comment disproves what drp is saying.

The only knowledge you gain from idlewords' comment is the final amount. For all we know, $1,200 of that $1,300 might be earned from the first 100k impressions, and the other $100 from the second 100k.

In addition, just because idlewords has earned $1300 from 200k impressions doesn't mean that he won't soon exhaust his inventory if his site grows.
VBoxHeadless by itself isn't all that handy for appliance type applications, since it doesn't detach itself from the shell it was started in automatically.

IMO, a better way of accomplishing this is VBoxManage startvm <VM Name> --type vrdp

VBoxManage will then start the VM and detach the process from the shell. The one downside to this method is that some errors from VBoxHeadless will end up getting suppressed, so if the VM fails to start, you may need to start it directly with VBoxHeadless to see what the issue is.

If you're using the OSE version of VBox (which lacks vrdp support), you can also use --type headless (since 3.0.0)
Never mind that, why is it required for Women to go to the toilet in groups. What do they do in there?

Can't really imagine a man saying "Hey guys! who wants to come with me to the toilet?" to his friends.
Teenagers don't use twitter
Can someone who knows Ruby and Python contrast their metaprogramming capabilities along with how much mileage Django and Rails get from it under the hood?
I'd prefer the software on the plane I'm flying on to be engineered. Arts and crafts are fine for your new facebook app, but please engineer the stuff that keeps me alive.
I've been a cigarette smoker for 14 years, but in the last 6 months i've switched to pipes. It's a whole new approach to nicotene delivery. Much more enjoyable, and healthier in some ways imho.
To other smokers, you should really try it. Cigarettes is to smoking as hearing the same loop of music over and over again while pipe smoking is like having all of the itunes store available for you to listen.
A side benefit is that as it's an active process, contrary to just lighting up a cig and letting it burn on it's own, you keep your attention focused on it, you relax, and your subconcious is free to engage in all sorts of thoughts.

(Although you can achieve similar results by taking a bike ride for example)

To those who have quit smoking well done and keep it up.
The 'elevated' 4k demo by RGBA group is almost unbelievable.

Of course the DirectX libraries needed to run it wouldn't fit on a floppy :-).
> Really though America's the only nation that could really pull off any real space progress at the moment

Well in my opinion, given the current state of the american economy in particular and the western economy in general, I'd think it's upto China and India to be the innovators in space for the next decade or so. After all both of them did do successful man and moon missions respectively, quite recently.
That's just stupid, internet startup costs are peanuts compared to any other market.

The problem, is that investors are used to investing huge amounts. So they end up investing millions into an idea that could have gotten off the ground with a few hundred K.
Put the curiosity aside, please. I smoke, and I've tried to quit numerous times. I feel like crap several times a month, and I know it's directly related to my smoking.
The lack of mathematical rigour is what kills it. The software industry is the one where we do not learn from past mistakes or successes, we rarely measure important things or when we do benchmark, it's to focus on stupid things like the overall performance of specific language implementations or how much RAM Firefox is using instead of figuring out how to eliminate whole classes of problems.

We can be artists and creative people just as mathematicians and physicists are.

I'm reading about John Nash and holy shit, Princeton gathered some of the smartest people together and told them not to worry about grades, just worry about research. Nash himself would just wander around the halls and just think. The papers written may seem formal but the way the ideas were generated was highly informal, with random meetings and discussions in hallways and common rooms and walking about lost in thought.

What struck me as most interesting and applicable to software development is that Von Neumann and the others at RAND were applying somewhat pure/abstract mathematics to specific problems in other fields. So why don't we take a page from them and apply some more rigour to measurement, and why don't we learn some management skills and develop useful metrics for software development, so that we can stop letting the marketing people and the snakeoil consultants from monopolizing our field and turning it into a wasteland of overly expensive unfinished projects.
I think the only unique thing to come out of this is the supposed clear-text-credit-card-number iTunes exploit. That would be a story worth telling, where exposing information is in the public interest.
I think part of the problem is that we have so many places to keep track of(email/passwords wise).

I can pretty much guarantee that there is a way for some of my accounts to get compromised with an email address I haven't used in 4 years.

Why? Because at this point I probably have a few thousand accounts, and there is just no way to keep track of all of them, when updating your password/email.
where's the link to it? couldn't find it on the page.
Assuming this isn't a Joke:

Lisp IDE for Windows (the easiest and most basic; use it just for your first 30 days, after that move to SLIME.)

http://www.daansystems.com/lispide/

Implementations (both work with LispIDE above)

http://clisp.cons.org/ (byte compiled, fast)

http://sbcl.org (natively compiled, multithreaded, industrial strenth)

Books

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/ (easiest intro)

More here http://lisp.org/alu/res-lisp-education
FasterWeb Wants To Make The Entire Web Up To Ten Times Faster In 2010
When I did the same thing with "marketing," it was clear to me you were abusing the term. You tried to redefine all human communication as marketing, which strips the word of its intended meaning.
http://www.rgba.org/ -> prods
Kleiner Perkins’ Former Front Man In China Starts Fresh
Kinh nghiệm khi đi du lịch Đà Lạt : Khách sạn, điểm du lịch, ăn uống ...?
My guess (anyone know first hand?) is that they can stand in front of the mirror for a minute or two and exchange there statuses while checking and adjusting their hair/shirt/makeup.
Make A Free Website
Make a free website with http://webstarts.com. WebStarts provides you with everything you need to build and maintain your own website.
World’s first ever low cost,low-power Peer-to-Peer Device - True Digital Freedom
No, this isn't a joke. Thank you for replying.
What an absurd claim. Went to read the story to find either the meat, or spot a grammatical error or missing specifics:

One VC firm, YL Ventures, believes that it can. And they’ve seen it in action, so we’ll just have to take their word for it, for now.
I wouldn't know as it has been over 10 years since I looked at a math textbook. The thing about math is it doesn't change. Well at least the basics so it's safe to say any text that you find in the library would be a good source.

Where different text books may deviate from one another is how they prove a theorem. Like programming, you can usually get the same results by going down different paths. Some paths are more efficient than others, but that is predicated by what you know.

If you are just learning, the best thing to do is find textbooks with answer keys to assignments. Also with the advent of google and such, I would have to imagine you can probably find answers to a lot of the questions that would be posed in these text books so answer keys may not be all that important now.
You might wanna revise that "download to brain" requirement. Programming is a skill learned and polished over years; none of us are Johny Mnemonic ;-)
That reminds me of another excellent book: Good to Great by Jim Collins. Great companies have a clear single metric of profitability (profit per x) and then relentlessly iteratively optimize against it--what Collins refers to as the Flywheel.

If there was any doubt this practice of having a small confined environment with clear metrics and feedback and iterating against it relentlessly was a Pattern of Success... Hmm.. Very enlightening.
I was talking about TC, not the hacker. Also, I made it clear that whilst I didn't agree, the question is a valid one.
Ask HN: Paying for a "premium" domain name?
Like me, a large number of the members here on Hacker News work in some area of web development. I've thought about starting a few free websites as hobby projects before, only to find that all of the names I could think of were registered by domain squatters who wanted hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars for them.

What does everyone else do if you get stuck in this situation? Is it worth paying for a better domain name, since it helps with SEO for your site? Would you pay money to get one of these domain names for a non-profit, hobby project? Would you consider paying for a domain name for a startup company, since you would presumably want to build your brand name and market materials on top of that domain name? If so, how much of your limited budget do you think you should spend on the name?

This is something that has been bugging me for a while, and I'm interested to hear how everyone else deals with it.
I always find these articles frustrating. They usually seem to boil down to "we found some area of the brain linked to what the subject is doing showing more/less activity when the subject does whatever it is they're doing". Whether the scientists themselves have a deeper understanding of what that means or not (and I'm not convinced that they always do), I certainly don't. Follow with some handwaving argument about cavemen hunting mammoths, and end with the truism "We act the way we do because we're wired that way".

It's a thoroughly unsatisfying read.

Maybe it's because it reminds me of trying to explain why a program works the way it does by tracking which parts of the computer use more electricity when you run it - you don't have a debugger, let alone the source code. What can you possibly learn?