skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll second the votes for The Rails Way, it really is good. Another one to consider which I didn't see mentioned is an Apress book called "Practical Rails Social Networking Sites". It's slightly out of date, though anything written more than 6 months ago is. In spite of it's somewhat misleading title, it's a good introduction to building a site in Rails, and touches on most of the things you'd need to build any modern application. It serves as a good introduction to Rails IMO.

One other really good resource is The Rails Guides: http://guides.rubyonrails.org - they cover everything, and are very up to date. I use them regularly.
The main downsides to PDF are that it is not supported in all browsers, especially mobile or embedded ones and even in the browsers where it is supported, it is implemented as a plugin and so is slow to load.

PDFs open in 3sec on this computer. That seems small, but html+css pages open almost instantly.

There are lots of nice things about PDF, but when almost everything else I'm viewing is html+css it's unpleasant.
Usain Bolt Versus the House Cat
Maybe it's just curiosity.

I've discovered I can downmod some comments (though I haven't yet), and not others. That gets me thinking about things like "What are the rules? At what point do I get the ability to downmod articles? Is it all relative to the karma other users have?"

. . . but it's just idle curiosity (for me, at least). The only time I've honestly, earnestly wished I had the power to downmod submissions was when the front page was full of the most banal possible Erlang articles, to the point that even good Erlang articles couldn't get to the front page. The rest of the time, the fact I lack the ability to downmod submissions just makes the place feel a lot more laid-back than other places, even while the fact I know the HN members with the most activity over the longest time can downmod submissions makes me feel better about the ability of the community to police itself than places that only allow upvotes for everyone.

I think, if I were to implement something like this, I'd probably try grading on the curve. Maybe the tenth percentile would be able to downmod comments, and the second percentile would be able to downmod submissions -- or vice versa. Maybe I'd make comment downmodding a privilege based on relative karma, and submission downmodding a percentil cut-off. I'm not sure. I'd want something that grew organically with the community, though, rather than eventually being 98% of the community because most people have been there long enough to have 200 points and the remainder are newbies and lurkers.

edit: That ended up being much longer than I expected (thanks to rambling off into speculation about what I'd do with a new discussion Webapp).
I looked at Linode and their offering is pretty competitive with Slicehost (slightly higher price but more storage).

Any positive/negative experience with them?
No ZODB?
Whoops. Of course they are. Thanks.
Guess he wants to avoid the Mitnick Dilemma?

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/08/kevin-mitnick...
That's almost correct. The amount of stuff you get from refining ore increases as your skill in refining increases. The price imbalance is created by people with high skill buying up the raw ore, refining it, and selling the result.
Except that in your first couple of years of programming, before you start worrying about maintenance, users, and other developers, "working" is about as "perfect" as you care to get.
'Twas a joke (I myself run a significant portion of by business through Basecamp so what you argue is pretty apparent). The "X is not a bank" thing is a joke about sites with cavalier attitudes toward security.
I'm quite happy with them. Since I signed up in 2008, they've increased the base storage once:

http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/23/33-additional-disk-space/
"costs $20-50k/year" - pardon, but where did you learn it from? Even if PhD students get tuition waivers, the waivers are given along with Teaching or Research Assistant positions. In other words, the PhD students are paid for some assistance, they are not just given the money. And Teaching Assistance at the university (especially, public school) might not be so much fun as it might seem. Not surprisingly, the percentage of Americans in graduate science programs is small.
There's a huge potential flaw in your prediction: you assume that the true efficacy of the techniques they use will determine the survival and popularity of the research techniques. In the cases indicated, the people deciding whether to continue funding the research are not scientists who understand causal relations worth a damn, and they're very susceptible to spin (in the political sense of the term "spin", of course).

The saddest thing about it is that I'm positive there's something to the theories involved, but they're being squandered by people more interested in the popular appearance of success than they are in true efficacy -- possibly because they ego-identify with the successes of their pet projects, and ensure that they don't pay enough attention to the right factors to recognize the difference between appearance of efficacy and true efficacy.
Agreed. Having played Eve for three and a half years, the risk of losing your ship or assets in battle can definitely give you a rush. Sometimes the loss stings but you're not going to win every engagement and hopefully you can put yourself in a better position next time through better skills, planning and corp mates.

As for growing their market, they just announced a FPS console game that's linked to the Eve universe. It will be interesting to see how both environments will interact.

http://www.massively.com/2009/08/23/eve-evolved-dust-in-the-...
Nothing is wrong with PDF. This would provide some pretty useful options, though.
It's not always about the existence of talented people. You tend to know a lot more about friends, family, and old coworkers than the 10,000+ people in the US who are ready, willing, and able to do the job, but which you don't happen to know. And it's hard to separate dependable, knowledgeable people that get stuff done, from the sea of idiots out there.
Transliterated Russian seems to get ID'd correctly, but only sometimes. (Anything with "zdrastvuite" in it, for example, works fine. But other simple Russian 101 sentences --- e.g. "U menya est odin karandash" meaning "I have a pencil" --- get ID'd as French. Unless of course I'm spelling it wrong.).

But I haven't seen it correctly ID transliterated Chinese or Korean yet.
Even if it's a "big brand" only because of their less than savory SEO techniques? The only reason I know of expertsexchange.com is because of the way they show up in search results, not because their name is a household word.
If you have a google referrer, you just have to scroll down ten pages to see the content.
1) They're only charging that because people are paying it.

2) What do you need on your Slicehost VPS that you couldn't just dump onto your home storage device?
> There's little reason to suppose that with legalization the cartels will suddenly stop using bribes, violence and killings to maintain their monopoly.

All of which are illegal, and as such mean extra costs, which would put them at disadvantage with legal competitor.

I'm not sure, but I don't think many of the mafia gangs that ran the alcohol business survived the end of prohibition very well, the alcohol industry has been run as a normal business ever since.
It's semi-satire, but a lot of it rings true, based on my experience working in several big corporate office/cubicle types of jobs. In that environment, people who work smart/fast generally are not rewarded proportionately to their merit. Whereas if you go freelance/contract or start your own business it does become more about effectiveness, efficiency and working "smarter, not harder". What you do, not where you do it. What you achieved, not how many hours you clocked. Social networking and relationships are still important, but it's more horizontal and collaborative rather than vertical up/down and master/slave. Also when working in the corp/office/cubicle/9-to-6 sort of job a fairly narrow slice of your talent is used, whereas it's more broad and I think satisfying and challenging intellectually if you're self-employed or freelance. Again, just a generalization based on experience in both worlds, and there are exceptions.
> Global warming is definitely scientific fact, but the issue here is moreso how much money do we need to spend to mitigate the (still somewhat unknown) risk.

I think there's something to the indicators that global temperatures have been rising, of course, but the "science" involved has been so damned sloppy that we can't even get credible estimates of past trends, let alone credible predictions of future trends. There's a lot more at issue than "how much money do we need to spend". Hell, there's even significant doubt about the question of whether what is currently occurring is inconsistent with natural cyclic trends, and many temperature sampling sites have been found to be compromised by virtue of placement in the middle of parking lots and the like.

Get me some figures that don't look like they were compiled by twelve year olds, then we'll talk.
Don't trust a CEO.

Collusion is always illegal when it's anti-competitive, whatever the size of the participants of the collusion. The key point to take away though, is that the authorities are unlikely to enforce antitrust laws against minor/negligible market participants. However, as little as 2% combined total market share has been enough to justify enforcement of antitrust laws for collusion.
Nothing in his post came anywhere close to talking about 'ethnic cleansing'. He was only talking about letting some other group be the majority, and letting caucasians become a minority in the country.

Of course, that projection is for 90+ years from now, so if it happens at all, it won't be happening to most of us.
Based on the one-ish episode I've seen... there are some interesting bits, but also a lot of absurdity. Both the valuations proposed by the business owners and the ownership-percentages proposed by the "sharks" seem surprisingly high.

I suspect a lot of these deals could go quite a bit better on an order of magnitude lower scale.
What is your obsession with programming and the notion that it encourages "paralyzing perfectionism"? See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=567827.
As far as I recall, the Eve team actually has a resident economist.

I've always been fascinated by this aspect of Eve... too bad the game itself is such a large time sink.
Is it normal (not necessarily within YC, I'm speaking generally) for them to either accept money regardless in order to get the associated benefits (even if these include help raising larger sums later) or come to some non cash exchange?
The Median of a Trillion Numbers
I think this article is sort of a work ethic litmus test. I'm actually considering having some contractors and business partners read it, just to see what their reactions are.

I realized the first time I ever read it that the article was a little tongue-in-cheek, but I still hated it. I could imagine the hordes of people reading it and rallying behind a "two-hour rule" banner, as if it in some way legitimized their poor work ethic.

I liked it a little better this time. If you read it and feel a little disgusted, then the chances are good that you probably aren't a bottom feeder.
The idea that you should price things based on what they cost you to acquire is the reason engineers are rarely trusted with pricing in established companies. Slicehost can charge whatever it wants for storage, because you can't get storage with a Slicehost wrapper around it anywhere else. This is just an optimization problem.

Something to like about this situation: most startups price too low out of the gate, and should be raising prices regularly. Here Slicehost gets a (small) shadow price increase over time, as its costs for storage and compute decrease.
This gets even more complicated when I realize that the meaning of a word rests within people which means even something perfectly accurate to me could be inaccurate to someone else.
1) I understand, but unless people raise this issue publicly maybe they won't ever change ;-)

2) I can dump it on my home drive just like i could dump it on S3, but I do a lot of parsing on the files and copying them back and forth when needed is a headache I'd rather avoid. And then there is my front-end server that caches large portions of the website dynamically which I can't move to my home drive
http://www.shelldorado.com/
Their customers pay it, their competitors don't undercut it, and they get an increasing profit margin out of it. Sounds like they've found the magic number to me...

I'm also curious how you know that their numbers would actually let them drop the price yet. You really think they pay for all their hardware and software with a few month's worth of fees? That after paying personnel/electricity/marketing/rent each month they're going to wipe out the long-term investment numbers each month? I'm willing to bet they have some kind of spreadsheet somewhere and understand where they stand on their pricing requirements much better than you do.
I think he has a very valid point, and Slicehost should take notice. However, I also think that he has outgrown the VPS space. I would contact SoftLayer if were him.
... after being immersed in code for hours I do have trouble socializing and being on a less intense level with people.

I have noticed this too. Though I've never really been that sociable a person to begin with, maybe that makes a difference. But for whatever reason, my "coding mode" does not seem to play well with my "social mode".
This is what you're searching for http://dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5106093&fecha=...

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl...

sorry for my english :S
I'm also on Slicehost, and have been for a few years now. My spending on hosting goes up every year, my spending on hosting as a percentage of sales keeps going down. This is principally because I spend most of my time figuring out more ways to charge more customers more money (they certainly don't pay 2006 prices any more) and less of my time worrying about servers or trying to shave money off my hosting bill.

Now, if you want to treat hard drive space as a commodity, there are many service providers out there who are happy to meet your needs. You'll have to put up with some of the pain associated with dealing with a commodity service. Slicehost (sensibly) has no particular desire to commoditize their offering or price like they have done so.
You make it sound like this is a highly differentiated market. We are talking about hosting hardware. Sure Slicehost (and others) throw some software in to the mix, but the main thing everyone buys is access to hardware (and not specialized hardware at that). So yeah, price does matter. I think it makes them vulnerable to new entrants into the market that can base their prices on today's hardware.

Also, I don't think this is a "small" shadow price increase. Hardware gets cheaper by 50% year-over-year. Even if you cut that in half, a 25% yearly decrease in hardware costs is pretty good for them.
Nothing in his post came anywhere close to talking about 'ethnic cleansing'.

Umm, except the part that involved replacing one ethnicity with another, viz, ethnic cleansing.

I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, but the census bureau projects the total population to be 405m in 2040
http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/files/natio...

And the nhw population to be half that at the time,

http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/files/natio...

...so, I'd say 30 years, but it's probably less than that because illegals generally avoid census workers, and a lot of people are counted as "white" when they and no one else typically do in practice.

Anyway, the actual replacement of one group with another is not an overnight thing. Rather, neighborhoods, then cities, then regions, then states, one by one by one are overrun. Only then, when reversal is impossible is the actual country gone.
You never get the ability to downmod articles. I've got 8000+ karma and still can't.

I believe that you can't downmod comments that are on a thread that you've responded to. This is to prevent pile-ons, where debates get so heated that people just downmod all opposing POVs that they don't agree with. Similarly, you can't downmod comments that are more than a day old from the user page, to prevent people from downmodding all comments of a person they don't like.
IIRC there was a study done along these lines a couple of years ago. The actual number was 90 minutes. Among the chair-moistening set, actual productivity per week boiled down to 5 * 90 minutes.
Yes, "bislama" means "with peace" in various languages in the muslim parts of the world (to me it sounds very north african.)
Similar question, different country-of-origin:

Does anyone know of any Canadians who have gotten a TN-1 visa to come work at a startup?
I saw that too :-/

They're confusing the saudi flag with the arab league flag, both green with white arabic text.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Fla...
Yep, same here. It's like it takes time for my brain to switch gears.
There are providers offering better pricing.

ChunkHost has 2GB instances for $66/mo. You can get a 512MB instance to try for free during their beta.

Prgmr (which is very, very basic and much harder to use) offers 2GB instances for $36. However, their service isn't so automated.

The issue is that Slicehost now operates on a premium level - they're a big name. And you're paying for that name. Linode offers slightly more competitive pricing, but again name.

People are willing to pay up a little in order to get something they think will have better uptime. But this is one of the reasons that I left Slicehost. When they started, you could get a 512MB dedicated server for around $70-100 with no RAID and crappy reliability. The cost thing is starting to swing back toward dedicated hardware as for $160 a place like Softlayer will give you a 4GB dedicated box or an 8GB server for $210 (both coming with 2,000GB of bandwidth). It's still hard to match on the low-end because when you're dealing with dedicated hardware you have electricity and rackspace which, well, a server has to take up physical space. But Slicehost and other VPS providers haven't cut prices and adjusted as things changed which has made dedicated boxes a lot more attractive.

If you have 7 2GB slices, you might want to look at a dedicated box. Buy a box with 16GB of RAM, 4 processing cores, and get your VMs running on it all for around $460. That compares favorably to the $910 Slicehost would charge. Gets even better at 32GB for $660 vs. $1820.

Just remember that VPSs aren't the be all and end all. They're a tool. If the pricing of other options is working out better for you, look into that.
Imagining him chasing a house cat is a nice visual.
Once upon a time Symantec (in the era of "Visual Cafe") had something akin to a radio program, complete with "DJ", who basically did a routine modeled on morning radio, complete with "updated traffic reports" that told you the current hold times on various streams.

It was certainly unusual, but I guess if you had to call them a lot it would get a bit draining.
It think it's more like the 80/20 rule in most offices. 80% of the employees only work two hours a day and a handful work frantically to get all the real work done.
The bad news is that the iPhone gold rush is basically over.
I know the question was asking for RoR book recommendations, but being quite new to both Ruby and Rails when I started using Rails, I have found "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide" (AKA the Pickaxe Book) to be an invaluable reference.

If you're already very experienced with Ruby, then please ignore. :P
I didn't change that much from when they were originally posted. One's cut out of something longer.
I wonder if there's any provision against first downvoting then replying - I'd rather not downvote someone just to the this and I couldn't find any trace of that in the source code. But then again, my Lisp-fu is far from perfect, I might have missed it.
Ask HN: Could a Lisp be Blub?
Could a language with S-expressions, macros, first-class functions, and a REPL cater to average programmers and be despised by hackers? How could you cripple these things?
Any language could be "blub". You're talking about a power continuum. If something more flexible than lisp gets discovered, then lisp could ostensibly be less powerful than "New Language X" for the developer.
They are also careful to say PC not Microsoft even though everyone understands what they mean.
I speculate, since I haven't got access to any more information than anybody else, but probably not. Remember, the tongue's ability to "taste" is actually quite limited; most "flavor" actually occurs in the nose, which this won't affect at all.

It's faintly possible that some hypothetical future device could do something with flavor, but it is another scale of engineering difficulty since it would almost require that you are physically releasing molecules, as in, "fuel". It's at least conceivable, since it's a myth that certain flavors are isolated to certain parts of the tongue, but I'd expect that by the time we had the nanotechnology chops to pull that off, we'd have real artificial eyes, and quite possibly real artificial optic nerves, leaving the number of people who would want such a device quite low.
This is the perfect answer to an interview question, with the proviso that it is nearly impossible to demonstrate over the course of an interview. You can sketch out the general nature of the approach but actually doing something productive with it takes a wee bit longer.

For questions like this, you think between the phone screen and the serious interview you could send someone an email saying "Here's homework: we have a torrent here of a substantial data set. Find the median number, document your approach, and we'll talk about it at the interview."
How to get music from the Internet. | Mind Dimension
I assume you mean that first line? 1/70th of a week (rounding to a 70-year life span rather than going to look that up) is a bit under two and a half hours. There's no way I spend 2.5 hours a week on hold.

Maybe they found a stat that says you will spend 1/70th of your life in a line of some sort, including being on hold, because that sounds at least plausible, and then worked that Layers of Editors (TM) journalist trick where you just sort of take a bit of truth and turn it into a lie, because it makes a better lead.
Perhaps I missed this in the article, but in what "cases" are the people deciding whether to continue funding complex systems research not scientists?

My guess is that a majority of the research into complex systems is funded by the NIH and the NSF. Both of which make funding decisions largely based on the opinions of other scientists.
> I'm not sure, but I don't think many of the mafia gangs that ran the alcohol business survived the end of prohibition very well, the alcohol industry has been run as a normal business ever since.

That's true of large-scale criminal enterprise, but small-scale moonshine continued until the cost of raw materials started to approach the cost of the cheapest hard liquor in stores.

Post-prohibition moonshine runs is where/why NASCAR came from.