skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They might say that. But for whatever reason I'd feel a lot less comfortable staying in the nearest Starbucks for a long time (say, a few hours) than in any of the independent coffee places in my neighborhood. This might just be me, though.
I've had a gas station in Northern Canada, but it was a total failure, which is sad. We got defrauded big time while we were in Europe and the whole thing almost literally collapsed. Some of our employees had had the great idea to go and gamble in the casino with the proceeds of the business, they would put back the 'borrowed' money before we returned.

You can guess the rest.

By the time I found out about it (a supplier calling to Europe why we had not paid for a month) it was much too late to salvage anything.

So, since then I try to stay out of retail as much as I can...

I lost some money, which was sad, but they lost their livelihood and their reputations, which is probably more of a problem in the long term. It took me a while to get over it though, I had a serious trust problem for a while.
Who You Callin' Stupid and Lazy?
Geek Weekend, Day 1: Bletchley Park
What kind of Lisp?
Neat product. I had to buy one for my GF, the artist. The whole shopping cart experience is just a little bit better than usual. It asked me for my name and the used it to populate the CC and shipping names. The messages were nice, not institutional.

EDIT: Must be the HN effect: they are out of stock and wont ship for another week, :-(
I couldn't disagree more with the idea that it's embarrassing that PHP apps tend to run with just a simple untar and Django projects don't. For me, this highlights some of the weaknesses of PHP - that there is a lack of pre-built libraries out there, and the difficulties in reusing code.

When I first started using PHP god knows how long ago (IIRC PHP 4 was still in beta), one of the things that shocked me was that there was no equivalent to Perl's CPAN. Things are better now, but not that much, and beyond DB libraries there is still far too much reinvention of the wheel in PHP.

Django is very much in the Unix philosophy of code re-use, and anytime you re-use code there are going to be dependencies. Added to this, many apps are going to use Python, non Django-related libraries, creating more dependencies.
Any good Django app that's doing anything moderately complex should have a pretty long list of INSTALLED_APPS.

Many rails apps work with a simple untar because they include their libraries in vendor. I'm not a ruby guy, but Luke Kanies (creator of puppet) is, and wrote a great post on why this is stupid - see http://www.madstop.com/ruby/ruby_has_a_distribution_problem....

Basically what I'm saying is don't fear dependencies, embrace them.
Does the App Store really need saving? I still have yet to hear any complaints from anyone other than a handful of geeks.

Before anyone throws a fit, yes, there may be some issues which need to be resolved, but I think the headline for this article is a bit ridiculous.
Elsewhere in the site:

Keyboard
Continuing my experiments with keyboards, I currently prefer using 27 keys to provide the 48 characters needed. These are the home keys of a standard 101-key keyboard, allowing the other 74 to be ignored.

The assignment of the keys changes, with the current one displayed on-screen at lower right. It's pleasantly easy to type while referring to the display. These keys minimize finger travel, as close to Dvorak's arrangement as 27 keys permit.

They are used as function keys (menu selects) for applications. The only text that needs to be typed is when editing source code.

Other arrangements are possible. Including, gulp, standard qwerty.

Wow...
His intro (first few seconds of video) scared me shitless!

edit: I've basically been failing (with a couple hard-won successes) for the last 3 years and that's exactly what I needed to hear because sometimes I'm just asking myself: "Might I be DOING IT WRONG?" (maybe I am, but oh well ;P)
Open source project management tools
I don't understand, why does one need a beard for Python/Django? Is Ruby/Rails more hip?
Judge Throws Out Red Light Camera Tickets As Program Declared Illegal
I like that Pragprog gives you the option of buying both the deadtree and pdf versions. That way you CAN have your Ctl-F and something to read on holiday at the same time.
Totally enforcing separation is an almost impossible ideal. You just shifting logic from the controller to the template engine.

For example the paper describes how a designer would handle submenus as follows:

To handle submenus, have the template iterate (tail-recursively)
over the list of submenu items if that menu is active.

<a href=$attr.url$>$attr.title$</a>
$if(attr.active)$
$attr.submenu:menuItem()$
$endif$

I prefer to send either an array to the View with the menu items and handle the logic in the template or the controller sending the list in a list with classes and id's embedded. I do not like either of them. Has anyone found a solution? I have also tried transclusion a.l.a. wikipedia to ease some of the pain of separation the designer only having to include this {{menu:top}}.

Another pet peeve of mine is that Views are more and more becoming programs (i.e ajax, Javascript?), they do not fit in neatly into a model view controller paradigm.

Whatever my comments the paper cited above by tmikew is a MUST read.
meh. To be fare I'd like to see "Worst Case" boxes for everything else...
I didn't see irritation. I saw amusement when the host mentioned Mark. But then again you might be right.
It's not so much that it was inaccurate (although it was) as that it was missing the point.
I don't go to Starbucks because of their Wi-Fi. Most places I can just walk in and start using it, but with Starbucks I need to maintain a cash card and register it online, then after that it has a time limit. It sounds simple to do, but it's yet another card I need to carry around with me everywhere for no good reason.
Why are freeways crowded?
amazon has large dataset.
http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/
Are you saying you've seen a detailed description of OKAD's user interface somewhere? I haven't, and I'd love to read it. Chuck doesn't seem to want to release it.
Now that I see he was OK the next day, I don't feel bad for laughing so hard at it. Maybe he worries that it would cause people to think badly of him, but in my case, anyway, it just reveals a more human, vulnerable side, which doesn't diminish my respect for his intellect in the least. It said:

Hi. I'm at the cabin. Have had 3 whiskeys. It's been a hard day. And it's really hard to type.

I talked to mortgage consultant Craig today, about raising money on my Incline Village property. No joy.

I drank my whisky at my Yuba River outlook. Very peaceful. My insight was that I need to use this web access to seek a solution to a dilemma. You can help. I'll get back to you.

Walking back from the Yuba River outlook, I encountered a deer leg. Something killed a deer and brought its leg there. How ephemeral we all are.

I brought to the cabin 1/8 cord of oak firewood. It was delivered to my house, I loaded it onto the Jeep and drove it here. Tomorrow I'll stack it. You know, this keyboard is almost unusable after 3 whiskeys. Hit the wrong key and funny things happen. That does not happen with the colorForth editor.

You know, dealing with File Manager on the Earthlink website is just as keystroke prone. It took me many tries and much confusion to post this comment.

I just got a beep. Have no clue what it means
Yep. legend has it he had a chair with who triplets of keys taped to the armrests to control the cursor and place the gates by 'chording', using a system he called 'Okad'.

http://www.colorforth.com/gates.htm

one hand would control the cursor, the other the placement of the gates or wires.

Would be nice if someone could corroborate or disprove that, I always thought it completely matched the rest of the stories about Chuck Moore so I give it a good chance of being true.
I can't help but notice that this does nothing to answer the question, which was about how to decide between any two languages, with Python and Ruby given as examples, rather than "What language should I use for web programming?", which appears to be the question you have answered.
Google Chrome OS Screenshots?
The other mystery with all this is that none of these people remember talking to anyone, it seems that the language faculty keeps suppressing some processes in the brain, it is almost as if it is an abstract layer on top of the underlying 'compilers'. Aboriginal people always talk about the 'dream world' which I theorize was a pre-language sort of memory.

Try this experiment. Try to think of driving to the store buy some food, come back home cook it and have dinner. Can you do that without language just images?
I think he was referring to Rails being very structured, and Django giving you the flexibility to do it your way. It depends on your tastes; I prefer Ruby/Rails.
I would like to recommend something I call "Sleep Deprivation Psychology". I used it with great success at varsity. ;) Basically if someone irritates the hell out of you, wake him up at 4:00 AM. Whenever he/she is in deep sleep (REM sleep, Theta brain-waves). A rough estimate would be 1/3 or 2/3 of their normal sleep cycle. To wake them, use excessive noise, a fire-cracker works wonders or hammering on metal pots and pans. Done right, they will receive your communication loud and clear.

WARNING: This can lead to an arms race, so do your communicating anonymously.
I was 'into forth' a good bit in the mid 80's, I worked together with a german programmer that really 'grokked' it (Lothar, his biggest dig at me was to call 'C' a 'great' language, by which he meant 'so verbose that it takes a lot of keystrokes to do simple stuff, to tease him I wrote a Forth in C ;) ), I was the newbie learning little by little.

We got some pretty hot forth hardware to play with (first chip of the 'Novix' line, pre-production) and we did neat stuff with it.

(until someone dropped a dime onto the experimental board when it was powered up that is, after that I had to pull some long nights coding a C replacement of our OCR code to save a demo... those were the days :) ).

Anyway, during the run up to this we got all kinds of good stuff on what was going on with the design of the chip, and my colleague Charly had some direct contact with Chuck, the stories about Okad come from him.

Charly was pretty good with the routing packages on our PDP-11 himself but he revered Chuck.

See my other post in this thread for some more details.

edit: iirc there was something about the Novix that was classified, I remember having to sign a bunch of documents about it being 'strategic'. I don't remember the details though.
Real!?
Plus Google is convenient so I use it but I can hardly say I "love" it.
> Many rails apps work with a simple untar because they include their libraries in vendor. I'm not a ruby guy, but Luke Kanies (creator of puppet) is, and wrote a great post on why this is stupid

Is it? Rails apps have to work on more platforms than just Debian. You can embrace apt-get and make Debian users happy but you'll piss off everybody else. I wouldn't call the decision to vendor stuff "stupid", but "necessary".

I've noticed that most users actually prefer that an app bundles its dependencies because it reduces installation hassle. Some users literally begged me to vendor a certain library because installing it themselves is too much of a pain. Only a select group of vocal Debian users care about enforcing everything through apt.
Why don't they charge for the wifi too instead of just restricting it?
We lost a scientist, and gained a delusional spiritualist.

What a trade...
Most probably we should. It is the most obvious answer. However we have not as yet managed to understand what matter is and how weird the sub-atomic world is. At a point causality seems to disappear and the world as we know it needs a transformation in order to explain this sub-atomic world.
I thought about this for years until I graduated from university years ago. Besides knowing what they are talking about, the second most important pre-requisite for me in a good teacher is sense of (healthy) humor. Plain and simple. Knowing their stuff but no sense of humor, I rather read Socrates or learn from a robot , because they are all the same to me: boring!! : (
Perfect advice for a beginner. I was wasting so much time reading language debates, pros-cons, and comparisons. I was overwhelming myself with things I didn't understand.

Had I just picked a language and just ran with it, I would be farther down the road than where I am now. So just grab something, sit down, and play with it.
Status Anxiety - documentary by Alain De Botton [video]
> The number of lines of code that a programmer can write in a month tends to be a constant independent of language

Says who? Ignoring the fact that LoC is a terrible metric for measuring anything except the amount of paper it would require to print the program, I think it would be very hard to use it to quantify how much you will accomplish. Your (implied) assertion that you will not just accomplish less, but accomplish between a half and a fifth as much in Java as in Python is even more outlandish. I can't imagine you have any evidence to support this?

> Stay away from Java; everything is too damned complicated

What is this supposed to mean? That the hundreds of thousands of people who make their livings from doing web development with Java and being competent Java programmers are either stupid (for not programming in Python), or super-smart (because they can grok Java)? This is pretty absurd. Java is no better and no worse than pretty much any other language in wide-spread use. To its benefit, it has extensive library support for pretty much everything under the sun, and all the enterprise features which would make it relatively painless to do a whole heap of things that would become very difficult in almost any other language.

Really, I think you should refrain from giving advice on specific programming languages if you are just going to resort to complete and utter nonsense to provide comparisons.
14% larger is just about equivalent. It's certainly within the error bars on the inflation numbers. (Consider the price of a megabyte of memory in 1940 versus today, or free-range beef, or ivory, or Viagra, or insulin.)

A bar chart would make it hard to compare things more than an order of magnitude apart, and a logarithmic scale would make it impossible to show relations "A as a part of B".
spider + scraper ?
New background for me. Done.
In a couple of years, we're going to look back at URL shorteners as a fad as lame as the <blink> tag, animated mailbox GIFs, and logos from FlamingText.com.
The features remind me of the CMS that is built in James Bennett's Practical Django Projects:

http://www.apress.com/book/view/1590599969
Tatjana van Vark. Cryptographer, machinist, hacker
infochimps.org (http://infochimps.org/search?query=weight) is an easy search in general--it certainly has many health-related datasets, but I didn't see any specifically on exercise. The census bureau (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/hlthins/hlthins.html) also collects some health data, though a good part of its focus is on insurance.

Most datasets on the web are going to be latitudinal surveys of a population in time, though they may span several years. It sounds like you might want a specific kind of longitudinal study following individuals over time and tracking their individual weight changes and relating that to their personal exercise routines. As garish as it is, http://www.bettycjung.net/Phdata.htm actually has a wide variety of health data links and is probably your best bet.

Finally, a few more links from my bookmarks which look like they might help you (though I haven't looked through them to be sure): http://www.who.int/whosis/en/, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/PUBL/stats.html, and http://phpartners.org/health_stats.html. Good luck!
I feel a need to stand up for Java here. Most of Java's nasty reputation comes from J2EE, and not the language itself.

Java is a wonderful tool for a LOT of systems programming. It's got a nice object model, automatic memory management, and pretty good execution speed. Given the choice between C++ and Java, I'll take Java every time. Remember, Java was originally designed for embedded systems like set-top boxes. It's still one of the best languages out there for those kinds of applications.

It's not a good fit for UI or web work, but neither is C/C++. As always, consider the type of job before selecting a tool.
The Django wiki has a nice comparison of cms apps:

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/CMSAppsComparison
You can pretty reliably predict that any article featuring the terms "myths" is going to be some kind of propaganda... The term is a rhetorical device which assumes that the conceptions you're arguing against are so childish that they don't merit serious discussion. Generally, it is used by some kind of authority trying to re-impose a black-and-white view of things on a complex, shades-of-gray world - "drug myths", etc.
I recall that waking up happened in stages.

The first stage was full on dreamworld. The majority of it was nonsense I forgot immediately, but I do have scattered memories of very intricate and bizarre almost Proustian sorts of scenes playing out in my mind involving whoever was around at the time. Like sleeping dreams the amount of elapsed time in the dream did not seem to be bounded by external time.

The second phase begins as you wake up from that dream and consists of auditory & visual 'hallucinations.' I scare-quote that because it's probably not the most precise characterization. The best way I can describe the sound is as the sound of crashing waves at the ocean, but they quickly go from very loud to to sort of a dull ringing that almost seems to physically hurt your ears. (I associate this with high blood pressure for some reason, but I don't think that's valid, particularly in this case.) The visuals consist of an almost cinematic gradual fade-in from black.

The third and final stage is where things become more familiar. This generally kicks in a minute or so after you regain consciousness. This is where you are aware of your surroundings but very muddled. If you're in a medical situation, people will be talking to you but it will just seem like gibberish. This fades pretty quickly back into a sort-of normalcy that you gradually adapt to. Sometimes this would be accompanied by nausea, and at this point you are still susceptible to re-starting the process if you aren't careful.

I am not sure I could really do it in practice, but as a thought experiment, I don't have a huge problem with visualizing that sequence without language, but then again, I am a symbolic/visual person in terms of my learning and thought process.
Her book is short and clear, and a quick read. I wish it went a bit deeper into the science, but it did a decent job, for being targeted at a lay audience.
Oh dear. Are we having a religious and political argument? We'll both get banned!

1. When they say "evangelicals" they don't mean 0.8%. They mean "people who self-identify as born-again or evangelical" and it says right on the first page (under "Highlights") that this is 34% of the US. The confusion arises because they use the term in a much more specialized sense in two places. But if you look through all the uses of "evangelical" in the study, as I did, there's no doubt that everywhere else they're referring to the 34% definition.

2. GWB obviously fits in this 34%. Kennedy and Reagan obviously would not. Carter is an interesting hybrid.

3. Yes, atheists are rising as well. But this isn't any "opposite point" to what I "desire". Two things can be rising at the same time. (Indeed, my comment originally mentioned how the US is becoming more religiously polarized, with atheists and evangelicals growing and mainline Protestantism dwindling. But I deleted it for brevity.)

4. There are many examples of evangelicals exercising political power under GWB. Think of all the appointments that were made of people from evangelical law schools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Goodling). I'm sure they did not exercise as much political power as they would have liked. But GWB went far further in this direction than ever before. That is all.
It's easy to find blog posts to talk yourself out of getting started with any language. None of them are perfect! Lisp has that "stupid parenthetical syntax" [1], Python has the whitespace thing, Lua indexes from 1, Javascript ...

I started tinkering with Prolog as a summer project, and as a side effect, Erlang makes sooo much more sense now. (Erlang was originally implemented in Prolog, and inherited a lot of its syntax & style.) I picked it deliberately because it's quite far from everything I know, and Peter Norvig said a lot of interesting things about it in PAIP. Chatter on the web gives the impression that it's just some weird dead AI language, but I've found it really inspiring. I'm glad I didn't let that discourage me. Even if the only benefit I get from it is the insight into Erlang's design, being able to read Sterling & Shapiro's _The Art of Prolog_* , and finally getting how unification/pattern matching and type inference work, it was time well spent.

* Which is awe-inspiring. I would recommend it regardless of whether you care about Prolog, much like Norvig's PAIP is worth reading even if you don't care about Common Lisp.

[1]: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Talks/SwineBeforePe...
My guess is maybe a little training but mostly lots of public speaking practice in general, thorough understanding of interview topic as well as lots of practice answering these questions in particular.
http://data.gov/
I wanted to support my local franchised coffee shop rather than Starbucks, but the WiFi was too unreliable. It's a huge downer when you're ready to get into the zone and the WiFi doesn't work.

Starbucks makes you jump through hoops to log in (via my AT&T account), but it's fast and it works every time.
Well.

My personal opinion as someone who works a lot with Django but not (for now, at least) Pinax is that they hit the problem, common in the open-source world, of starting to hit the popularity curve before they were really ready for it. Pinax started getting attention and flattering blog posts and such when there were still several issues to work out with the way Pinax itself was packaged, how applications were vetted for inclusion, etc., etc.

Fortunately, popularity has also brought them plenty of new contributors, which means this stuff either has been worked out (e.g., for things like packaging -- now using pip with custom bootstraps, and requiring every app to be installable through it, which is pretty much the ideal) or is being subjected to a flurry of activity.
> It's not a good fit for UI or web work, but neither is C/C++.

That's so true. Java is a great general purpose language but it so terribly verbose when you're trying to do string heavy or database work. The web is both.

One thing though, compared to several years ago the speed penalty has all but disappeared, it's fast enough to build some pretty impressive stuff with it.
Drupal's all about the hook system and modular architecture, and to recreate it in Django along with even half of the good stuff in contrib would take a very long time.

More importanly, Django will need to make progress in schema evolution to allow for easy DB upgrades between versions. This is the area where Django lacks most right now.
Yes, it’s quite interesting, it turns out that human pubic lice share closer ancestors with gorilla lice than either chimpanzee or human head lice do, while those species are quite close to each-other. Which means that when humans became hairless, their lice adapted to living on their heads and stopped living all over the rest of their bodies, leaving a perfect ecological niche (pubic hair) for gorilla lice to jump into. The evolution of "body lice" likewise corresponds with the earliest uses of clothing.