skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: anyone in Boston teaching RoR?
Hey guys I'm pretty well versed in php/mysql/ajax/html/css but want to expand my knowledge to Ruby on Rails. I'd like to find someone that has experience and knows RoR inside and out and pay them to teach me everything I'd need to know to get started developing web apps with RoR. I'll just teach myself if I don't find anyone, but would love to learn from someone that has worked with it.

Email me or leave a message here if you're in the Boston area and are willing to meet up for a few days and teach me RoR. Thanks.

my email is hotshothenry {at} gmail {dot} com
If you don't nullify every reference, then the instance really should not be garbage collected, as it is not garbage yet. You should rather consider your application, where you are storing references and whether it is really needed (often better strategy is to make clone of the instance and treat it as disposable).

Modern garbage collectors traverse the object graph and dispose everything, that is not in the graph - meaning, that closed chain of object with circular references is not a problem - they will get gc'ed.

Accessing null reference does not give NullPointerException, ever. Dereferencing it does.
The Next Great Media Company Won't Have a Web Site
Top Travel Tips to Protect You from the H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic 
Swine Flu is now a global pandemic this neat article explains how you can help to avoid getting infected whilst on your travels
Anyone else sort of think that the "To TDD or not" argument eclipses the much more important argument of "To have high unit test coverage or not"?
Just another case of someone trying to save the world with regular expressions and falling short.
EU and Microsoft near browser agreement
Android allows this (users can download apps directly from third-party web sites). It just requires the user to check an "I know what I'm doing" box in the settings first.
Does it seem weird to anybody else that about half the list of prominent projects using TDD he listed are testing tools?

That's like saying type systems are good because they help you write sound proofs about type systems. I know they can be really useful, but it's an incredibly circular argument.
With the added benefit that it will warn you if you're not really in tail position. The only place where recur falls flat is with mutual recursion in which case you need to use trampoline. I love me some Clojure.
they're going to charge $20 for the IDE

Do not ask people who do not pay money for software how much money to charge for software.
The server looks non-responsive.
As Nietzsche said, "...if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

The fundamental tension with all entrepreneurs is the willingness to go to the brink of the abyss for your idea, but also have the wherewithal to pivot or pull back. The choice between zombie company (with no high market potential) and starting another idea is tough, There are some ways to make the decision, but a lot of what makes you pull back or dive in seems determined by luck.
The Story of Ping is a classic children's story from the 30s. When people had a very different attitude about, for instance, corporal punishment.

The summary is that Ping is a duck from a family where the last duck home every night gets beaten. Ping is going to be the last duck one night, so decides to run away. He has a series of scary adventures, learns that home is best of all, and is happy to go home the next day, even with the beatings.
I think it may be obvious to people with a c/++ background, but when I was in school in the early 2000's, they taught you concurrent programming in Java via threads.

And the concurrency primitives and frameworks in languages like Java and C# are so easy to use there's a whole generation of us who think that threading is the easy way to do concurrency.
Here's his writeup of his blog design: http://tomayko.com/writings/administrative-debris
Actually, once you've figured out that you can stack allocate an object, you can stick its instance variables in registers. This can be a huge win.
5 Tips For Companies Launching E-Commerce Websites
When setting up an online business you should bear in mind that many potential consumers are still very wary of supplying their details over the internet.
>making a single stew out of them all seems like a mistake.

Ya... http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20070710/absurd-the-giant-swi...

Maybe their design choices were.. uninformed. The team was small, quite secluded (in Australia) & secretive (even within google). It;ll be interesting to see what/how much they change.
It seems really weird. I've been trying to get an answer to the question "what popular apps have actually been built using TDD?" for a while, without success. All of the entries on his list are either libraries, programming languages, or testing tools and frameworks. Can anyone name actual apps that TDD has blessed us with?
Rich Hickey and Brian Beckman - Inside Clojure (54 minute video interview)
How Sony's loss is Samsung's gain
I was at the talk - the demo was excellent.

I spoke to Francisco afterwards and he said that the resulting code would be able to run across both Mac & Win32 platforms, which I thought was nice.
Very very very very far from true. It definitely has the potential to at least be a just as strong supplement down the road, though I highly doubt it. Here are three key reasons why:

a) Email is the highest penetration of any utility on the web. Even more than search. (I know, i know, i need to find this source again, but it's not far fetched). Twitter is a blip on the radar in comparison.

b) Too much noise on twitter. When I read your newsletter, it's just me and your newsletter. That's it. Twitter is surrounded by other noise including lots of spam.

c) Twitter is the gateway, not the destination. 140 characters can't get enough across. It can certainly get a link across... which will probably be to the newsletter you just sent out.
Is Flash Good For iPhone?
This site gets clogged with video links that sound interesting taken alone, but would consume vast amounts of time if you tried to watch them all.

If there's no nice way to get transcripts, maybe there's at least some way to condense this stuff in time? Cut out pauses, speed up the talking while keeping pitch normal, etc.
Some interesting points, but this one:

"In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.

That is remarkable stinginess. Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable, conferring a lifetime of social capital and prestige."

Isn't the reason Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable precisely the limited supply of them?
Thank you. This is a major problem with how media portrays data in news stories. Most people would see 50k over 9 years as a huge number, but if it were instead presented as an individual having a %0.002 chance of getting ill from these foods, or as about %0.0022 of the population is affected per year, the story takes on new meaning. Understanding how to present data like this should be required learning for journalists.

Of course there is always the chance that this is deliberate, and done to make the story more sensationalistic, but I prefer to follow Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
When we did the tour in '05, we were in the door with partners at every firm we pitched, and we're not especially connected. The way to get VC meetings is to have friends who have been funded; you call them up, and they call up their VCs, and it goes from there.

If your friends like/respect you, this isn't a big favor.
Thanks.

Yeh I spent a bit more time reading the thread and I see he is a family man and has personal friends in the NM moderators.

Was just checking because it always worries me when young single guys [which I assumed he was, oops] drop out of communities with no noise :) now I actually have the resources to check their ok I keep my eye open for these types of things - but I missed him disappearing.
I heard about Red laser barcode scanner, but did not try. The problem with EAN/UPC (grocery) symbols is that they are optimized for laser scanning - flat bed, one laser pass, poor light conditions etc ... QR, 2D barcodes are optimized for imaging where a complete (or incomplete) picture is analyzed.
The government's fuzzy small biz math
Does this mean that simple accessors (or at least getters) effectively have no method call overhead?

Also, the linked article's linked article mentions (in 2005) that Java 6 would have had this. What happened?
A Conversation with Sergey Brin
More importantly, that were done with TDD as opposed to unit testing, testing with a repl, etc.? A lot of claims about TDD's benefits seem to take credit for testing in general. (Automated testing is a clear win, IMHO.) Insisting on writing tests upfront does mean that you test consistently, but then it's hardly the primary cause.

I'm sure it's a highly useful tool in some cases, but the people pushing it uncritically make it harder to tell when it's actually a good fit. In my experience, it's very useful for safely making changes in a legacy code, but I suspect it can encourage over-engineering surface details or getting caught in local maxima when used for initial design. (I usually just design with a REPL or notepad/whiteboard.)
Sounds equivalent to getting rich selling the secret of success.
This is missing an extremely important piece of VC advice, which is that VC's very rarely say "no". They say "not now", and they use different words to say it: "let's take another meeting a couple weeks from now", "we're really interested", "we'd be interested in syndicating with someone else", "yes", etc.

You will lose a lot of time from important things at your startup if you can't either have the cajones to pin them down (of course, you're probably going to get a "no") or run your business in a way that works with or without funding.

From cofounding a company that got an A round, having a decent role at a very successful VC-funded company, and going out again for funding in '05, my gut is that by the time they've sent someone out to talk to you about database architecture, you're getting buying signals.
What happened to Argentina?
"The 10 types of foods included in the list account for nearly 40 percent of all foodborne illness outbreaks linked to FDA-regulated foods since 1990"

"50,000 illnesses were linked to these 10 foods"

50 000 * 2.5 = 125 000 illnesses (125 000 * 40% = 50 000)

125 000 / 19 years = 6580 illnesses per year

6580 illnesses and a population of 300 million means that there will be 1case of reported food-borne illness for every 45 000 people in a year. Compared to how many cases I remember from when I was a teenager in the 1970s, this is incredibly few.
I also think that this list isn't very convincing.

What I don't get, if Robert Martin uses TDD, why doesn't he simply list those "real" projects (real as in projects for clients) , he's worked on?
In regards to corporate newsletters, this post was just as ridiculous. Twitter likely had nothing to do with the decline. He has absolutely no evidence indicating it in any way, other than twitter growing while the newsletter ctr dropped. Nearly everyone on earth gets email, and has an email account. Twitter's audience is minimal in comparison. But rather than say anymore, I'll just refer you to maxklein's comment above. He really nailed it.
Maybe, but shouldn't they be valuable because it's graduates have proven themselves to be well educated and well balanced people? Should education be valuable because there is so little of it?
This may be old hat to some, but I just bumped into this while working on my Introduction to AI Programming homework.

Hope it's helpful.
Like they'd ever tell you.

One VC, after investing in a company I was at, deliberately fed us the pitches of competing companies that were pitching them. Thanks, VC!

Another VC, in a second partner meeting, stocked the room with the m-team of a direct competitor. After the meeting, the competitor talked about "buying" us. Thanks, VC!

Note: in neither case were this minor VCs. You would recognize them.
I'm ... I'm installing Silverlight to watch a video on Clojure.

Help.

EDIT: Nevermind, you can download source files below the video. Phew?
trivially parallelizable processor-intensive heuristics?
Love this: In early September, endowment officials announced that they had lost $10-billon, a 27-percent drop... Vanity Fair sent a reporter to Cambridge this year to assess the damage. She was told that the university had lowered thermostats by four degrees and would no longer be serving free coffee [because their endowment was "only" ~30 billion].

Btw, endowment or no endowment, Harvard is not in business to give away free degrees. Indeed 10 to 15 percent of students in any given class at Harvard are legacies, who pay a LOT for a Harvard undergrad degree, which, by the way, isn't worth as much as people think..
http://slate.com/id/2112215/
Not available in China :(
Can't say it surprises me though... I'll get the txtr instead http://reader.txtr.com/
I couldn't believe someone would post this "twitter is killing the newsletter" stuff the day after you posted that extensive post yesterday Jason... clearly they're not reading HN.
Exactly... just like doctors should earn a lot of money because their skills save lives, not because professional associations conspire to limit the number of doctors.
"Barcode Reader" on Android, which uses the zXing library, worked for me. (I don't know how the iPhone app works, but Barcode Reader continuously takes pictures until it recognizes a barcode. It seems to work quite reliably.)
I guess but at the same time the article points out that due to some lesser qualified students getting entry because of ivy school reason, many very qualified students get left out.

And frankly, Harvard's rep would increase if they had more students achieve success. A larger class size could aid in that.
Ask HN: Anyone interested in forming a community of blog post reviewers?
The problem:

I like to have blog posts I write to be reviewed by someone else. A co-worker, wife, etc.

It's definitely made my blog posts clearer, more effective and less dangerous (for those posts that sometimes contained something I shouldn't have said)

But sometimes it would be nice to bounce the post off more people with varied interests and writing skills than my small network. I don't seem to be alone as Paul Graham seems to use his network of friends and colleagues to review his essays. (for example, the bottom of http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html)

A possible solution:

What do you guys think of me and the guys at Inkling putting together a community to get blog posts reviewed. Maybe it's something as simple as setting up a private discussion board like http://tenderapp.com. Where folks can submit drafts of their blog posts and have a group of people review them and offer comments before they get posted to the rest of the general public.

The community could take at least a couple forms:

1) There's a group of moderators who do the reviewing. They might nominate themselves, but are voted on by the community. The rest of the community then submits their blog posts to this body of reviewers.

Maybe for compensation, the reviewer doesn't get paid, but their name and link to their blog/project is added at the end of the blog posts they review. Maybe so that the quality of posts being reviewed starts much better than lots of junk, people that want to join the community of reviewees "applies" to be accepted into this community by submitting their current blog and a little about themselves. This way reviewers aren't going to get bogged down with reviewing total blog spam and those "reviewed by:" footnotes will be more worthwhile.

2) Or the community could just all be "better than most" blog writers that band together. Everyone is a reviewer and reviewee and the community is a bit more tight knit and challenging to get into.

Thoughts or ideas about this and making this idea better?
I agree with you that intelligence does exist and it needs to be measured. Measured by the completion of medical school/college, by whatever heavily IQ-correlated traits that investors look at or by a wide variety of indirect measurements or proxy tests.

Intelligence should not by measured by a standardized test. Standardized tests simply do not have a history of predicting success at anything on a micro level. If they did, people would use them. It would be trivial for large employers to pay $500 per employee to have an IQ test taken. And it isn't illegal for them to do so. From the court decision:

"Nothing in the Act precludes the use of testing or measuring procedures; obviously they are useful. What Congress has forbidden is giving these devices and mechanisms controlling force unless they are demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance."

The law doesn't say that you can't use IQ tests for anything of economic importance. It says that you can't use them to discriminate. Do you think Google could show that a high score on a general intelligence test bears a demonstrable relationship to successful performance as a software engineer? And if it doesn't...then what good are the test scores?

It is possible that there is a great conspiracy against IQ tests. They could be the best measurement of intelligence, but people just don't like them. It's also very possible that the test scores aren't used in society because are relatively meaningless.
> Does this mean that simple accessors (or at least getters) effectively have no method call overhead?

Method inlining has nothing to do with escape analysis (other than enabling it in more cases) and in any case getters and setters have had zero overhead since HotSpot was first introduced in Java 1.3.
Looking at it made me curious. Is there any ray tracer that includes the effects of gravity when tracing the rays? You would have to model in terms of solids and give materials densities.

It would be a really interesting project.
The question is how well does quality education scale?

What I found most valuable during my university days was easy access to great professors. Many of my peers learned more outside the classroom in this way than during lectures.

With more students it becomes difficult to foster this type of one to one relationship. Those less motivated to get to know professors become more likely to fall by the wayside.
I was wondering whether it supported just the mac platform so thanks for the answer!
Yes, you can use some databases. But I don't think you can use the classic DBI interface.

More problematic, though, is that a single poorly coded function call on a seldom hit page can seriously impact responsiveness for a large fraction of your website. With real threads or processes you can protect against a function with a memory leak with resource limits. (You can set that up BSD::Resource with Perl on Unix systems.) If you try that with Coro you risk taking down a large fraction of your website each time a bad function runs.

If you have a small team and absolutely trust their work, this works. But as you scale up in complexity, mistakes will happen. You will have problems. And your choice of cooperative multitasking will look worse and worse.

Cooperative multitasking is not a new idea. In fact it is usually the first thing people try. Windows through 3.1 (continued under the hood in the 9x line). Apple did it through OS 9. Ruby did it through the 2.8 line. Yet in every case people run into the same problems over and over again and conclude that they are better off with preemptive multitasking. Even badly done preemptive multitasking such as Windows 95 or Ruby 2.9.

Again. I would be suspicious of anyone trying to create a high volume website these days in Perl relying heavily on cooperative multitasking. I'm not going to say that they won't succeed. But they are setting themselves up for problems down the road.

Furthermore it isn't as if there is a real problem that needs solving here. A single decent server properly set up can serve enough dynamic content from a single machine to put you in the top few thousand sites. Buy more machines and you can scale as far as you want.
Interview with Dana Callow, Managing Partner of Boston Millennia Partners
I found this passage absolutely chilling. I have never read fiction, classic or otherwise, that captured so well the tragic vulnerability of the human condition; the tenuous moment-to-moment insanity that makes us happy and irrational. It quite literally brought a tear to my eye:

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his "prize" Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. "On his 70th birthday," Vaillant said, "when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, 'Would you write a letter of appreciation?' And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters--often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him." Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. "George, I don't know what you're going to make of this," the man said, as he began to cry, "but I've never read it."

"It's very hard," Vaillant said, "for most of us to tolerate being loved."
MOU/LOI - memo of understanding / letter of intent. More concrete and binding than a conversation. Less so than a contract.

The only words you need to know are "term sheet". You will get a term sheet before you get any other form of commitment. You don't care about the other details, because when you get a term sheet, you can tell other VCs that you got it, and now you have competition.

I don't think you need to know the jargon to do the VC thing, other than you should know the lifecycle of a deal, which is something that's kind of missing from this post.

You need to know what should be happening before the term sheet and after the term sheet --- pitching, market due diligence, the partner meeting, term sheet, all the rest of the due diligence, 9 months of waiting with 86.7% chance of flaking, the room at the law office with the papers you have to sign, steak dinner.

The VCs know you're not an MBA, even if you try to sound like one.
Perhaps, but I think there is a much more practical and likely reason. It's just one that won't sell magazine articles: Harvard exists in a finite amount of space.

Anyone who lives in Cambridge knows that Harvard, like many other city-schools, has expanded to the absolute borders of its property lines. It literally has nowhere else to go, which is why it is now buying property across the Charles river in Boston across from HBS.

While it is always fun to criticize "elite schools" for their snobbery, I would suggest that the administration of Harvard actually had a rather simple decision: keep harvard at the scale and size that has proven successful for decades upon decades, or build a satellite campus to hold new students so it can grow it's size. A dimension of a university that is hard to put a dollar amount on is community. While building a satellite campus in Boston is possible, I think this would seriously damage the community, and thus output, of the school by dividing it into two disjoint locations.

Anyway.. I just think it's easy to get mad at a school like Harvard for not accepting more students. But in reality, they simply are a school built a long time ago for a certain amount of students and can't realistically grow much larger.
I'll probably be there. I'm the other guy under matt1's response. :)
I assumed from watching the video that the code it generates is objective-j or cappuccino code, and that it would run in the browser. Is this correct?
It's the FBI that does the burning.