skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are many more Rails developers out there, but there are also a lot of hacks in the community. There are probably close to as many good Django developers as there are good Rails developers - you just don't have to hunt through the bad ones as much to find them.

Sorry, what? How could one possibly know there are more hacks in the Rails community than in the Django community?

I'm all for comparing the merits of various languages and frameworks, but this article is more about gut feelings than facts.
The crazy part is that anyone can sue for anything at any time and basically experience no downside for losing. Its win or draw for the crazy person. The losers are the ones who have to spend real money and time defending against nonsense. If the first suit against Disney had cost this fellow a fortune when he lost, he'd have thought twice about this one.
Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to SEO optimize a site, paraphrase WSJ articles, put some ads in and let Google index them (like already happens to dozens of blogs). Then instead of blaming Google for stealing their money, News Corp will have to blame the dozens (hundreds?) of spammy reposters who appear to fill the void.
3 reasons why your adwords costs might have increased
damn. It was flagged for spam. I'm now curious as to what the post actually said.
I like the article's emphasis on developing neural connections but I'm a little mystified about this "Cuban system" that is supposedly leading the way. All we learn from the article is that Cuban schools have sports directors, music directors and someday a chess director. That's it? Sports, music and maybe chess? How is this different from other schools around the world?
I fundamentally disagree with this. If an existing solution exists, one shouldn't try to create his own? Then why did Linus build Linux?

There's also a lot to be said for curiosity. I'm currently building an email client in my spare time, not because I don't think there are plenty of great ones already, but because I'm interested in programming with IMAP. I'll probably open source the final result, and I don't think there's anything wrong with doing so.
I roll my own, these JS solutions miss so much what with NoScript being so popular nowadays.
This will just leave sites hosted in Europe at a disadvantage.
when i looked at this, i wasn't excited or envious of all the geek gear, i just thought it represented a massive waste of resources. they took their shot, they flopped...any time/mindshare leftover for google alternatives now belong to bing and players to be named later (blekko etc). to continue to pour money into hardware and development just seems like a massive waste. just give the money to an inner city school...actually put that wealth to some positive use for humanity
Except exclusive content deals could be viewed as Microsoft using its leverage in an existing monopoly to unfairly compete in the search engine space.
Enough of this nonsense already, please.
The VC Carry as an Executive Compensation Model for Wall Street
How to catch a cookie stuffer
It seems as if it pays to be evil.
What's also important, but not addressed in this article is the kind of app you are building. I'm generalizing a bit here, but Django seems to focus more on the CMS-y content type of applications whereas Rails shines more for non-traditional kinds of web apps.
To some extent, but it's a real shame it doesn't (always) come with PLOT and BEEP.
"It approaches the problem of building a web framework in a unique way and doesn't even attempt to share terminology with Rails for things as basic as model-view-controller (Django uses the terms model-template-view instead). "

I can't really agree with this being a good thing. The MVC pattern has been around much longer than Django or Rails, thus Rails is using an existing nomenclature where Django is not.
Well, I'm sure they can do some damage and slowly kill off Google engineers with their awesome jingle: http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2009/08/0...
I was talking about linking to a home-made blog post written by a start up, not a third-party article from TechCrunch.

It's not about spamming people, it's just common sense. If you were a musician, wouldn't you want your song to be on the radio during rush hour, and not at the 3:50AM slot?
The article has a very reasonable tone, but a headline like this is unlikely going to spawn anything but the relaying of subjective experiences on why or why not the authors points are or are not total bullshit.
To this day I still play Plants Vs. Zombies. I've beaten it at least thrice, but... still gotta fill the gardens and finish the wisdom tree.
Django doesn't call itself MVC because it isn't MVC.
I have been looking at this for my 7 yr old son. Beyond school, his time is spent getting muddy on a soccer field, swimming, building dens, and generally racketing around with friends.

However, along with every other 7 year old, he want to know how things work. I am finding that many of my explanations get from A to B via "and at this point there is a computer that does ...". - Things: Microwave, car, alarm clock, phone, camera etc. and broader systems: exams, shops, banks etc.

I could explain things in terms of the model that is embodied in the computer, but that seems wrong - at least as the only explanation. If you pull it apart, you don't find the coresponding physical embodiment.

If he does want to dig further into this and explore how to make computers do things, I want to have a good set of resources to draw on - My current short list w/ comments:

- Lego Mindstorms NXT

Start with the provided graphical environment, move on to one of the several text based development environments, eg: NQC, leJOS. He loves Lego, and I have already set up a mindstorms controller+psx joystick to give him a drive+steering component he can use in his own constructions. I find the graphical a bit cumbersome.

- Nodebox (http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Home)

I think it is great - python & easy graphics. I have already been showing off some simple drawing animations and fielding requests to: "Make it go the other way, go red, faster, jump etc." - Cool, but I am well aware the he'll get frustrated with syntax errors.

- Processing (http://processing.org/)

Also, cool - not used it so much myself, and I am not sure I want to start explaing curly parens & semis, but it does lead into Wiring and Arduino. One thing I would really love for him to experience is making things w/ embedded cpus - even if it just simple things to spin motors and flash leds.

- Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/)

Only recently found this. For me, the visual programming was way easier than Lego NXT. Going to have more of a play.

- Nintendo DS homebrew

- C64 - in the form of a C64DTV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV)

- Usebox (http://belogic.com/uzebox/)

When I was mucking around w/ NDS homebrew I had him draw some characters, then we scanned them and displayed them as sprites bouncing around (one was under joypad control - no collisions or gameplay, maybe 20 lines of code)

My own experience was that making games was a very powerful motivation - and all these 3 provide a way into that - C64 & Uzebox would provide a similar experence to mine (well, I was a BBC fanboy, but anyway). Nintendo DS would be a bit more up to date, and would have some currency with his mates. Some way of targetting NDS from processing would be a cool halfway house.

Assuming he is at all interested, it will be interesting to see if any of this is appropriate. If not, well, there is another son - and maybe I'll just get stuck in myself.
Murdoch's Folly: Block Google & Kill Fair Use -- Plus a Nasty Truth
Indians account for close to 20% of all realty sales in Manhattan
I believe you mean "laid off in April". "I was laid in April, still looking" is very different.
The answer to this question hasn't changed. Choose one or the other based on:

Language knowledge (Python v. Ruby)
Availability of developers
Amount of third party code specific to your needs

This topic has been thoroughly gone over a number of times, this article doesn't really bring anything new to the table.
Thanks guys and please let me know your thoughts on cookie stuffing. It's a pretty contentious subject.
As I understood the article, is not about ink and paper. The suggestion was, that Bing will pay NYTimes and WSJ to index their content, if/when will they go out of Google index - the intention behind is, that if people want to have those sites in the search results, they will have go to Bing.
They have

http://endsoftpatents.org/amicus-bilski-2009

It seems that FSF, Google, Red Hat and the Software Freedom Law Center are against the patent ideas.

IBM, Microsoft, Symantec and Philips are for patents according to this page.

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Bilski_v._Kappos_amicus_briefs
Not as a desktop at least. If a device comes with OpenOffice, it's going to fail with consumers. If it's even possible to natively port OOo (if it uses an X server), the outlook is not good.

ChromeOS is extremely promising in this regard.
Scarcity?
I read your comment first and then clicked thru to the article, my soda just came out of my nose on my keyboard, thanks.
Smart people get their news from aggregators and feeds. Normal people go to sites directly for their daily dosage of drivel. Both Google search for individual stories. It just so happens that the same news story is linked 10 times down the page, some often pointing to the same page due to blogs and aggregators.

I predict nothing consequential will come of this drama.
The name is silly, but who cares. The search results just aren't very good. My impression is that the ranking algorithm is passable, but that they just don't have nearly the depth of Google. Less popular but highly relevant pages that come up in google are completely missing from cuil.
http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Home
Hi I am am one of the founders at http://appsto.re and we have a way for you to track google ad word campaigns from our analytics dashboard. The service is 100% free and we would love for you to give it a try.

Give me a call if you have any questions, 917 nine seven four 6317
Yeah, you would think the AP could have found someone at Google to present another angle.
I prefer tulips.
I'm not involved in anything that would be a victim of "Cookie Stuffing", so I don't know how any of these schemes use Cookies. As a result I can't follow pretty much anything you're talking about, because I don't know what the mechanisms are that are being perverted.

So, although I'm interested, and am probably in one of the target audiences for your post, I'm completely at sea as to what you're talking about.

A clear explanation of how affiliate schemes or whatever use cookies in the first place would be a great start. As it is, I have no comment, because I got nothing out of what you wrote, even though I read it carefully.
Random discovery is so difficult. If only there was an engine of some sort that we could search things with. We could call this engine of search - Bing!
JParse - Easily Parse XML with jQuery
The math gap
Adsense's TOS state: "Up to three ad units and three link units may be placed on each page"

I imagine other worthwhile networks have similar policies.
Never, ever, ever?

Even as I write this from my Ubuntu 9.10 machine while coding ruby in emacs in the other screen space because Unix based development is so much easier than Visual Studios++?

Even though http://digg.com/linux_unix/the_PERFECT_mp3_player_for_Linux_... has 1000+ diggs and is the only reason my coworker is buying a specific mp3 player amongst the hundreds of options?

Even though Linux can be downloaded for $0, and in most of the non-western work, more than $300 dollars for an entire computer, let alone operating system, is stretching a very thin family budget?

In my view Windows is good for 2 things. Running Excel and computer games. And even that is starting to change. http://www.worldofgoo.com/ is fully Linux compliant, and even the boys and girls making Natural Selection 2 are talking about making a Linux version.

Hell, even most of the awesomest games have been ported through wine (like Team Fortress II). Microsoft will always be around, but more in the way that IBM will always be around. It's only a matter of time before Google makes the web browser so dominant and piracy makes non-SaaS based software so unprofitable that it won't matter whether you use an NT kernel (or Direct X whatever) or not. Flash is, hopefully, going to go the way of the dinosaur as HTML 5 comes out, and by that point what is the value proposition that Microsoft has? "Ugh, our software can run a really freaking awesome spreadsheet program!" Excel is great. I'd dual boot it if it were an operating system.
Livly.org: hacking cancer in Mountain View
Highlights From NVDA's Q3 Conference Call: Steady Increase in Demand
Class decomposition and a handy delegation pattern
People waste my time with language wars every time the word "Perl" is used positively. I thought I would waste other peoples' time to see if they liked it.

Apparently not. Interesting, isn't it!
Ways to sabotage your job search
Do people actually want quality? I don't think so. I think they want humor, personalities, different perspectives, social integration, and probably most importantly they want some blogger to read an 8 page article and summarize it into 2 or 3 paragraphs for them. Turning Bing into the news stand doesn't address the reality that people's conduits for information have fundamentally changed. I don't think there's anyway to go back at this point. Additionally I have a hard time believing 1000 major publications would get into bed with Microsoft on this. It's too risky and Microsoft's track record on the web is comically bad. They could get maybe a few dozen maybe. Would anyone miss them?
Before you go any further, you should know these things:

1. Deployment and scaling is a lot easier on Rails b/c of several dedicated hosting providers that specialize in Rails. Engine Yard is the one we use, it makes scaling extremely easy. I'm not sure if Django has similar companies.

2. Rails-specific SAAS are super awesome. Newrelic/Hoptoad, etc. They make tracking your software and errors a lot easier than the less supported Django.

3. Speed is a non-issue; scaling is 100% about making the DB scale. Furthermore Ruby 1.9 is going to be faster than Python 2.

4. Training a developer to learn Django is not as trivial as you think. There are a lot of "tricks" in these frameworks that make working in them very fast, these take time and experience to pick up.
Jees could this article be any more biased towards the BSA?
My fingernail clippings are more scarce than gold, but they are worth much less.
I have a lot of respect for Jason and takes his opinion more serious than mine.

In this case I think he is misunderstanding the Internet a little bit. The value is not created in the center (content, sites) but by the nodes. We, the users create the value of the internet and to some extent the value of what you search, at least that part is growing.

If you look at the top 20 sites on alexa globally you wont find a single pure news-site. You'll find a combination of social sites, collaborative sites, self-publishing and communication sites. This, this is the value of the internet - it's not "content".
Guido van Rossum: People want CPAN (discussion on Python packages)
Money is the bubble that doesn't pop.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/02/return-...
"I don’t want to argue with a 6000-year old bubble [but] I would not invest more than a sliver of my wealth into something without intrinsic value, something whose positive value is based on nothing more than a set of self-confirming beliefs."

He neglects to say what he would invest in. The mainstream financial media keeps on with the "gold is bad" drum, but provides no alternatives. The simplicity of gold and the fact it can't be conjured out of thin air (and vanish into thin air) likely make it attractive in times of massive con games.
should've been:

"Google acquires Gizmo5; Skype seeks fresh underwear"
Web Desing & Internet Marketing
I remember buying those excellent Mir of Moscow math books at the USSR exhibit at the CNE in Toronto every year.

I really miss them - anyone know if they still exist?
The Number of Classes Is Not A Good Measure Of Complexity
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925487
That sounds like a plot for a Crichton novel. I like it.
Five years of the AWS blog
Since gold is a decent conductor, it has use in a variety of industrial applications such as for connectors, switch and relay contacts, soldered joints, connecting wires, and connection strips; so you can find it in a lot of electronics and computers.

It's also used in certain medical treatments involving radiation, and in glass to make certain windows more energy efficient.

Gold has real intrinsic value.

I do not agree with the article, but it's an interesting point of discussion given the times.
People do... we get organic search traffic for people looking for "iphone offline maps" "iphone topo maps" "best iphone gps app" and stuff like that.

I chose my keywords for adwords based on our organic traffic.
very little useful or new information actually conveyed

Really? So e.g. the scifi test, the point about design and open source, hotels and efficient markets, the unified theory of the decline of empires, and economic inequality following automatically from higher resolution were all things you'd already thought about? They were all surprises to me.
I wonder, If "the industry" spent the resources allocated for software patents on additional R&D, could consumers even handle all the innovation? Besides, when was being the market leader ever an incentive for companies :-D

There was a cool talk on the problems with software patents by D. Ravicher: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0chez_Jf5A

I just can't imagine something like an Augmented Reality iPhone app being patented by a restrictive extortionate company. It's basically the Terminator vision on a modern handheld device. But then again, look at all the ridiculous applications http://www.google.com/patents?q=augmented+reality+phone+came...
Oh cool, I'll sign up right now. :)
"It has no remaining uses as a producer good - equivalent or superior alternatives exist for all its industrial uses."

...sounds like a statement by someone who has never worked in industry. While I can't argue what quantity of gold is actually required in industry, the value is certainly non-zero -- or else all those gold connections in ICs would be replaced with cheaper copper equivalents.
Anyone know how long we should expect to wait before they decide something and it impacts the real world?
The title of this article should be "How Bing could speed up the stagnant decline of Microsoft"
This is not true. Example: you have to collect and transfer to EU tax authorities VAT for downloadable goods sold to customers located in the EU if you're not located in EU. If you don't, you can't sell to EU customers. This is ridiculous, but I guess, they can "force" you to block EU users from accessing your website.

I'm not sure how this is actually enforceable, but I think you'll have problems with EU (for example, if you decide to go to Europe for holidays) for not complying with their rules. Which is sad.
There is a huge redundancy here: if a user does not want cookies, every modern browser gives the user an ability to simply deny cookies. Just use the browser and solve the problem.

Now, even if you want to allow cookies (and have signaled as much in your browser), a site will have to disrupt your browsing experience to accept a cookie from the website.

Completely redundant and adds yet another layer of bureaucracy on top of website design. Very EU.

And there are plenty of good uses for cookies without having to register: session tracking for shopping carts (so that you can add items without logging in), session tracking for sites that show you a navigation breadcrumb...
I predict for AdMob's eCPMs for November to drop sharply against their numbers for October based solely on their yanking of the IQ quiz SMS subscription offers (although they do still run some SMS-billing ringtone offers, so their numbers might not fall too fast). Those types of offers, while perhaps morally challenged, subsidize a tremendous amount of free content and services for the rest of us that have enough common sense not to click on them.
But at least, they will get some money from Microsoft.
Agreed! I love the fact that blogs take on a personality and have an opinion and/or attitude. More exciting then reading "unbiased" newspaper articles.
I'd expect stage one is 'get an introduction to a member'.

Interesting to see it's not based out of Silicon Valley. Was at a panel on Saturday about angel investing and the scene is certainly a lot more geographically distributed than I'd realised.
Yes, very much so. Mathematical expository talks are, in my experience, of appallingly low quality.
Ooops, I can't seem to verify my website, even though I put the tracking string at www.gaiagps.com.

Where it says "Your website" on the verify page, it looks like there is a bug too.
Was Apple Seriously Bidding For AdMob?
Gold production per year: 1.2%

Population growth rate: 1.19%

M3 index growth rate: 2 to 12%

I'll stick with gold, silver, and investments where I actually put my brain to work, like my own company. I believe in stable stores of value for emergencies and a growing stores of value for future luxuries. The ft.com author can stick to investing in ponzi schemes. Just for kicks he can take a look at how the DOW has done versus gold in the past 10 years.
Gold has plenty of value, it may be a fuel in the future; it can be used to create antimatter.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27998860/
I think "b) If you would only search the top 1,000 newspapers and magazines on Bing, would you use it? How often?" is fairly crucial. I can't imagine my life would be any different if I couldn't search the WSJ on Google. But then I'm not the sort of person for whom WSJ pages as search results factor highly.

Jason's proposed deal certainly does provide a rescue option for Murdoch's terrible statement about taking all his content off Google - but it just opens up a need for someone to register bingle.com and simply aggregate both sets of search results together. Search should be open, not partisan; hiding content from Google and publishing it on Bing won't gain Bing market share, it'll just reduce the WSJ's hits.