skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, I was surprised to see this submitted to HN. In an effort to drag it into something that gratifies my intellectual curiosity, forget what does or doesn't work in Ruby for a moment and ask a question:

Why doesn't this work in every language?

In other words, if you have a construct for sequencing multiple statements (line breaks and semicolons in Ruby), and another construct for altering the order of evaluation (parentheses in Ruby and most languages), why don't they work together seamlessly? The surprising thing here is not that Ruby allows it, but that many other popular languages don't.
When talking about about computation the argument is usually presented as exponential increase in processor computational power (FLOPs/MIPs) per unit cost not processor speed. Even though processor speed peaked recently computational power per unit cost has continued to increase.

Economics drives an increase in computation per unit cost not processor speed. How the increase in accomplished is irrelevant.

The current peak in processor speed may also be temporary as you can see with a quick google search.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1...
What does one thing have to do with the other? People make irrational economic choices all the time.
Parent's in some areas can have girls that aren't subject to the one child policy (i.e. they can get another).
pretty solid. You get plenty of the basics (ORM, session handling etc) with the core package and there are a whole load of community built libraries (projects.kohanaphp.com)

I couldn't comment on CI too much: I stopped using it around 18 months ago.
> Whether the govt. should be involved or not is a different question altogether.

I think it's the main question, actually.
Just because there's a market for everything doesn't mean there's a living wage attached to every possible activity. I think you're getting yourself a little tangled up here.
At the moment it's pretty simple matching based on a few rules, but machine learning is in development. In the case of google, it appears they are using human editors.
nice..would it be rude to ask if/when you plan on putting out something for Rails 3?
no it is not. it's the easisest and the one that cant irritate end users.
Define "this stuff" - what, specifically, are you snorting at people believing?
Yes it has.

That's a major problem with the attitude in our country. Greed has overtaken our senses and everyone thinks they are entitled.

Even when you look at the number of students in each major, you will see a very disproportionate number of students majoring in subjects just for the money with a disregard for their talent in the field.
This is especially interesting for me (because normally I am put off by video), do you think is because the video highlighted the installation procedure better or do you think generally people prefer video?
Disk IO and throughput benchmarks on Amazon's EC2
Jaunty's Website
Trees, cabs and crime in San Francisco
great system!

we need to get rid of flash already and replace it with something that does not destroy resources

how about the multiplayer aspects of games? have you any ideas about developing this?

I am very interested in competitive games where we can play versus others in the same js style environment.
Thank-you mixmax. I had looked for this before, but last time I searched using Google and came up with no useful results.

For posterity:

PG explaining the algorithm that determines the 'hotness' of an item here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704
Since 1998? I'd say that's accurate...
tl;dr summary: author presents several straw-man arguments that are predicated on a shallow understanding of not only Christianity and its views on the afterlife, but humanity's bounds.

One of the better comments (by "Matt"): "I really don't see 'meta-atheism' as explaining anything that can't be accounted for by the limits of human discernment, prudence, and will."

Although this one's good too (especially out of context): "People simply don't posess the capacity to behave in a way that reflects perfectly consistent intertemporal preferences. Many of the people I cite above know perfectly well the bad fates that await them for their poor choices. It's just that at the time, Salma Hayek's heaving bosom seems more urgent than whatever might happen the following day."
I just saw why you knew the answer to this question, you posted a similar question a while back! History repeats...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166833
PSP Forums-NDS , PSX, PSN, Xbox 360, Wii and Free PSP ISO Downloads
Well first of all, we all know the limitations of exponential growth in the real world. What does 'enhancing capability and intelligence to an unimaginable scale' really mean? It all strikes me as uselessly fuzzy and mystical. Good for pop 'science' articles and sci-fi speculation (which, don't get me wrong, is fun in and of itself) but not terribly useful or informative otherwise.
You do know that it is not a Law, right? It should be called, Moore's Rule of Thumb.
I'm a little bit worried about the proliferation of text-based formats like this. Currently we have MarkDown, ReStructured Text, Textile, AsciiDoc, Perl's POD, Wikipedia Wiki markup, and now this. When you pick one of these, you gamble that the one you chose won't fade into oblivion, forcing you to convert all your documentation. Some of them have features that others do not, making an informed choice even more difficult.

I don't know what the answer is, but it makes me hesitant to use any of them.
I like how you introduce the concepts of git and Heroku as well (I haven't looked closely at the actual contents).

How the hard part: making sure the book the book can keep up with the pace at which the Ruby & Rails community moves.

Good work!
congrats. one thing, though, license and usage pricing should be communicated clearly.
"You would need thousands of engineers and billions of dollars to compete with them."

I don't think e-bay or amazon took thousands of engineers to build.
I think it was because the video helped the user understand the product better. All about education.
Okay, sure, for a document-based website with a few bells and whistles. If you want to build one of these new-fangled "web apps" that I hear so much about, you will absolutely need to manipulate hundreds or thousands of DOM elements and do so fast and consistently across god-knows-how-many versions of - to make the list short - IE, FF, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. There is a major push for JavaScript optimization going on industry-wide, and the libraries are a crucial component of this.
Because, as a liberal arts student, she probably didn't have much in the way of assistanceships or scholarships. Most science and engineering students are supported through teaching assistanceships, research assistanceships or fellowships from outside her school. Those pay both tuition and a modest salary.
Great work! I have been thinking about something similar to this for a while, but it's nice to see that now I probably won't have to go to the trouble!

Demos run very smoothly for me on FF 3.0.15!
If that ever became a problem, then surely it wouldn't be that much trouble to write a script that outputs it in whatever markup happens to be popular at the time.
Well, if cargo ships have cabins for passengers, then it's not that optimized, right? It's not about making room for passengers, but about using unused room.
Desktop computers have tens of millions of lines of active software, and for most users they only exhibit a bug every week or so. By any measure, that level of reliability far exceeds any other industry. Chipmakers achieve 0.999999 reliability, which is impressive, but if software had only that level of reliability it would crash every millisecond.
I generally agree with this concern, although I think it's likely that it will become unimportant over time as formats congeal.

I guess the mitigating factor is that at least it's readable and well-formatted as ASCII, so it's not that big of a deal if your format isn't supported anymore -- just read the source.
Africa is a continent that includes quite a few different countries. Are any of those countries actively seeking permanent settlement by Chinese citizens?
The Afghan war seems so remote to us and it has been dragging too long, what screwing it up so long is actually finding a political solution that could let the troops go home and the Afghans live in peace!
Ubuntu Server 9.10 - Review and Commentary - Linux Critic
Biz Stone talks about Twitter's monetization strategy (audio)
Me too, actually. I tried to keep Ron 100% markdown compatible but broke that with the `<VAR>` syntax. It'll probably break with Markdown more in the future, as I can already see places (pre-formatted blocks) where I'm going to want slightly different behavior.

One of the best defenses against documentation rot is a free, ultra simple, and portable toolchain. I'd like Ron to eventually be entirely in C (based on Discount, most likely) with very few dependancies, if any. If the format turns out to be useful, I'll start moving in that direction.
Mike, why so many posts about wind power and green energy in an IT forum? I have looked over your post history and you post some good IT stuff so I know it’s not a spam effort. We are an IT forum, it is just off topic here, and I was wondering. That’s all.
If you keep your mail on the server and download it using your client, then P(losing your backup & google losing the files) is much smaller than either one of those probabilities.
Lets not destroy the sea bed for minimal cost & energy gains. Especially in one of the most fertile and last remaining wildlife areas of Europe. Plenty of studies point out the negative effects the vibration of wind turbines has on fish.
I believe the BBC DRM allows this to be played worldwide, but can't verify that from here in the UK. Interview is the first 9 minutes of audio.
How a scientist went in a "dark direction"
Would you rather be working in 360 assembler or FORTRAN66 to Python/Ruby/Javascript?
You misinterpreted his last sentence. He didn't mean "I work for a living, you don't."

He meant "Since both of us come from backgrounds which requires us to work to get through school, we need to pick areas of study that will pay enough to support us."
If health benefits didn't have tax breaks, employers would probably stop giving them and would be able to pay a bit more in salary (benefit cost - increased taxes). I personally would prefer to be paid more and use that to select my own health plan, that way it would be portable.
First two did not deserve the position but Xerox printable electronics http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356800,00.asp has a very high potential IMHO and it would probably open zillions of application opportunities, keep an eye on it! :)
Sure, I agree. My only point is that people seem to underestimate the regular, non-singularity exponential doubling. Already some aspects of science and civilization have become more far-fetched than the sci-fi of 50 years ago. Like http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/mf_optigenetics/
RightJS is also not as cross browser compatible as jQuery is, just look at their selector engine, its an alias to querySelectorAll. Of course aliasing it directly is faster then checking to see if it exists and then using it if it does...
PHP Header(), Beyond Redirect
People what is wrong with you! This post earn more votes than main source!
I'm not javascript expert but RightJS looks very solid work to me. And someone spend a lot of time building that that free library for you. I will probably not use it because I'm used to JQuery but I will say thanks to the author who build it and dedicate his free time for us.

Author of RightJS thank you for your time and keep up the good work.
Then by all means, out-facebook Facebook. I'll be cheering for you.
Are are the Terms of Use?
I crewed on a private sailboat for a summer after college and it was amazing: it's a paid adventure with great people in breathtaking places. Even the middle of the ocean is surprisingly beautiful. The most important pre-requisite is a strong stomach. It's likely you'll hit a storm where you will be levitating off your bed at the height of each wave for two days straight: seasickness is completely incapacitating and will make your captain regret taking you onboard. If you pass that and can clean and heat up a pizza, most captains will take you on all expenses paid, possibly with pay. There is a migration of boats from the Caribbean to New England in the spring and back down south in the fall. Try hitting the docks at the stopping over points in St. Barts, Martinique, Bermuda, or Newport.
Google themselves have identified ways to make search better. Why text based search? Why not explore searches in a more interactive way? How about searching based on your existing thoughts and ideas? How can we make search work if you don't have a browser?

You don't need to compete with all of Google to succeed in the search arena. It is sufficient to capture 0.01% of their market to make a couple of startup founders successful.
There seems to be a lot of crime in San Francisco, that is sad. It was once a nice safe city. In the 1960’s many young people from all over the country came there as a destination for peace and love.

Interesting map although I’m not sure there is any correlation between criminals and cabs or criminals and trees. There may be other factors at work here besides trees and cabs. I think the criminals will do their criminal activity where ever they can find an opportunity. Tree and cabs or not. Nice map though.
Herpes may not kill like HIV does, but it likely makes one wish one were dead. You say it's fine to have herpes, when in reality it is not. At all. It affects your sexual life, hence it affects your personal life as well. A pregnant woman with an herpes outbreak is endangering her baby. There's a very good reason society's morals have evolved towards condemning promiscuity. The sex revolution only happened a few decades ago because of penicilin and antibiotics. Sure, many people carry the HSV without even knowing it, but that does not mean it's OK to have it. And, as you know, it is known that HPV causes cancer, so I don't think it's OK to carry it as well.

In the end, the only truly safe sex is masturbation, but that's not a life option I recommend to anyone. When teenagers are educated on sex via porn movies, promoting safe sex is the responsible thing to do. If the no-condom movies went underground, then one could ban them. Or rate them as akin to child porn, and hence, illegal.

In any case, if there are people willing to pay for no-condom porn, then the world is sicker than I imagined in my worst nightmares...
Sort of related: this is one of the best short stories (actually it's a play) I've read on a singularity-esque vision of the future.

http://www.fullmoon.nu/Resurrection/PrimarySpecies.html
Facebook Forces Users to Get With Its Privacy Program
Indeed. I'm really impressed and intrigued, but I'm a bit wary about doing much of anything serious since I don't know what the terms are, what licensing might be like, etc. Even though it says in the EULA I retain rights of code/assets/etc. I'd really hate to develop something and then have it taken down over payment, or for some other reason.

But from a technical standpoint, it looks very cool - nice work!
Looks really good so far.

Do you plan on using gems, or building everything from scratch?
That averages the science and engineering professors with the liberal arts professors. At my school, I know the starting salary for a CS professor is going to be around $85k. But looking at the History department, I see some assistant professors as low as $52k.

See: http://www.collegiatetimes.com/databases/salaries/salary?nam...
The Product Group, From December Festivities to an Exciting New Year
Again, your syllogism is faulty. You assume her work is fairly valued in exact proportion to the income it generates. But what of the possibility that her department's revenues subsidize the high cost of other departments, such as physics labs or in-demand business speakers?

It's not cheap to participate in a program like this, especially not at a decent school. If there was very low demand, you would expect this to be cheaper, no?
http://www.stateuniversity.com/program/05-0202/American-Indi...

I can't get with your thesis that she's being poorly paid because she's choosing to have more fun. It sounds as if she's worked extremely hard to get to the academic level she is at. And if you sample people, I imagine that most would expect that a professorship at an ivy-league university would pay well, since you have to be at or near the top of your field to land such a job.
maybe I'm just feeling negative today, but this sounds like some bullshit to me. it sounds like the kind of thing that would be appealing to managers: having "not exceptionally intelligent or talented" employees who become completely obsessed with doing their jobs. great, you can pay them average salaries and they will be so loyal to your giant company. the story and the events themselves are fine, but I feel like the reason this story (and some of these details seem pretty apocryphal to me, like programmers crying because of bug reports) is so popular is that management types are taking the wrong lesson from it: that it would be desirable if employees were unhealthily obsessed with doing their jobs. then they try and manipulate their own people into doing the same thing.
Getting sick is not fun, so naturally they think "I should avoid getting sick and keep my kids from getting sick, since is better than getting sick". This is the emotional reaction, not an intellectual one, and most people ignore or don't have an intellectual understanding of the immune system, other than having heard the term.
> how would you feel if she were a math professor instead? Being an academic mathematician is just as self-indulgent as anything in the humanities.

The academic mathematician who wants to make more money can probably get a job in industry, or learn an in-demand skill such as programming, stats, etc. An assistant professor of Native American studies probably doesn't have the same capacity (to put it bluntly: is not as smart), so it was a much bigger gamble for her to take on so much debt to become a professor.
Is the form for trials or paid customers? Seems the form is for trials which effects only the # of trials which was only marginally higher. What is the process to convert from trials to paid and is the video really the cause in the massive jump?

There were also other small subtle changes like the addition of "Request Instant Price Quote" headline etc.
In related news, Health Insurers Pay Congress Members Actual Currency To Oppose Reform Bill.
I've had some good managers and some bad ones. The difference for me has been whether they add-to or reduce my set of concerns.

A bad one will make you aware of every microissue their boss has to worry about, and makes you code in some terrible things in order to please them.

A good one acts as a firewall between their boss and their subordinates. Bad ideas from above are pushed back (as much as they can), lots of independent (and usually fairly random) requirements are combined into something logical, and my resulting problem set is something reasonable to create, test, and maintain.

A boss with programming experience will be able to negotiate a deliverable that's internally consistent enough to make for a good product. They do some of the up-front thinking to reduce the problem down before it's even given to me.

A nontechnical boss just sees a spreadsheet of checkboxes that we have to complete. They're like a simple IO controller: send requests, wait for completion.
If that is what he means, he could have said so. It would have been a much more coherent argument. Which is to say: +1. ;)
Razib on how a scientist went in a "dark direction"
We're updating the EULA and policies to be more open. Once it's up, I'll post a message on the site. The absolute last thing we want to do is keep people from trying Effect out.
The heading is rather misleading. It actually should say "Some site somewhere increased sign-ups by adding video to their page. You may or may not get the same effect, depending on a vast myriad of factors." But I guess that's not very catchy is it.
So obvious but very neatly done. POD is like this for perlish folks.
What images were re-used?
6 Killer Extensions for Google Chrome
Only if my tweets are private, I should think. There are public methods for getting a list of people I follow, and public methods for getting the tweets of any person (except for private tweets). In combination, these two should make my login credentials optional.
>If by modern science you mean Gregor Johann Mendel and Isaac Newton then yea it's only a few hundred years old. But, Archimedes also believed in testing his ideas when possible so "modern science" is probably not the best term.

What's your point? The idea of science as something separate from philosophy which could actually replace philosophy altogether is basically a 20th century one, and is certainly no more than a few hundred years old. (Science just wasn't impressive enough before then for it to be a reasonable point of view.)

>All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end.

I don't see how that follows. The vulnerability of initial assumptions is a problem for any form of inquiry, science included, but it isn't a fatal problem. Much of philosophy is precisely about questioning assumptions.

>PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines

I have no idea what you mean by this, but it doesn't seem to address Descartes' argument. (He was obviously not suggesting that anyone who merely says "I think therefore I am" must necessarily exist.)

>or a part of a far large hole

whole?

>So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.

This is manifestly nonsense. Unless you are seriously claiming that there has been no progress in logic, political philosophy, moral philosophy, the philoosphy of science, etc. etc. in the past few thousand years. At the very least, the range of possible views, and the best arguments for and against these views, are much better known and understood than they were before. And in some areas (e.g. logic, and those aspects of the philosophy of science pertaining to it) there has been progress in a much more definite sense.
I'm focusing on building things from scratch when possible, but I'll definitely use gems when they fill a need. For example, all the user signup machinery will be built from scratch so that readers understand all the different moving parts, but when filling the database with sample data I'll probably use the Faker and Populator gems.
You're saying the dark side of the moon isn't cold?

Or only that there is no way for the heat to move away once created?
Investigator easily gets fake passports from State Department
AT&T warns of coming clamp-down on iPhone data hogs
11 things I didn’t know about app development
You mean like having a separate Git branch for a Rails 3 version of the tutorial? I'd have to be pretty on-the-ball to have thought of that. ;-)
I know it's not something you do for the money, but in terms of income, what other kinds of jobs is it comparable to?
As shown elsewhere, teaching computer science doesn't seem to pay all that well either. I think the real problem here is not her chosen field of study but the fact that wages have no kept place with inflation in recent years.

I could go on, but I won't...I don't want this to turn into a Reddit-style argument. My basic position is that undervaluing teaching as a service undermines our educational productivity and long-term economic growth, through excess focus on short-term dividends at the expense of cumulative value.
Here's the plan:

$ git commit -am "Updated the tutorial for the latest Rails version"
$ git push heroku

:-)
What’s Inside Hugo Boss Cologne? Rat Valium, Mice Viagra
You you should update to the latest version of Rubygems.

gem update --system