outotrai

I'm interested in this sort of competition, but honestly, I don't know enough to even begin. What do you recommend to someone who'd like to learn enough to participate in these competitions?

If you (or someone else) wouldn't mind taking the time to explain it, I'd really like to know why your unsupported and vaguely anti-Ruby statement is so popular. I'm assuming that it means that the problems with Ruby are so widely known that you don't even need to spell them out in order for people to agree with you, but I guess I didn't get the memo. Why "really shouldn't" we? (Serious question - thanks.)

I'm sure the remaining employees appreciate your keeping the company afloat.

I'm shooting from the hip here, but I think maybe there's a distinction to be made between ideas for a product and ideas as a product. The end result of the ideas of mathematicians is mathematics itself - furthering mathematics was the goal all along. Obviously ideas count when you're working within the realm of ideas alone. However, when the ideas are a means to an end (e.g., a movie, say), the implementation is what counts. You might have the world's greatest screenplay in your desk, but if you haven't gotten to the execution stage, what kind of movie do you have? (None.) Whereas if you'd started with something, anything, like walking trees fighting hobgoblins, say, or the idea that maybe humans are just batteries for supercomputers in the future, your movie might have a chance, depending on its execution.

When will Rails 3 be formally released (as the stable, recommended version)?

How did you and do you decide which services to provide? How do you gauge demand as you're thinking of possible products?

I think he means that he shouldn't be obligated to sign up for or get involved with any service that he doesn't want to just to protect his reputation. Sure, you don't have to pay the mafia protection money, but what happens if you don't?

I don't use Ruby very much, so I can't respond to the bulk of your comment, but I wanted to note that Dive Into Python was first written for Python 2.x, then rewritten for Python 3, not the other way around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pilgrim#Dive_Into_Python

Why do you say so?

More readable print version of article:

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/11/...

Wow! I really like the attention to detail. You can change the desktop wallpaper with the genuine Windows 3.1 tile images, you can create and save files (which download to your actual computer), wildcards work in the file selection dialog...

Of course not everything works, but this is a lot of fun.

Because you're considering stopping, I wanted to say that I find this sort of post very helpful. Many times I've found much more interesting discussion on previous submissions because of you, or learned something I otherwise would have missed. My upvotes apparently are discarded by PG's algorithm, but if I could I would contribute karma - this is behavior I greatly appreciate and would like to support.

I disagree. Being able to downvote comments to -4 (and no farther) seems like an excellent system to me, as it allows us to punish comments that are detrimental to discussion while preventing comments from being so downvoted that they have no hope of redemption (in the case of controversial but contributory comments). I'm curious - if downvoting were done away with, how would you suggest that we flag comments which are contrary to the spirit of HN?

I'm very interested in that sort of business model - selling real or virtual products within a free application. I remember reading an article last year (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/06/eas-new-motto-ple...) wherein the CEO of EA Games claimed not to mind piracy of certain games which had products for sale in-game. Many websites and applications seem to be using it to great success - IMVU and the social site Gaia Online come to mind. Somehow it seems strange to me that users who are so hesitant to buy something outright will pour their money into it when it is ostensibly free.

"Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders] is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters."

From the website: http://www.msf.org/

I think he's saying that if someone came into your house and said it was theirs, and had the ability to enforce that, it wouldn't be your house anymore. No, you can't ethically say "I claim this piece of land for my own. Oh, look! There are people living on it already. I guess I get to enslave, rape, torture them." But if ethics are not of any concern to you, then you can certainly say it and do it, and the land will then be yours.

> And is he pleasantly surprised at the 250ish Euros or did he consider it too high?

He was very pleasantly surprised. In response to a comment on his post, the author wrote:

"According to newchoicehealth.com, an abdominal ultrasound in a major American city costs $340 on average at the cheapest service providers. At hospitals it’s much more expensive – $1350 at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

And that’s just the ultrasound — without the ER fees, the blood tests, the surgeon consultation, etc, that I also received in Munich. So I think 265 euros is extremely cheap."

[Source: http://nat.org/blog/2009/12/no-waiting-room/comment-page-1/#...]

If you expect a comment of yours to be downvoted, perhaps you should consider whether or not the comment in question is actually contributing to the discussion. I imagine that your original comment was downvoted because it expressed your feeling that this was not worthy of submission without including any reasons supporting your opinion. You seem to be surprised, in general, when people disagree with you. Try convincing them, or considering things from their points of view.

Sorted results of that poll (as of 9:30 PM EST 11/15/09):

  INTP - 207
  INTJ - 188
  ENTP - 76
  ENTJ - 57
  INFP - 41
  ENFP - 30
  INFJ - 27
  ENFJ - 16
  ISTP - 12
  ESTJ - 11
  ISTJ - 11
  ESTP - 4
  ESFJ - 3
  ESFP - 2
  ISFJ - 2
  ISFP - 2

How did you finance the café initially, as a college student?

A thought on security - I think #5 should be changed from

    if socket.gethostname() == 'productionserver.com':
        DEBUG = False
    else:
        DEBUG = True

to

    if socket.gethostname() == 'developmentcomp':
        DEBUG = True
    else:
        DEBUG = False

It's better practice to whitelist one box than to enable DEBUG on all computers but the production server - what if you deploy to another machine without thinking?

This is probably the best option, but the FSF-approved WTFPL (Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License) may be clearer.

[Previously discussed on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652183]