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carbon8on Trouble with Diaspora

Basic authorization for resource access isn't the kind of thing you add later. This isn't just an issue of bugs or being in development, it's a fundamental issue with their development process.

Furthermore, one of the primary goals of the project was to make something more privacy-conscious than Facebook, and so far they show they have a development process that pays less attention to access control than any Rails app I'm aware of.

carbon8on Poll: Sequel or S-Q-L?

"sequel" for SQLite and MS SQL server.

SQL for everything else.

carbon8on What's better about Ruby than Python? - comp.lang.python

It's not a problem in Ruby because you don't pass around method instances, you pass around Procs (wrapped blocks, lambdas and procs), so if you are passing a callable around, you know it's a Proc. If you are passing around a method instance, you should almost certainly be using a block, lambda or proc.

Also, see wycats post: http://yehudakatz.com/2010/02/21/ruby-is-not-a-callable-orie...

carbon8on What's better about Ruby than Python? - comp.lang.python

Procs (lambdas, procs and Proc-wrapped blocks) and Methods are callable and all respond to #call.

As wycats pointed out in a post earlier this year (http://yehudakatz.com/2010/02/21/ruby-is-not-a-callable-orie...), the reason you don't need to explicitly call #call on methods is that Ruby is designed for the common case of calling methods. In addition, it's uncommon to even explicitly use #call or #[] on Procs since calling them is built into the language via yield.

carbon8on What's better about Ruby than Python? - comp.lang.python

Are you actually passing around methods in Ruby and, if so, why? As I've pointing out in the past (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141245), passing around methods is very rare in Ruby due to the flexibility of Procs.

carbon8on Ask HN: What are the best resources for learning Ruby/Rails

Here's my big list from a few months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088737

Also, although I've only skimmed mhartl's book, it looks great and has already been updated for Rails 3: http://railstutorial.org/book

And for the edge rails guides (Rails 3): http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/

carbon8on Ask HN: What are the best resources for learning Ruby/Rails

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459119

carbon8on Thoughts about Rails from a Django guy

There's also mustache (http://github.com/defunkt/mustache) which has some similarities to django templates and is pretty popular.

"safer than erb / haml, etc"

Are you are referring to auto-escaping strings? If so, in Rails 3, this is on by default, and for Haml without Rails it's a simple setting.

carbon8on [dead]

This Greg Donald guy is totally out of line, but he's just an irrelevant troll.

Edit: to the downvoters, what is your argument that he either a) isn't totally out of line or b) is relevant to the development of Rails or the Rails ecosystem despite his nearly complete lack of open source contributions (http://github.com/gdonald)?

The title here is "You stay classy, Rails," yet there is a single unnecessarily rude response from a Rails core member in response to criticism, followed by a bunch of inflammatory posts by a guy who apparently is just an immature troll who doesn't speak for anyone but himself.

carbon8on Things You Should Be Doing With Your Server, But Probably Aren't

I use chef, but I have no experience with puppet. Overall I'm happy with chef, although there are rough edges. At this point, I can't imagine not using something like chef or puppet.

I found chef to have a bit of a learning curve, especially when running your own chef server. I actually gave up using the server after a while and manage my servers (between 5 and 10, depending on what I'm working on, plus a bunch of one/two-off servers for client work) using chef-solo. Now that they offer a hosted server service, I might start using that, but I'm pretty content with chef-solo, roles and a minimal json config file on each server.

Chef has been a bit of a moving target during its development, so it's been hard to keep up with. This goes both for chef itself (although, presumably the API will be more stable after it hits 1.0) as well as the cookbooks. I kind of dread pulling in the changes from main cookbook repo because it's tough to know whether some change to a cookbook will negatively affect your config.

It doesn't necessarily save time up front; it takes more time to write a bug-free cookbook than do an apt-get install and edit some configs. But over the long run it makes it much easier to understand your server config. Rather than having long-forgotten edits to hidden config files, you have a solid record of exactly what your server config is.

carbon8on Why did Quora choose Python (over PHP and others) for its development?

There are actually a bunch of Ruby frameworks (ramaze, rango, waves, padrino, camping, halcyon, to name a few off the top of my head), but it seems Rails and Sinatra meet the needs for the vast majority of Ruby web developers.

carbon8on Ask HN: Should I Learn Ruby?

See my comment here if you are looking for additional resources (I see you mention else where that it's both a Ruby and Rails course): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088887

To add to that list: http://railstutorial.org/book

carbon8on Ask HN: Should I Learn Ruby?

Which will teach you Django, a very popular web framework (more popular than Rails actually)

No, it's not. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459119

carbon8on Meditation: Why Bother?

If you do vipassana via http://www.dhamma.org/ the ideal daily sitting schedule in day to day life is an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. If you make it part of your routine, it can be somewhat easy to do. It's actually trivial to be on the 2 hr/day schedule after finishing a 10 day sitting since 2 hours is nothing at that point and you remember exactly what you're doing, but in my experience it's difficult to start up again with regular 2 hr/day sittings once you stop. My routine for a bunch of years was to do the 2 hour sittings for a while, but eventually fall off until going to another 10 day sitting.

Even though 2 hours seems like a lot, because of what it is (focusing the mind, learning to not overreact to external stimuli, stability of the mind), it makes people able to be very highly productive throughout the day.

carbon8on Ask HN: Feedback on Mixest, my HTML5 ironic indie Pandora

    -          <input id="password" autocomplete="off" tabindex="2" type="text"> 
    +          <input tabindex="2" type="password">

I'm looking forward to trying it out next time I'm working. Resist the temptation to add too much stuff; you're on the right track so far.

carbon8on That Misery Called Meditation

Long meditation retreats for beginners are pretty standard. Repeatedly sticking a toe in the water doesn't really do much, you need to dive right in.

carbon8on That Misery Called Meditation

It's pretty much impossible to get as focused and steady in tiny spurts of meditation mixed in with the turmoil of daily life as it is when doing it essentially non-stop for days/weeks.

Once you've dived into it deeply, then you actually have an understanding of what's going on when you do regular sittings.

carbon8on I don't like Python. Does that make me a bad person?

The ruby examples don't behave the same as the python version since they use ARGF in place of stdin. They are also non-idiomatic. Here is a correct, idiomatic Ruby version:

    $stdin.read.split.each do |w|
      puts w if w.match(/ing$/)
    end

or as a single 57 column line:

    $stdin.read.split.each { |w| puts w if w.match(/ing$/) }

we can also use the match operator:

    $stdin.read.split.each { |w| puts w if w =~ /ing$/ }

I'm inclined to assume that the other language examples are also suspect.

carbon8on Django Hidden Hires

It looks like it's mostly just that the job market is getting better overall; there are more jobs across the board. For example, about 9 months ago I looked up the number of jobs for PHP, Rails and Django on various job sites http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805931 Here are the old and current numbers compared:

SimplyHired - PHP: 10726 to 15993, Rails: 2553 to 3823, Django: 328 to 926

Startuply - PHP: 280 to 488, Rails: 121 to 230, Django: 35 to 66

StartUpHire - PHP: 458 to 549, Rails: 119 to 152, Django: 9 to 25

carbon8on Ask HN: What's your favorite TED Talk?

My most recent favorite:

Itay Talgam: Lead like the great conductors: http://www.ted.com/talks/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_con...

carbon8on Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

Double check the thread nesting. My statements are regarding fivebean, not prgmr.

carbon8on Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

Interesting. Lots of disk space and bandwidth, too. Looks like their acceptable use policy is a bit strict and baroque, tough. I'm also guessing the admin interface doesn't give nearly as much control as linode's (no other VPS providers I'm familiar with do).

carbon8on Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

I like chunkhost and have a vps there, but the admin interface is still incredibly rudimentary. You can't really do anything other than reboot, create, destroy and reimage. Still, I'm a happy chunkhost customer, I think they have great potential and recommend them to anyone who is looking for a simple, cheap VPS.

carbon8on The Biggest Legal Mistakes that Startups Make

My understanding is that for S/C-corps you should incorporate in Delaware, for LLCs it's generally better to do it in the state you operate out of.

carbon8on Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel?

Interesting. Here's a clearer image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lastjudgement.jpg

carbon8on How to Spot a Spook

Note: this article is from 1974.

carbon8on Upgrading a Rails 2 App to Rails 3

Paperclip w/ Rails 3 beta is kind of a moving target right now. As of yesterday, the rails3 branch of the main repo wasn't working in my only Rails 3 app, but this fork works for me: http://github.com/enable/paperclip/tree/rails3

carbon8on Ruby 1.9 made me remember how I hate the concept of encodings

As I understand it, Ruby 1.8 strings are simply treated as non-encoded sequences of bytes. It has some support for UTF-8, so as long as you can use UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (latin1, since the mapping is the same), just think about it as passing around byte sequences and don't need to do a lot of string manipulation, it's not horrible to work with. However, you do need to jump through hoops to use a number of the standard string methods like #length with multibyte characters (often, this means running the the string through #scan(/./mu) before working with it: http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/bytes_and_character...). Rails also has a UTF-8 handler to help with manipulation of UTF-8 strings with multibyte characters, and I think it's on by default (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Multibyte/H...)

carbon8on Coding Horror: What's Wrong With CSS

Sure, if you want to leave the same comment in every place you assign a particular hex value to one of the descriptive variables and don't mind changing each of those duplicated hex values if you ever need to tweak the color. Personally, I don't see the benefit of using comments when using variables is already self-documenting and further avoids possible duplication of hex values.

carbon8on Coding Horror: What's Wrong With CSS

Agreed. I do the exact same thing. First define a palette and with variable names that describe the color (eg, !mauve= #E0B0FF), then assign those to descriptive variable names (eg, !accent_color= !mauve). That way it's immediately clear which colors are being used while also avoiding the need to replace variable names throughout the partials.