skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that I need transactional databases less and less. Whether I specifically don't need SQL is not clear -- it's a great abstraction for storing and manipulating data.

Specifically, what I loose with transactions is fault tolerance and predictable performance while I find I don't really need atomicity in most places.

Fundamentally fault-tolerance is achieved by having few interdependencies among computer systems. Transactions makes that really hard to do for replicated databases and you need replication to be fault tolerant. So usually people cheat and settle for async replication, but then you really don't have transaction anymore since different parts of your system are seeing different states.

Transactions also lead to difficult to debug blocking behavior either due to deadlocks (btw, where else in computer systems is the advice that you have to destroy all abstraction and understand the entire locking order of your program in one place?) or locks getting held too long due to programming errors etc. I hate when my entire site hangs because a key table has locks on it due to some transaction getting accidentally left open.

Understanding database consistency levels and their nuances is extremely difficult and error prone as well. So you may not really be operating in the pristine transactional environment you thought you were.

Finally, programming to a non-transactional model is actually pretty easy in most cases. You just have to go into your project thinking about this upfront. And the decisions you make building a non-transactional site will probably increase how decoupled all the parts are which will make it scale better anyway.
Still an order of magnitude more expensive than most other cities.
In particular, she did not appreciate that formspring.me was displaying generic DB errors.
Ask HN: Latest thinking in best type of Corp and what State?
I've always heard if you're getting funding, then Delaware C corp is the way to go. If no funding and small, then LLC at a state level (IRS doesn't recognized LLC correct? So to them, its a sole proprietor). Best states laws/advantages seem to by Wyoming, Nevada, and Delaware - and from some reading in that order. Opinions/facts please?
Ask HN: please review my project (just a demo for now)
My wife and I have started working on an online Russian alphabet tutorial (азбука). It is heavily inspired by StarFall.com and a kids' alphabet book/method called Azbuka Zhukova.The site demo for the first letter is located at:

http://azbuka.heroku.com

We would love to read your comments/suggestions. The site works best in firefox; there's also sound, so make sure your speakers are on if you want to hear it.
Interesting, but I'm skeptical.

'Non-blind' means that patients were informed that the pills they were issued were totally inert, that they were placebos, and in this case they were also assured that despite this the pills would be of benefit to them. The study concluded:
'The primary finding is that patients can be willing to take placebo and can improve despite disclosure of the inert content of the pills; belief in pill as drug was not a requirement for improvement.'

They tell the subjects something that's bound to be confusing to most people. I don't know that there wasn't "belief in the pill as a drug". If the test were done only with subjects with a scientific background, or if they omitted the assertion about the benefit, it would be more convincing.
Cacoo: Export as PNG
I've not had a chance to read the article yet, will do so if I get a chance over lunchtime. However, the posting reminded me of an Radiolab story I listened to over the weekend that explores this topic as well and had some good observations about the power of mind over matter.

http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2009/12/28/placebo-rebroadcas...
Absolutely, we just really want to purchase this service from a vendor, and for whatever reason I'm having a lot of trouble finding one that fits the bill.

If you know of any specific vendors, please let me know.
Does the "civilized countries" bit really add anything to the conversation?
Not to be a sour grape, but what are you talking about? The papers are the whole content, and the linked page is just an implementation of the papers! What on earth would you expect to get out of the link if you don't read them?
I'm actually very glad it doesn't support background apps. The biggest problem I had with the Windows Mobile smartphone I had before the iPhone was with the background apps. The phone was already underpowered, which was a problem.

When Apps were launched, they would automatically run in the background if you switched contexts, further starving the phone of resources. It was also difficult to tell what was running. This would inevitably cause the phone to run out of memory, and either perform so slowly that you would miss calls, or lockup and reboot whenever new calls came in.
If I decide I really need a keyboard (I think I do), I'm pretty confident that some handset manufacturer will build the ideal hardware configuration for me soon.

It's called the Verizon Droid and it's quite a nice phone. The high pixel density screen is the envy of iphone users everywhere.
There's a limit to the number of @import's you can have per style tag too, but the imported stylesheets can also include @import's, from what I remember.
Valium tends to produce tolerance pretty quickly. As a one-time administration of a pre-op dose, you would notice the difference.

Chronic use of a lower dose for anxiety symptoms separates from placebo at first, but not after 2-3 months.
I dont think its an actual subsidy (price support). Its more like insurance, production control (CRP) etc. My brother grew corn for 20 years, and never received any direct "subsidy". That web link doesn't explain any of this, it just throws around careless terms without explaining them - slanderous yellow journalism?
Your Guide to Fact Checking Website Traffic Claims
4GB, expandable to 32GB.
Also the web page is woefully out of date. There is absolutely no corn surplus anywhere. Ethanol production ate up every last available kernel, to the point that chicken feed became scarce - endangering your tasty mcnuggets!
Self-remixed track (mixed out of samples of itself)
I've also started messing around with Processing. I've been using it to generate some simple art.
Fascinating and depressing at the same time. Posts like this make me think I'm in the wrong job as if asked to write a similar program, I'd have no idea where to start. JGC labels this as a "small program", like it was knocked up on a whim :(
You do have to rely on 3rd party servers staying up with Beejive - but you get a push message when you're disconnected.

Beejive also recently integrated with Address Book - so you can connect your buddies with their address cards.

Just thought you might not be aware. It's no blackberry, but it isn't half bad.
Corn crops are large; is it even feasible to suggest replacing corn ethanol with sugar? Isn't the total sugar production an insignificant contributor to potential ethanol supply? Sure the import restrictions are onerous, but not a significant factor in the ethanol debate
His vision of modifying human behavior is pretty much the plot of "Brave New World". I'm not sure why this goal of forcefully improving the human race is so appealing to people. It seems strange to me to want other people to guide the direction of our species.
"public ... administration of ... allocation of resources" is socialism. And that's whats happening with sugar.
Didn't Linden Labs provide a subsidy for Second Life users who built up areas of the world that attracted lots of users? The idea being to give people interesting things to do in SL without having to build content themselves. Inadvertently this created lots of gambling and strip clubs because this was an easy way of attracting people and earning your subsidy.
I'm not a DBA, however I will protest that I've spent enough time in the trenches to have seen both sides. To me the appeal is a more object orient abstracted view of the data. I'll also admit that it is a far from perfect solution. As a developer I find myself spending hours debugging simple problems due to misconfiguration of Hibernate. I also find performance problems often, and the configuration sometimes struggles with more complicated queries. From a dba view point I hate that adding foreign keys will destroy any functionality (at least with Activerecord/NHibernate in C#) I've used Linq->Sql which is a bit better from a configuration (and performance) point of view, but still has many problems. The problem is a perfect solution just doesn't seem to exist at the moment.
I think this guy is even more amazing to me:

"His early coach Simen Agdestein successfully juggled being Norway's chess No. 1 and a national team soccer player..."

It would be fascinating to hear if he was able to leverage anything from one of those realms to the other. Did he see football as a more fluid kind of chess?

Any other examples of someone achieving that level of excellence at both a physical endeavor and an intellectual one? Has there ever been another national chess champion who was simultaneously a professional athlete?
Openings aren't demonstrably optimal. (Or there would be only one.) Players make improvements on openings all the time.
Stephen Wolfram on Bing Deal, Software Strategy & Future of Knowledge Computing
I've got a whole crate full of Brio wooden trains from when I was a kid, including up/down pieces. I bet if I modified this software to work in three dimensions it could build millions of configurations with the parts I've got. Could be fun.
Will these antennae work for UK broadcast stations - are there other dimensions that will improve the signal.
In Nevada they jokingly refer to "the senator from Reno" and "the senator from Vegas", historically one comes from each population center. So those cities each get a senator, versus California's 37 millions sharing 2
It was knocked up on a whim, and it is small, but don't be depressed: it wasn't easy...

I had to bang my head against the trigonometry to get it all correct. Although I know the rules of trig, I always have a hard time applying them in the real world because I have a hard time imagining the shapes involved. Ended up drawing little pictures of what was doing on.
Food is a special case. Fool with it too much and you, personally, will go hungry. No joke - we don't store food in America, we suffer within weeks if the crop is threatened. Not to mention the third world countries we feed, they of course suffer first so our supply is less threatened.
I think "The Google Phone" is now obviously the primary reason Eric Schmidt resigned from The Apple Board, not Android. Just an interesting thought.
http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2009/12/28/placebo-rebroadcas...

Very good episode of RadioLab about the same topic.
Experimentation (Not every user is an idiot)
Do you know which more things vlc mediaplayer can do ?
Rather than black-on-white (as with paper), I've started using an ivory over very dark blue.

One of my most common uses is the same as yours, reading at night without disturbing my wife. I find that light-over-dark is much easier on the eyes when viewing in the dark.
Argument from authority? Hawking's seems quite muddled but not all his remarks are entirely "out there" (see Pagel's "Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator", for example).
Transcription is still necessary, particularly in fields where accuracy is important, ie medical and legal. Automatic dictation just doesn't cut it quite yet.

Most legal offices have their own internal talent, but a fair amount of medical transcription still gets farmed out to what amount to temp agencies. If someone signs up with one of those agencies as a transcriber, they can generally take delivery of dictation via download, and upload the results. Barrier to entry is typically a certification course that can be wrapped up in a couple semesters.
I found the post about block towers fascinating.
The point of the article is made about books, which are an insignificant source of information. Average folks learn from books a little in school ( I remember returning many college textbooks unread), then never again. Its the media that matters. And its bitrate is orders of magnitude larger than books.
my opinion is that it just doesn't matter. When you get big to actually benefit from those advantages, you can always reorganize in the state of your choice
He did have a point about the drunk dial app though :D
Skiff e-Reader
The Paging Game: Zarking and The Thing King
Upvoted. This article is cute, but boils down to just another vacuous diatribe against some nonspecific issue gleaned from the latest trend, gilded with verbiage.
These comments don't reflect how I feel about the quality of the apps/sites, just the likelihood of them making an impact in 2010.

Ones I agree with:
-Justin.TV
-Bing
-Android Market

Ones I doubt:
-Yammer
-WikiTravel
-Postabon
-Fancast Xfinity TV
-Grooveshark

Ones In-Between:
-Clicker
-Google Voice
My son got a similar train track when he was little but with a lot more pieces. I wanted to write something similar but never got around to it. One twist is that his set has several sets of forks and some pieces to make an elevated track that can double as a bridge.
I'm going to look through the program and see if I can add these types of pieces. We always just made up the tracks as we went and quickly learned to follow some rules so the track would loop but not reverse the train because we had 2 sets of trains. It became a contest between my wife and I to see who could come up with the coolest layout. It was lots of fun.
I'm a little disappointed after reading the page. I had hoped it would do more and require no manual configuration. It uses chroot and says that it will autodetect library dependencies. That's great, but what about dlopen()'ed libraries? You can't detect those. What about data files? Can't detect those either. You'll have to manually specify them as dependencies.
I think it would be quite interesting to know more about how you approached this problem for solution, than the solutions presented by the program itself .. I didn't really get much of the details about how you'd sorted through this from your post .. perhaps a followup topic?

Its really great, btw .. I play with this toy with my son on a regular basis, and found myself just a few days ago wondering what is the maximum number of shapes we can build with the set .. okay, this got a bit screwed up by the addition of another mini-set gifted to my son by a friend, so there is room for improvement in my thinking now that I've learned what you have discovered. Nice job!
Hmm.

Congratulations on correctly locating the coin!

We've been experiencing some technical difficulties and, unfortunately, cannot issue prizes at this time. If you would like a chance at a prize, please check back later today or tomorrow.
Agreed! I think the most worthwhile part of the article was the initial caption:

"Do you really never want to get lost again?"

I was actually quite touched by that point. Unfortunately, everything past that was masturbatory.
There are very many other authors who talk about how most evolution (change) in human daily life now comes about mostly because of cultural innovation rather than because of new inherited characteristics in successive generations of Homo sapiens. Hawking has neither a special competence nor a special lack of competence to speak to this issue--anyone who knows basic facts about biological evolution and the development of human culture can make (and probably has made) the same observation. What's interesting here is Hawking's attempt to attach numbers to the rate of evolution (change) in genes and in cultural information. Plainly humans will develop the most in new directions as a result of cultural changes.
I know this isn't news, and probably many of you already know this. However, I was recently surprised to discover that some deeply geeky friends of mine didn't know how virtual memory worked, so I pulled this out to explain it.

If only all technical documentation were half as accurate and half as engaging.
Google poised to take wraps off new mobile phone
NewServers: Bare Metal Cloud
"The only server cloud that delivers dedicated servers instead of virtual instances on shared servers."
"The only server cloud that delivers dedicated servers instead of virtual instances on shared servers."
No they are not. This is Homeopathy "works".
"Commercial property foreclosures will at least double in 2010 and job growth won't return for two years after that, held back by U.S. consumers who are saving more and 'getting back in line with sustainable spending habits,' Haveman said."

That suggests that the return to a boom economy is still a long way off, as commercial property investments absorb a lot of capital, and bearing those losses will cause many spending cutbacks throughout the economy.
Why doesn't Django try to do an UPDATE using the non-NULL primary key and look at the number of updated rows (which is returned by all the SQL databases I know) and if it's zero only then do an INSERT? This way it would only have to do two queries for inserts and still remain idiot-safe. An UPDATE using the primary key that can't find any rows consumes the same amount of resources as a SELECT.

(This approach would cause problems with funny black magic triggers but funny black magic triggers cause problems anyway)
Quite a fun an informative article. I've not plugged in a pc-speaker component into my builds the last 6 or so years, I'd gotten used to peace and quiet without shrill (and very loud) beeping coming from inside my box.
Make 2010 a Year For Giving
I would have suggested Asprotect, but it doesn't work with .NET.

I've heard about SerialShield, but I really don't know what it's worth.
Yes, here the duplicate detector for this older article was beat by submitting the print version, which opened a printer dialog on my computer.
I honestly never understood why html needs to manually specify all these tags, due to the contraints their semantics are as much as lost, just give us some tags with clear and precise semantics list, quote, address, a, input etc, then let us markup the rest with whatever we want.
How about in C int i=1; int * p = &i; int x = 100/* p; doesn't even compile (why?)
Note to run this you should run PLT Scheme in pretty big mode. If you include it in a module or libraries you will break certain aspects because amb-eval uses set! which mutates module definitions. This is disallowed in current versions of PLT Scheme.
Successful Lisp: How to Understand and Use Common Lisp
Good to hear about Address Book integration. It still feels awkward to me though, the way the Pre does it seems to be what I'm looking for. I want be able to start an IM or an SMS from a contact in the Address Book (or right in Messages) and see both in the same place. I don't want to go back and have to remember if it was an IM or SMS when I want to re-visit a conversation. They're all messages.
This is similar to the WTF Public License (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL)
Thank you for explaining how compaction works in greater detail. As I understand it, the "buffer" used for write queries (and more) while compaction is active is in-memory, correct, an ArrayList? http://github.com/mmcgrana/fleetdb/blob/master/src/clj/fleet...

Why not just open a new file at compaction-start instead of an in-memory buffer? When compaction ends, append the newly open file to the compacted file, then swap-in the compacted file as the current log file.

I suppose deciding on whether to buffer in memory or on disk would depend on several factors:

1) how much compaction is required and thus how long compaction might take to complete

2) historical write-rate average

3) buffer size threshold

4) compaction time threshold

By thresholding I mean: start buffering in memory and then switch to a file on disk if compaction starts taking "too long" to complete or the buffer in memory becomes "too large".
Creare gratuită a  unei pagini web , blog sau fotogalerie
Don't know the science involved but how does the evolution of life strictly out of impersonal forces over eons of time transmute into a process that somehow can be controlled by any species? In other words, if the very nature of being is purely and eternally impersonal (i.e., no deity or other overriding intelligent force as creator or overseer of creation), on what basis can this possibly change to the point where there emerges a controlling, purposeful force that suddenly overrides everything else in existence?

Is there some form of science that attempts to describe how that change occurred or is it a philosophical assumption based on a worldview tied to evolution?
The word "public" is used here to mean the State, as in, the current capitalist state, not a worker's state controlled and administered by councils as in socialism. If it were public, as in non-private property, it would be administered by the workers themselves, not agents of the bourgeoisie.
It's kind of out there, but there's a related scene in the film `Waking Life'.

"What is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that’s only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until we reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space."

For the full excerpt and a clip:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/waklifeex/
Agreed.

"Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

No stopping to ponder whether removing "aggression" from humans might have some unexpected negative consequences? I find this kind of technological utopianism troubling from the likes of Kurzweil, as well. The people who debate him tend to question the feasibility of the advances he predicts. But to me the more important question is whether some of these "advances", and their possible repercussions, are even desirable.
How to say stupid things about social media
Too bad the keyboard on it is no better than an on-screen version. You can't feel the differences between the keys.
The start-up I work for (http://www.theport.com) uses .NET 3.5 / C# / SQL Server 2005. We've incorporated some open source projects (most notably SOLR, NHibernate, and SharedCache) and use a wide range of open source tools for day-to-day management of our team (SVN, Trac, CC.NET). We've found great success in getting .NET to scale and in rapid development.

I've been developing w/ Microsoft since the VB6 days and I will be the first to admit that there's no right answer to which is the "best stack". There's great advantages to LAMP, Java, and Microsoft. I think it all depends on where your comfortability lies. My honest opinion is that trying to answer this question is like to trying to figure out which is the "best religion". It's totally subjective.
To me, it is more of a metaphor stretched past its breaking point. Is reading books really just an extension of the process of biological evolution? To me, it seems a very different kind of thing, and conflating it with biological evolution confuses more than it clarifies.
But they still define them. Either keep them or toss them, but don't just half heartedly try.
Ask HN: Best unit testing framework for PHP 5.x?
Looking for a solid PHP 5.x unit testing framework/library. Dependency on PECL/PEAR is hopefully nonexistent. What do you all use?