skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This review irks me. The reviewer seems to have no idea about what contributes or detracts from the performance of different kinds of apps. The most likely culprit for the slow performance is the 4200 RPM drive. The processor and 2GB of RAM should do fine for most purposes.
Django Wired
Very interesting read; definitely different than the standard China bashing I've been reading.

I remember reading an article how the entire culture is different and where scientists don't disagree with their elders. ((http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/16130/page2/)

Nice to see that it's not as simple as that.
heh-- writing is hard for me. I'm glad someone noticed. I think 37s is right... Startup hackers need to be really good at written communication. Practice, practice!
Consider making the sign-up a lightbox. I'm not the world's biggest fan of modal lightboxes, but when I first tried to rate/vote on Reddit and it let me login without taking away my entire screen to another page, it was a good feeling.

Other than that, I have friends in this space and it's ultra competitive and getting tougher. I like the twist of coming up with recommendations for a group, but it's rare for me where that is useful for TV. I'd almost rather it provide recommendations for a video game, movie, or board game than just a TV show.

Having things disappear when I rate them is a little painful. I keep trying to quickly move down the list to rate more things, but then it refreshes (it seems) and I'm disoriented trying to figure out where to rate next.

Maybe it would help if it just said "Rate one of the below shows" and gave you a Thanks! response after you did it? I'm not sure what would improve the experience, but you may want to tweak that.

I'm not your ideal user as I don't watch TV.

Best of luck!
"If this is wrong, please do correct me."

It's not right or wrong. It's a trade-off, a design decision.

Just because a tool can do something, doesn't mean it should in every case.

Normalize as far as it makes sense for your app.
I suppose, but if you only get one...you'd have to have an awful lot of extra accounts to make a big difference. But, if everyone agrees that a story sucks or doesn't fit the purpose of the site, it ought to go away.
I wish that there was some way to discuss a stereotype without assuming some responsibility for perpetuating it, but I don't know of such a way.

But stereotypes shouldn't be taboo for reasonable discussion here. That something is uncomfortable to talk about doesn't make it false or nonsense. In fact, I find that uncomfortable subjects are most interesting to explore because they force you to consider what you otherwise prefer not to believe.
Here's the comment I left on Hank's blog:

Hi Hank, I like to be brief so this might sound bad, but I mean everything in the friendliest possible way.

You and almost all the people arguing against you are wrong about almost everything. I don't mean to say anyone's opinion is wrong. I'm talking about basic understanding of what certain words mean.

Let me break it down. There are 3 models for "programming" (in the general sense) computers:

1. Functional
2. Relational
3. Imperative

The functional model can't store data and therefore can't be used to create a database. So there are fundametally only 2 kinds of databases.

A database created using the Relational model uses relations to both store and retrieve data, so lets call it a relational database. A database created using the Imperative model uses pointers & nodes to store data and pointer navigation to retrieve data, so lets call it a navigational database.

That's it. There are only 2 database models. Each model can be used to implement different kinds of databases based on the limits they place on the structure.

There are 2 primary kinds of navigational database: graph/network and tree/hierarchy. A filesystem for example is a tree/hierarchy database.

A relation is basically a truth table with columns that are related to each other by a truth statement and rows of truth values that fulfill the truth of the statement. A standard relational database doesn't place any limits the number of rows or columns. A binary database limits the numbers of columns to 2.

A SQL DBMS is a (partially successful) attempt to implement a language that can be used to create a database which uses relational model.

OK, the important parts:

1. The semantic web is an implementation of the relational model that limits the relations to 3 columns and a single row.

2. Just because you use a SQL DBMS to create a database doesn't mean you actually created a relational database. You can put pointers in your tables, turning your relations into nodes on a graph, turing your database into a navigational database with some relational features.

Much of what you said in your original post was exactly backwards. You said "relational sucks" but the things you described as problems were features of navigational databases, not relational. Then you said "the semantic web is awesome because it's a navigational database" when in fact it's a relational database.

That's all.
Just having a small amount of extra accounts can make a big difference if you can down-vote stories at the very beginning. This gives the unmolested stories a big head-start. I think that reddit implemented different behavior for the first hour of a story's life for this reason.
The "please do correct me" part was in regards to my characterization of the arguments that RDBMS gurus make against join tables. I wasn't asking you to judge my architectural decisions, thanks. ;)

I think it's besides the point whether or not an RDBMS can handle a given app's data; it almost certainly can. The real question is should people dogmatically choose an RDBMS for every single data persistence problem they need to solve.

While the article's title is obviously hyperbole, I think the dissent against choosing the RDBMS model of storing knowledge is a good one. I see the decision that system architects are faced with here as being an end-to-end argument: should the protections and optimizations provided by relational databases be enforced at such a low level or are dumb databases that delegate those features to other layers better design? There's decent evidence for the latter.
Why Doing A Startup Is Like Dating
Yes. The most frustrating thing about this site is getting downmodded (repeatedly) without any replies. If you don't agree, say so! Then maybe we can have an intelligent discourse. I have often made comments that are counter to the "groupthink" of the thread. Sometimes because I disagree, sometimes just to play devil's advocate to see where it leads. But always to learn and share.

If clicking the down arrow without replying becomes a trend, then no one will want to disagree. Then where will we be?
Ah, I remember the LZW patent. Has it really been almost five years since it expired? I guess this software is at least as old...
The software that runs this site is open-source, included in Arc as news.arc. I don't know the answer, but maybe you could find it.
You failed. Own it. It happened. Who are you worried will find out? The people who love you already know who you are and they don't care; they still love you. The people who don't love you probably don't matter.

I agree about exercise and a change of pace in your lifestyle (backpacking, academia, even a day job). The important thing though is to realize this isn't even near the worst thing that could have happened. You can still try again. Only this time, you have more information and are better prepared to deal with adversity. This sort of thing is hard for everybody.

I look forward to reading your new startup beta announcement soon.
What you call "hyperbole", I call flamebait.

"Choosing the right tool for the job" does not equal "the old tool is dead".
I go one step further - if someone writes an insightful, contrarian comment that I don't agree with, I'll upmod it for quality. For instance if someone brings up a real downside of startup life it usually gets attacked, but I'll vote it up if it is good.
I think this is what has been the most damaging aspect of Reddit's growth. People don't see the up and down arrows as a measure of quality, they see them as a source of agreement.
"Choosing the right tool for the job" does not equal "the old tool is dead".

Can't argue with that.
How to deal with a pinkslip?
I mostly agree, except that I'll also downmod someone if they assert something that is false, heavily disputed, or sweepingly general. There is no use proliferating incorrect information, urban myths, faulty reports, or common stereotypes. Such a downmod, of course, would be accompanied by a correction, unless there already is one, in which case I'll upmod the correction.
No question. But ultimately the underlying value of the service is what determines whether it matters or not.

If you wanted to win a significant share of the search engine market, which would help you more, owning search.com, or designing a search engine that was actually better than Google in a way that users can perceive?
"I'm not going to write it because of some vague legal threats of a has-been computer company."
The functional model can't store data and therefore can't be used to create a database.

That's not quite right. You can persist data in functions, it's just not done as often.
I always find those numbers odd, since it implies that all programmers create some value. Bad programmers not only don't produce much, they introduce bugs that others need to fix and they need lots of help, hand-holding, and management effort, which draws down the productivity of others. 28 times better than a negative number isn't good at all!
I think it would be nice to have some sample text in the Test Pattern layout that you could change the color of.

Otherwise, nifty tool.
The only problem with that is that it means you will be voting on every single comment. Personally, I also take into account the comment's current score, and if I agree that its value is equal to its current score, I leave it as it is.
I think the best part about this is the fact that it lets you see the apparent color when displayed on the page not just the color by itself.
So alexa is wrong?

Wouldn't there be an argument to say that in the past people used to put 'perfume' in their browser address bar, and perfume.com etc,

whereas now most people seem to think google is where you 'put stuff', and so aren't the google results for 'perfume' more important than the domain perfume.com?
How to hack together a Y Combinator application
Nice exit!
Running a small company using outsourced IT services
Erik and his rant and the emotional charge that he touched is a real phenomenon about which many hackers feel strongly. I agree that a practical discussion is how to work together in a business, but dismissing or discrediting the discussion with an anecdotal counter example doesn't add or address any new ideas.

And I agree that there are many generalizations, and I purposely avoided hedging language to pad them. They do not apply to everyone in all cases, which is why they are generalizations. If you could argue that these generalizations are false or that it is false that they are widely held ---that could be interesting.
I've experienced a little bit of this same sentiment when I tell people I am using flex for my current idea. They look down at me almost, without having ever touched flex. Most people quickly equate it to flash (ok it does run in a flash player and makes use of action script), but its vastly different. There is no drawing, keyframes, etc. Now, I'm not saying it's for everyone, but it does make creating certain things exponentially easier. Ok, done ranting.
>so aren't the google results for 'perfume' more important than the domain perfume.com?

Yes, but perfume.com is also #2 on google for perfume!
There's also an aspect that goes beyond a new technology simply being irrelevant or less useful than an an old technology beyond simple ego and fear of irrelevance.

Consider an example from the original post. For the world of computing at large, GUIs are a giant win. But many expert computer users prefer a command line for many or even most tasks, and some even use windowing systems like xmonad or ratpoison that are optimized for command-line use.

Likewise, while word processors have taken over a lot of the market for creating documents, many programmers are much more likely to use text editors -- often ones that trace their heritage back to the 70s like emacs or vim.

There's nothing wrong with these new technologies, but it's perfectly valid for people to not prefer them, right? Some newer, friendlier technologies may be better for people who don't want to go through a learning curve, but may actually be worse for people who have already gone through the learning curve or are willing to do so in the future. Perfectly normal.

Here's the thing, though: when there is a large community of people who are using your technology (whether a CLI, a text editor, a relational database, or a programming language), there are a lot more new, useful tools being built on top of that technology. This means that someone producing a new technology will siphon resources away from a technology that earlier users consider superior for their uses.

Irrespective of being considered irrelevant, having fewer new tools at your disposal actually reduces what you can get done. Which sucks, right?
Yeah, but there's no dignity in that, and besides, the run may be taken away anyway.
Nice. I found it a little easier by starting on the Home page.
I think at least one part of the author's argument bears examining: the author says, "The cold reality that software companies try to ignore is that ANY major piece of software needs to be rewritten from the ground up eventually." He makes a good case for it, yet Joel Spolsky has this to say:

"... the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
...
"There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong."

Link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

How do you square the two observations? I think that since you can't reasonably go down both roads with the same project at the same time, one doesn't really compare the results of one option to the real results of the other, but rather to the imagined result we would have gotten if we taken the other road.

In short, neither rewriting nor endlessly patching is going to produce results as good as we think we ought to have; both would be a major pain in the butt. The devils always lie in the details, details you won't hit until you try one or the other. I'm inclined to think Spolsky is closer to the truth, but I'm suggesting it's not as clear cut as either position would have you believe.

The other point of the O'Reilly article, however, is spot on: "most companies let the value walk out the door (either through layoffs or attrition)"
Good UI Design: Make It Easy, Show Me You Care
Social Networking Hits the Genome
I agree the author is misinformed, though I also agree with him that relational databases suck, especially if you are doing object oriented programming. I'm not sure what is better, however. Also, most of the corporate world is firmly ensconced in the relational database mindset. This makes interacting with them difficult if you do not also "speak relational."
"The best people apply late"

I am really curious as to where that factoid came from and how you could quantify that.

I could see that the best people put thought into the application process, begin writing early and hold off on actually submitting until close to the deadline.
Here's other resources for advice:

http://mattmaroon.com/?p=247

http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/03/24/how-to-get-accepted-f...
Whydoeseverythingsuck.com? Probably because you're asking the wrong questions...
> Let me break it down. There are 3 models for "programming" (in the general sense) computers:
>
> 1. Functional 2. Relational 3. Imperative

Could you explain why you picked these three models?

Do you mean relational in the sense that you don't have input-output functions, but relations like:

plus(4,4,x) => x = 8
plus(y,4,6) => y = 2

Why can you store data with a relational model store but not with a functional model?
Oh I agree with that. I just group 'stating blatantly false things' and 'proliferating stereotypes' into the troll category.
So it is not amnesia, it is just a failure to influence their present action.

This reminds me of my college friend who spent much of his spare time climbing the outsides of campus buildings, smokestacks, et al..

Then one day he claimed to be afraid of heights, which made me laugh. "How can you be afraid of heights when you're constantly taking risks at high altitude?", I asked. His response was something like: "Oh, I'm afraid. But I can ignore that and keep going."
What you can currently do to get MySpace events is click the "view all" link next to Upcoming Shows on the profile page. The URL of the events-only page will harvest correctly.

You might be onto something with the idea of a rule system to handle things like that automatically... I hadn't considered it before. Thanks!
Running a decentralized workforce in the 90s was not viable for most people for obvious reasons. Today, tools are better, and more widely available, but more importantly the overall demographic of the technical workforce has improved by orders of magnitude. This is the foundation of why outsourcing is able to be an attractive (and more importantly viable) solution.

In the 1990s finding competent well rounded developers was throwing darts at a board. With the advent of modern frameworks and standards, and the increase in global capacity for technology development, outsourcing now makes a lot of sense, for a lot of people.

(article should have mentioned online collaboration specifically as well).
neat. Actually, I was fooling around with color layouts today. Just in case you haven't heard of it, I ran across Munsell color pickers, which lays out colors according to how people perceive color.

http://www.triplecode.com/munsell/

Maybe you can add munsell later too.

What I recognized as an itch is that color pictures and theme generators would actually be better as a FF plugin, so you can adjust entire color palettes and see it take effect right on the page you're working on.
I like this, it's a lot like CouchDB but I think multiple entries in this space are a good idea.
that might become less true as we move from away from typing out domain names and towards searching for keywords
/ Obligatory offence taken at us Irish being lumped in with the British :)
And oh, being able to change web layouts in your sample would be nice.

It doesn't work on FF3, fyi.
What's New With Windows Server 2008
did you get a chance to try the UI for registered, logged-in users? we're thinking about making the workflow for guest users more similar to that.... do you think it would help the perception of latency?
THE ROAD TO WISDOM?
Well, it's plain
and simple to express.
Err and err and err again,
but less and less and less.
— Piet Hein.

If you look at anyone successful, the reason you know about them is rarely their first endeavor. Everyone can start and and shut down a start up, but people that continue that cycle are those that succeed.
adding join tables like that has traditionally been considered an anti-pattern for relational databases because it increases duplication and denormalizes the data

I thought that join tables express a normalization of the data? You are then not storing restaurant data explicitly as a column in the Contact table, which reduces data duplication and gives you more fine-grained control over your structure.

Join tables (especially reflexive ones) gave me a bit of a headache when I first started working with SQL databases. Once I finally wrapped my head around them I started seeing a lot of uses for and advantages of them. However, I've had little formal training in database techniques; only a little bit of relational algebra. Is there something I'm missing here?
Allow yourself to be human and realise that everyone fails. Get back on the pony and accept it for what it was: A learning experience, as is everything in life.
Free Public Resolving Name Server
Really though paulsb, don't do that.
Implementing Hasblog, a blog compiler (part 1)
Actually, a good portion of the "nonsensical/typo" domain names are international. While the US has its fair share of bizarre, cartoon-character inspired names, a healthy portion come from India, England, France, and others. Zoho (Indian, yet akin to a tasty Hostess snack cake), ShoZu (London), Plazes (Germany, so possibly a tad buzzed), and a good 30-40% of all Demo presenters. But, I digress...
weird... i'll put this into our bug db. if it happens again, can you send me feedback via the form in the app (so we can followup via email)?
hey! great minds think alike!

our latest mockups have had them reversed like you're suggesting. it was a little weird for us at first, because we'd gotten used to the way it currently is, but it's definitely better with the source viewer on the bottom.
How could a small amount of extra accounts with only one down-vote per week make a big difference?
Very nice. Suggestion: clicking an area in the Test Pattern should change the selection to that in the Color Palette. Or at least identify the Test Pattern swatches as corresponding to one of the numbers 1-5 in the Color Palette.
I wish my former employer was willing outsource services. While the customer base grew from two to twenty, the staff size trippled, the IT staff eventually doubled.

It takes strategy and vision to outsource and manage the IT house. But, you've got to hold on to somebody to run the outsourced IT shop and hold them to your standards and keep them on your strategic course. An IT project manager of sorts.

And while it takes money (expense instead of payroll and training), be prepared to spend it. IT isn't something you try to afford, it's something you can't afford not to do right.

If you find yourself working in an IT shop where every smart solution (keeping to the strategy) is too expensive, look around and consider getting out. They're on the path to bungle it.
That sounds very plausible and, indeed, I have join tables throughout my apps. This is why I put the proviso in, "correct me if I'm wrong." :)

My understanding was that hardcore relational database guys would say that join operations are necessary when the data's totally denormalized, but having a join table wasn't necessarily a best practice because now you've got an additional table that could potentially get out of sync.
I wrote a rather lengthy comment about this some time ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123975
I applied early, so there are exceptions :)

I would agree this is difficult to quantify. It came from a casual conversation with YC folks.
After the attention that "OpenDNS is hijacking Google" received (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136270), I thought Hacker News might be interested in a nameserver that did nothing but resolve domain names. I have been using Resolving Name Server for at least a year, ever since I found that my ISP was hijacking missing sites and pages, and I have been quite happy with it, but it did take me some time to find it.

I recently purchased a WRT54GL and put Tomato on it (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/ -- highly recommended, by the way) and set OpenDNS to be my static DNS, thinking that's what I was using before with my dnsmasq setup. I started finding, however, that some of my browsing was redirecting me to OpenDNS pages, something that hadn't been happening before. After going back through some old config files, I found that Resolving Name Server is what I actually had been using, so I thought I'd share it (and also remind myself :-). I have been much happier with it than with my brief experience with OpenDNS.
So creepy...
So creepy...
So creepy...
Maybe its object oriented dogma that is a problem.