skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Time for the obligatory: "rumours of RDBMS death are greatly exaggerated"
Functional and relational are 2 sides of the same coin. For instance:

x + y = z

Can be viewed as either a function called binary_addition with x & y as inputs and z as the output, or as the description of a relationship between 3 sets.

So, to solve the problem using SQL for example you would create a table binary_addition(x,y,z) and then fill it with all the true values that caused x + y = z to be true and then say "select z from binary_addition where x = 4 and y = 4"

In the functional model the computer stores the process for turning the input values you give it into the output values you want. In the relational model the computer stores a table containing all known possible input values, all known possible output values, and how they relate to each other, and gives you a way to retrieve them.

Note, the functional model is implemented by what that famous guy whose name I can't remember called "function-level" programming languages, not functional (aka lambda) languages.
YouTube - Crayon Physics Deluxe
This works in reverse, as well. I used it just recently at reddit...the post was at 40 points at the time, and by the next day was at 17. That's actually a more dramatic impact than I expected (though the comment was particularly obnoxious and sexist, and I was genuinely shocked that it had so many upvotes).
Well, that's why I didn't say "blatantly false". There are often cases where someone has heard something so many times that they believe it's true (such as "Killing praying mantises is a crime in the US," or "Rice is no longer thrown at weddings because birds will explode," neither of which is true, or "Drinking bottled water is changing the Earth's climate," which is heavily disputed), and I would hesitate to call those people trolls. In such a case, a low karma on that comment and a quick rebuttal is certainly a fair response.
"most companies let the value walk out the door"

That's why I (usually) like the "rewrite" option. I can't think of a better way to learn what the program does than by rewriting it and getting it to work.

As I've told many clients before, "It doesn't matter how soon we start, just how soon we finish." Sometimes, rewriting gets you to the finish line sooner.
This paper discusses some related reasons why traditional relational databases are poorly suited to some modern applications: http://www.vldb.org/conf/2007/papers/industrial/p1150-stoneb...
Sabotage:: Are Former employees stealing your Domain Names?
I don't like the one-page style, pages can't be linked to. It's also bad for SEO. It also causes problems with the viewstate, after clicking around a bit I couldn't go back to the homepage (stuck on the login) no matter what I clicked and even if I refreshed the page.

The toolbar doesn't describe what it does. I see some images but have no idea what they do, not text that describes what the image-button does when you mouseover images.

I think you should try to make the design more usable and easy to use instead of making it cool/trendy.
Oh man, this kinda reminds me of "The Incredible Machine", but much cooler. I used to love that game. I actually helped make a 3D version in school with some friends as part of ACM.
Counter-Strike TV - The Revenge of the Court Jester!
Opera the first browser to pass the Acid3 Test
Genius Inside - 40 years of technology
There is a small difference here in that the author proposes simplifying the experience of using a database, while requiring your users to have a properly-versioned flash player complicates the user experience. Less-supported OSes and browsers will inevitably have trouble working with proprietary data.
I am the author of this article, and I must say, though I am not a regular reader of HN, I do find it refreshing that there are smart people here arguing real merits in an intelligent respectful way. I am sure it is not always the case, but it is really fun to read everyones perspective.

I dont think graph databases are for everything, but I do think that they will end up providing a much better abstraction for the kinds of apps we tend to write on the web. I do think an RDBMS is better for an accounting system for example. Oh, and my examples were not designed to actually be great real world examples, but I have a lot of less technical people reading my blog and so my goal was to provide examples that could be expressed succinctly. That said, there is no static example that cannot be expressed in a relational database. The problem is that relational databases (at least the ones that are available to us) are not at all fluid and flexible.
Nice story, but then what...?

(I was half expecting to hear, "I got so much control of my inner chi that I was able to refactor 10,000 lines of code in a single session while doing laundry and cooking dinner.)
Mozilla Discusses Firefox 3 and Microsoft’s Public Embrace of Open Standards
Would we need a startup to get RSS into Hacker News?
I was just wondering... Is just me that am not skilled enough or we really can't read Hacker News using RSS?
Context is king baby! Go get your own.
Grid-Based Design: Six Creative Column Techniques
You mean this?

http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Link at the bottom of main page.
Ask YC: Best cheap(/free) hosting
I've been looking for a sandbox to practice my web development, and am willing to pay a small fee for minimal hosting with PHP, MySQL, and perhaps Python/Ruby support. Building a host isn't an option. Any suggestions?
I like this - I agree w/bmaier that the visualization is great. Often what looks light at 20px square looks very dark on a full page.

One suggestion - right now I need to click around a lot to make changes. To change the bg, I click on the #1 box then head over to the slider, then to change the header, click on the #2 box and again head over to the slider... can you get that slider control to appear right on the page layout. That way I can go the section I want, see the slider, move it and then keep going...
Famous Last Words (slide show)
The Real Cost of Financial Clutter on the Road to a Remarkable Life
The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs
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.

-- I agree with this I think that preparation is an important thing.
The famous guy is named Robin Milner. He created the ML language. In lambda languages like lisp or javascript you can use functions as arguments and return values. I function-level, or applicative, languages you can only create new functions by combining existing functions. I think. I've never used a function-level language.
The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." William Gibson

The challenge in a startup is to discern the harbingers from the outliers.
Why Rails is total overkill and why I love Rack
The Golden Rule of Management
Is Facebook for Business Really Coming?
If I was downvoted because I said "More tables... is a good thing," I want to clarify that I meant in terms of properly abstracting relationships away from the data, not in terms of performance. If that's not why I was downvoted, then I'm curious to know why.
Joel's thesis is that crufty old code has bug fixes in it that will be inadvertently unfixed in a rewrite. He concedes the point that rewriting is much faster than heavy refactoring.

Experience says Joel is wrong. The old code is a mess because people got lazy or weren't quite sure what direction they were going, not because it accumulated value as bugs were fixed. This other guy is right. If the experts on the current code think it's faster to rewrite than go through a todo list on the current code, they're probably correct.

I think you can likely make the decision by empirical means. How many moving parts and roughly how much code can be removed in a rewrite?
Cnet Fires 10% of Workforce
That's a pretty nice useful tool. I'll use it next time i need to design.
No luxuries when programming an IBM 5150 PC (video)
From http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html :

"We have some evidence to support this. Several of the most successful startups we've funded told us later that they only decided to apply at the last moment. Some decided only hours before the deadline."
I started off with f2o, which is free: http://hostprogressive.com/webhosting/plans/f2o/index.php ; I liked it when I had it, but it's been a while. PHP, MySQL, Python, Perl. I haven't used it for 2 years though.

When I wanted a paid service, I moved to Joyent, and they've been awesome, but it's $15 a month. http://www.joyent.com/connector/pricing/ . You get SSH, any programming language you want, MySQL, and great customer support.
I just found a workaround and fixed it. Sorry for the delay
I'd define time as days installed, largely because it's easy to measure and a good common denominator. Especially since FB has chosen Daily Active Users as their king metric.
Has the submission/voting algorithm changed?
Karma-weighed voting or simply takes more votes to get up on the front page?

Just curious.
https://ssl.jumpline.com/order/?c=2EDTEQGG

https://ssl.digitalspace.net/order/?c=3PALPWTQ

Above 2 are free for a year ... if the links doesn't work then visit http://www.free-webhosts.com/ and click on links for jumpline and digitalspace - it takes u to autolink for 12 months free offer.

the link below will take u to the top 10 cheap/free list

http://www.100best-free-web-space.com/
Don't fucking circlejerk so much here on news yc. The meta-meta talk is all crap. Get back to posting links to inspirational stories and insightful tech articles. All this meta talk is increasing the noise ratio.
Yeah, that era was pretty rough. But when Desqview 386 came along, things really took off :)
why did u move from free to paid service?
LOL or perhaps: I haven't coded since...
"my examples were not designed to actually be great real world examples, but I have a lot of less technical people reading my blog"

This is definitely the place to give a real world example if you have one handy. Most people here would understand it, we would love the discussion, and you might even get some good feedback.

And thanks for posting here :-)
Amazon has rapidly taken second place in MP3 Downloads
I think the John Galt speech is only something that Steve Yegge could have penned, if the length is anything to go by.
I admit, I was surprised Ev didn't keep plugging on Odeo and try to innovate beyond iTunes. Especially when I had the "that's it?!" reaction to Twitter that makes me look like a doofus now. Props to Ev, that goes down as one of the all time brilliant moves.
Results from an Experiment in Ad-Driven Books
I've worked with a lot of accounting data, which fits the relational DB model really well. But I can't understand why I have to use an OO model to display it on a screen as a table of rows and columns with the odd field scattered here and there. It just seems like a lot of extra complexity to me when all the users want to see is SELECT * FROM TRANSACTION.... made to look pretty.
No one is no one's follower. Someone who thinks they are is a blind follower.

A better approach is for people to realize who's ideas they follow and why.
Anybody ever heard of Netezza? I was told about it by someone who works with vast amounts of data - many terabytes every day. It's part of a hardware system that uses overwhelming processor power to segment and blast through data. You don't need the traditional headers or relational database structures to search like this. The technology is costly now (it's specialized hardware) but if you want to talk about where databases are going beyond the relational, this is one direction.
You and I (and now aykall) certainly know that the link is there, but it's needlessly non-standard UI.

User Interfaces are best when people get what they expect, and they don't need to overthink what they're doing.

In this case, it means that news.yc probably SHOULD support Feed Autodiscovery, by having link rel="alternate" specified, so firefox and other browsers put the easy to see RSS button on the corner.

Is it necessary? Of course not. But if a user is trying to stay abreast of what goes on on your site, it's usually better to give them what they expect.
Jaguar Marketing System Scam or Pyramid
Many online marketers believe that the Jaguar Marketing System is nothing more than a hyped up pyramid scheme.
I tried submitted something this morning the same time as someone else and it looked like my submission turned into a vote for the first person's submission. I like that method of dealing with multiple submissions.
The same guy also wrote code on the 5150 to do video:

http://www.oldskool.org/pc/8088_Corruption
Why do you think personality determines one's philosophy instead of vice versa?
Everything is worthless - trivial statements...
Matt's number 1 tip is the opposite:

"# Apply early. I’m guessing something like 75% of their applications are submitted in the last few days. That’s usually how those sorts of things work. Doing it earlier can only help get you a little more consideration time."

and leaving co:

"Start early. If you haven’t already begun your application, do so now! It’s due on April 2nd, and you probably should have started at least a month in advance. There’s certainly been cases where founders have been accepted with a last minute application, but why risk it? The longer you can think things through and iteratively improve your application, the better chance you’ve got."
It’s small ($300,000 - $500,000 for YCombinator, pre-tax, I’m estimating), but it’s nice to see that YCombinator is self-funding.
so my equation is (all variables range from 1 to 10, except for number of replied)

agreement/quality*insight-number of replies

if its above 2 then i upmod.... lol
I Love Lisp
ActiveResource is Incomplete
Validations are not working on the current ActiveResource. But the workaround is easy, check it out.
As if the horse isn't already dead enough
"Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting." -pg

Consider the effects of regulated voting (i.e. removing the voting links after a user's vote for a period of time, e.g. 1 hour for submissions and 5 minutes for comments) and regulated posting (removing the add comment box if the user has commented or voted recently, e.g. in the past 5 minutes) on the pernicious scourges of News.YC: rampant upmodding would become much less rampant,
popular lowest-common-denominator banality would subside since banal hilarity is only funny for a moment,
newcomer acclimation would improve as newcomers are directed to the discussion of the article,
karma gaming would remain unimportant as karma does not confer any additional benefits,
and comment deluge would slightly decline as long-winded retort threads would become more difficult.
Additionally, it might even prevent the worst cases of News.YC addiction.

The motivations for the above suggestion are twofold: firstly, that it takes time to read articles and comments thoroughly and little time to vote unintelligently or add a troll comment, and secondly, that scarcity of available voting and commenting power causes users to deliberately consider which sites are worth waiting to save and which comments are worth waiting to submit.

A more general solution would allow exponential rating, where a rating of five would be a multiple greater in importance than a rating of four, but the step function of delayed voting and commenting is an approximation. The idea is that intelligent users have very carefully reasoned tastes (c.f. pg and his essays), which act as a long-tail filter a la Chris Anderson. For them, most everything is dross, whereas there are a few gems in the rough that are orders of magnitude (i.e. exponentially) better. Popular lowest-common-denominator banality is popular precisely because of a lack of carefully reasoned tastes, and in aggregating opinions of the best news, News.YC could bias towards the intermittent but intelligent content by regulating votes and comments to only slightly discourage that content while greatly encumbering the introduction of banal content.

So, what say you?
Have to give this a huge "so what". Sorry :I
Well, as I said, there is nothing that cant be expressed in an RDBMS - at least at first. But let me give an example of the kind of use cases we see.

First, imagine having a database that allows one to freely create record types. One might have standard data types like contacts, events, emails, checks, expense reports, etc.

These record types are nodes. Now imagine being able to connect these nodes using any type of edge you like. For example a contact might be connected to an event as an "invitee". Thats how the edge would be labeled. Now the relational folks will say that that is a relationship that could be predicted. But at some point, some new type of record is created. And you as a user want to connect that record to existing records. For example you have added a "shoe" record type to keep track of all of your shoes. You then decide you want shoes to be connected to events so that you can map what shoes you wore to what events. You don't want to modify your schema. You don't want to add a new mapping table, you just want to connect the record. And you want to be able to query the graph for all the things of any type that are connected to that record. More importantly, you want the end user to be able to decide that it would be useful to connect shoes to events since no self respecting programmer is ever going to design such a system.

This is the type of flexibility that you need in a web application that will evolve over time. But the minute you want to connect that new record type to the existing object, you either have to modify your schema, or you have created a database that is highly flexible via totally generalized mapping tables, but is not optimized for these kinds of structures. For example just creating a giant mapping table to connect objects will work in an RDBMS but it is not at all optimized and will fall over at scale. Since we are building something that will handle awesome scale, using an RDBMS in this way was a non-starter. Philosophically, we probably have more in common with Google BigTable than with an RDBMS.
Didn't Matt apply late?

Considering there is no longer an option to start early, the only advice left to give is "do it now!"
Is there just the one feed for the whole site, or are there user and per-article comment feeds and a newest article feed somewhere non-obvious?
bad analogy i'd say. they may lose some shots but their team mates may score better that day.

At the end of the day, their target is to win the game so it doesn't matter who lost any number of the shots. If they lost the game then the team and all fans are emotionally affected.

The players will get paid at the end of the day. If a startup fails nobody cares and you are certainly not gonna get paid.
I've been there. Just remember that the best indicator of future success in business is having tried before--even if you failed. In the valley, it's a truism that VCs don't mind seeing a couple of failed companies in your past, as long as it's clear that you learned something from them. There's even some evidence that the same investors that gave you money last time (and you lost) are actually more likely to invest in your new company than someone they've just met who has no record of failure. Weird, huh? Failure is practically a virtue in high risk business like tech startups.

Take some time off, work on something else that's a little less stressful (I did part-time contract work for a couple of companies that I enjoyed working with--contract work pays well, and gives you lots of time off to relax), play some video games, talk to girls/boys, learn a new language or to play a musical instrument, read good books, enjoy time with your family/pets/friends.

In six months, or a year, you'll feel rested and ready to dig in again. It'll actually come sooner if you have an idea that you really love. That is what happened for me, though I had some downtime before finally giving up on my previous business where I'd stopped selling the products that I'd always sold and started slowly evolving the business into something else--but I was accepting no new clients, so the workload was quite low.
But copying that would be particularly cargo-cult-ish. The point there is that great people were uncertain, not that uncertain people were great. The thing to copy is the greatness, not the uncertainty. :-)

"Cargo Cult Software Engineering" should be required reading for all nerds:

http://stevemcconnell.com/ieeesoftware/eic10.htm
Very interesting article. Just last year I left a big (for New Zealand) insurance co to work in a small start up internet co. I have no security, a small salary but a much more fulfilling job.
I don't know why someone would downmod you for that comment, but I threw an upmod your way to try to even things out.
As with most of the west, the quoted opinions misunderstand the core strengths of western style of government. The issue of giving people a greater say in their society is of little consequence. If it was critical then the most successful nations would have something like the Athenian model of democracy. The strength of the parliamentary dictatorship models we like to think of as democracies draw their strength from a structure which plays powerful personalities against one another in a model that is non-violent and relatively cheap compared to known alternatives [1]; it gives these personalities motivation to find fault with one another rather than collude [2]; and it providers a resent mechanism for the situation that develops when the ruling grouping begin to take things for granted.

That evolution of the Westminster system is a narrative example I particularly like because it is one of the main models. The story is dominated by reforms aimed to prevent concentrations of power. Magna Carta, church separation (a change of convenience the the ruler of the time but - ultimately beneficial thanks to further developments under Elizabeth I that cemented religious freedom - retained), The Republic (a deliberate but failed attempt at beneficial reform - discarded), evolution of the bicameral parliament to add impediments to overbearing governments left in control of the lower house, evolution of the doctrine of separation of powers.

Novelties such as policy elections do nothing to supply the necessary mechanisms. And they don't give particularly good outcomes - you only need to see the sorts of rubbish that people in the street consider to be important when they vote for someone to see that mainstream people are ill-equipped to make well informed decisions about complex policy arrangements. It is heresy to say this.

[1] The state in Australia with no upper house is the one that is most notorious for corruption and general shonkiness; it has a department to prevent corruption that costs twice what an upper house would.

[2] One of the disadvantages of this is that both sides have an interest in increasing the size of government. Ron Pauls are thin on the ground everywhere.
Leadership 101: How to Command Respect through Body Language
No - ecommerce is about connecting buyers with sellers. The domains capture the intent, auctomatic provides the inventory to take advantage of that intent.

Powersellers used to be tied to eBay, now they can connect to huge vertical audiences that are tied to their intent to purchase hence increasing their sales. Makes a LOT of sense this.
Try FreeWebSpace.net (largest guide to free webhosting):

http://www.freewebspace.net/search/power.shtml

http://www.freewebspace.net/forums/