skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is classic Stonebraker. It's a favorite strategy of his to say something so offensive to the audience that they will be itching for a rebuttal. Then on closer inspection you discover that it's much ado about nothing.

Here is one example: he says Teradata used MapReduce techniques 20 years ago and he's right (Teradata's ability to handle arbitrarily large data sets with hash partitioning helped WalMart get to where it is today). A Teradata system makes additional assumptions regarding data placement that MapReduce doesn't. In a Teradata system the data is actually stored at the processing nodes. If you take the idea of MapReduce and "extend" it with an optimizer that knows where the data is and how it is organized, you get pretty close to the Teradata architecture.

Viola: an RDBMS based on MapReduce.

Now look closely at what he's saying: in terms of distributed database research, MapReduce is a step backwards.

Well, he may be right on there. MapReduce is not likely to help you win any database research grants - it was old news to that community 20 years go.
I don't understand how anybody can be remotely productive under such circumstances.Amphetamines?
You have to read the original article very closely or you'll miss their point: in terms of distributed database research, MapReduce is a step backwards.

So what else is new? Things interesting to database researchers often take two decades to become mainstream.

To be interesting to a database researcher you need to think way beyond MapReduce. Stuff like distributing queries over 10^12 RFID sensor nodes each storing different data in a different way, optimizing in real time and adapting to arbitrary breakdowns in the communications network.
Excellent story - well worth the read.

"We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security."

Now that would be funny if it came up in the anti trust lawsuit:

"You developed this competitor to a popular application and released it for free. Do you deny that this is anticompetitive?"

"Actually, we didn't develop that application, we didn't fund it, I have no idea where it came from - it just appeared on the CD we shipped Windows on."

"It just... 'appeared'?"

"Yes"

"May I remind you that you're under oath?"
When the final transmission is ready, we will retrofit all cars, at Tesla's expense, to meet the promised performance specifications.

For what those things cost I'd expect more than that.
20 Analytics Tools For Blogs
More classic jwz:

- http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...

- http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
Wordpress Hacks Hacking - With Power Comes Responsibility
C is only for drivers. All other tasks are better done in some other language (even Fortran for heavy numerical computation).
I'm sure you could make them self contained (i.e. no contacts on the outside) - some sort of coil around the edge maybe to pick up signals and power for the LEDs.
People have been looking the other way for too long. Many borrowers have been led to believe that lying on their loan applications is ok and brokers have been mis-stating the actual risk to the buyers of those loans.

It was fun while it lasted but the party's over.

I don't think the government should bail out anyone. What they should do is start regulating the entire industry better.
Google is down : 403 Forbidden
Except that it's not. At least not for the Google DC I'm hitting.
If you're shrewd, you may be able to get a good deal on some property. Just stay away from places where there will be new construction when things turn around.
More generally, somebody should arrange another Lightweight Languages day at MIT no matter what. Or maybe a Lightweight Languages days somewhere else. And wherever "they" organize it, it would be awesome if they could manage to webcast it and have people who cannot attend pose questions through IRC.

I attended Lightweight Languages once and it was awesome. Informal, a large variety of smart people, but each smart in their own way, that had a lot to genuinely learn from each other.

Sadly, conferences, even comparatively small and informal once, take some effort and some money to put together, and frankly it's not going to be me who is capable of coming up with either.
Their conclusion:

We found it advantageous to avoid techniques specific to functional programming, such as extensive use of higher-order functions, and instead focus on the aims of

(1) conveying elementary techniques of programming,

(2) introduction of essential concepts of computing, and

(3) fostering the development of analytic thinking and problem solving skills
To be entirely honest with y'all, I haven't carefully read all of this article. But I already have my opinion ready!

The fact that MapReduce is a step back, in a sense, is true. But it's a step back from a dead-end alleyway, a step away from a particular very complex and bloated programming model--to wit the SQL-based RDMS--that is good as far as it goes, but requires so much effort to implement that it is unlikely to be a great model to use as the basis for innovative implementations.

If you're going to do crazy shit of the sort that google does, massively distributed computations on very high volumes of data, then in order to do it well you have to keep it simple. Such is life. There are plenty of RDMSes that can do the full whammy of RDMS features, but try to take, say, one that does not allow for replication and then implement replication. See you next decade.

Sometimes taking a step back can help put things into perspective, is all I'm saying.
I'd be worried about getting a BSOD from these at an inopportune moment.
Bobby Fischer dead at 64
This is an entirely sensible piece. I'm not sure if it is relevant to hacking or to startups, but it is entirely sensible.

If A sells to B sells to C sells to A, then they have just created three trade deficits. This is why "the trade deficit with China" is an utterly meaningless concept. Maybe China sells things to the US, which sells things to Mexico, which sells things to China, or any other transitive combination, and voila, a trade deficit.

The only trade deficit that is somewhat meaningful is the trade deficit of a country with the rest of the world, all of it. Now even that trade deficit needs to be taken with a grain of salt. If the US has a trade deficit with the rest of the world, you have to wonder for a minute why on earth the citizens of all those other countries would be so happy to send goods America-bound and not to receive equal value in return. Whence their charity? How come the free lunch?

When a good economist smells a free lunch, s/he smells murky accounting. And indeed, there's murky accounting in the trade deficit. Oftentimes, services are not included. Even if they are, then investment isn't. It just so happens that the US is a good place to invest, relative to other countries, because it has a very well developed economic and financial system that can take advantage of capital well and bring high returns in capital-intensive industries. China, on the other hand, lacks the institutions required to make capital-intensive industries quite as lucrative, but it has cheap labor. Thus both countries specialize, but the Chinese investments flowing into the US bought with the money that Americans paid the Chinese to buy their goods--those investments simply do not count.

Hey! A deficit!

Is it a big deal?

Mwah... no.
The first time I used vi was in a summer camp while I was in high school. I had accidentally entered "view foo.txt" into a command prompt on a Linux box, and "view" was symlinked to "vi."

We couldn't figure out how to fix this, so we asked the instructor, who replied to us in a heavy German accent: "aha, you see, vi ees an edeetor, and weez everyzing eet does eet say beeeep."

Actually, he was speaking Dutch with a German accent, not English, but you get the idea.
Jango and Twitter Rock the House. Why?
I agree that computer displays suck for reading. But there is one important, very simple lesson to be learned from this about computer typography: while in print, serif fonts are always easier to read for long stretches of text and sans-serif should be used only for display (headings and the like), on computer screens it really helps to have very simple fonts with the minimum possible amount of embellishment. Some sort of Helvetica derivative is always easier to read, especially in small sizes, and even with the fanciest subpixel rendering, than a complex thick-and-thin serifed font designed with high-quality print in mind.

BTW, I haven't seen a Kindle yet. Somebody I know has one, but he doesn't live in the area and I'm unlikely to meet him for quite a while. Are they any more pleasant to read from than a computer screen?
I don't want to spoil the fun too much, but if you are subject to EU law (and don't ask me whether that depends on whether the data is European or on whether you are in Europe; I am not a lawyer) you cannot simply grab data of the net on the theory that raw data is not a creative work and thus not copyrighted. Just in case anybody gets it into their head to do innovative things with web-accessible databases of facts, Brussels has given us the wonders of the EU Database Directive, which makes raw data copyrightable. Phone books, registries of commerce, postal code databases, train timetables, and other such things that cannot be copyrighted in the US do fall under a copyright-like _sui generis_ IP regime in the EU.

Not that there isn't a case for sometimes just ignoring the fancy details of the law and going with "do first, ask permission later."

But I thought maybe you should know.
>This has been covered before.

Link?
Maybe some node is down :)
The beauty of MapReduce is in its elegant simplicity of use (once properly implemented) think of Unix shell commands like grep, sort, cut - simple functional tools (as in functional languages - zero side effects), which do only one task but do it amazingly well, Google just added a new type of screwdriver to the toolbox.
Oh, and in case anyone has things mixed up (I wouldn't expect it in this crowd, but you never know): no, trade deficits and budget deficits are entirely and utterly different things, no matter how often Lou Dobbs mentions them in the same sentence.
Bosses Don't Wear Bunny Slippers: If Markets Are So Great, Why Are There Firms?
Pioneering research shows 'Google Generation' is a myth
I was going to write something as well, but I grew impatient!
Turmoil at Joost as CTO sacked then hired by BBC on the same day
Thanks for passing this link along.
"Complete Idiot Officer"?
YouTubes Traffic Continues to Snowball
Trade deficit of a country (the one vs the rest of the world) is equal to investment of other people in the country, trade surplus equals investment in other countries.

Why is this so? Imagine there are only two countries in the world, USA and Japan, and US has a trade deficit. This means Japanese manufacturers sell their goods and do not convert all of what they earn in yen, they keep some part in US dollars. These money are directly or indirectly invested in US: if people keep these money in the bank, the bank invests them. Sorry, I'm not precise, but I hope you get the point.

Now, it doesn't say if the investment is good or bad: the invested money can be happily consumed and the investor could get less or nothing for his money. It doesn't also say who owns (controlls) what: it may turn out that after a while some part of the US economy is owned by Japanese, depending on what they choose to do with their money.
What a toll this kind of thing must take on oneself. I mean, in some ways it's good, becuase there's nothing that will make you appreciate the absence of pain like the prolonged presence of it. Still, his wrists were a mess, he was developing gastro-intestinal disorders, and I'm pretty sure he didn't have any friends during that time period.
I used to love the National Enquirer ;-) I love Valleywag too.
If you're into ambient/chillout, you might want to try jon hopkins or blue states. Kind of "elevator music", still, it works for me ;-) I'm also a big fan of last.fm in discovery mode for that matter.
China close to becoming largest internet market by users
Video Game Champions
Folks In Europe Trying To Connect The CIA To Every Successful American Internet Company?
What Bugs Apple Fans
Google officially supporting the Analytics AIR application
This sounds like "if it takes more effort, it must be better" nonsense.

Further, I didn't see any mention of a control group. Are the children simply acting like children, or have their analytic skills actually deteriorated because of Internet use? I very strongly suspect the former.
Well I am shocked, just SHOCKED! Who'd have though that just putting a little "hacker safe" logo on your website wouldn't actually make you safe from hackers??

And what are people supposed to do now? Write secure web sites? You know that's hard, right?
[Note: Although the system attributes this post to a single author, it was written by David J. DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker]

Oh, the irony.
Have you read the original article? They are really comparing some abstract MapReduce with RDBMSs and saying: MapReduce sux its not relational. And from my perspective making an ass out of themselves. Some quotes:

"we have serious doubts about how well MapReduce applications can scale."

"All of the following features are routinely provided by modern DBMSs, and all are missing from MapReduce:

* Bulk loader -- to transform input data in files into a desired format and load it into a DBMS

/../

* Updates -- to change the data in the data base"

If this is not criticizing MapReduce because it's not a RDBMS what is. The only thing worth reading is their summary which is quite good, until it hits this point:

"Last, before MapReduce can measure up to modern DBMSs, there is a large collection of unmet features and required tools that must be added.".

So no, I'm not that impressed with him right now, since 2 out of 3 (I've read the One Size Fits All paper which I found interesting) things I have read about him/from him to me is utter bull*.

Thats why I stated that he's academically merited, which at least is a fact.
"I've seen companies that build proprietary systems around older or seldom-used technology (like the PICK operating system or dBase) and then wonder why they can't attract people to work on them. You're much better off using standard off-the-shelf software whenever possible and then building any proprietary software using currently popular products."

As a long-time practitioner of the PICK Operating System, I have witnessed hundreds of companies who would NOT be "better off using standard off-the shelf software".

Stop and think how illogical this argument is. The reason people choose seldom-used technologies is because they are better for them. There are plenty of good programmers everywhere if you bother to look hard enough.

This is like saying, "If you have deliveries to make but can't find a truck driver, buy a car and make more trips."

Addendum: This is what typically happens in a PICK environment:

1. Company implements PICK based system and hires PICK programmers to make the system do whatever it needs. (A PICK shop typically has 10% to 20% of the people of a mainframe shop.)

2. Company is successful for many years.

3. Company is acquired by MegaCorp.

4. MegaCorp MBA's don't understand why Company has such old proprietary technology and "not enough help". They spend $10 to $20 million to convert to SAP or Oracle.

5. Halfway through failing conversion that is over a year late and $10 million over budget, MegaCorp calls edw519 to propose a project to "convert them back to PICK".

6. MegaCorp MBA's move on and blog about stuff they know nothing about.
Google cache link: http://209.85.135.104/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...
Separate ASK YC from news posts
Try some Godspeed You! Black Emperor
MyBlogLog Web Services Beta Signup
Just read about this earlier today. Has anyone signed up or checked out the API?
My point is simply that iPod factories and soybean fields are not fungible. China has an unnatural industrial base, that doesn't suit the purposes of its population--it reminds me somewhat of the forced industrialization of the USSR, which worked great at singlemindedly producing tanks and rocket launchers. But now they have a shakey, unbalanced oil economy, while Germany and Japan (nominal losers) are both much healthier.
It would be interesting to use this with a supervisor program which receives a rating from the user about whether an image is appealing and then attempts to make images with similar characteristics.
Good point, some of these datasets are open/free...others are not. If anyone is going to use a "seemingly-free" data set in open source code, try to get permission under the appropriate license. There is a good overview of the difficulties here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Data
This title makes no sense. Was Fonzie jumping over a more popular show disguised as a shark? Let's mix some metaphors!
What's with the stereo equalizer theme? Who wants their analytics reports to look like an mp3 player?
"The winning stories are published in the yearly anthology L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of Future"

Hm, I would not be happy about that.
Poker is a negative sum game, since the house takes a rake.

However, since there is more skill involved, you can take advantage of less skilled opponents.

That being said, attempting to gamble to cover living costs is a horrible idea. Statistically it would not be low of probability to go on a losing streak of a week or more straight, even if you were playing quite well.
Hell yeah! I'm just recently learning Vim and I wondered what was I thinking back then when I was using normal text editors. I especially love the :sp command as it allows me to open multiple windows of my code within the same screen. And oh yes the '.' command is the best. I'm still currently getting the hang of it though.
Have you pondered the moral implications of your startup?
I'm working on a start-up that, if successful, has potential to be a major reference of human knowledge (think wikipedia in terms of vastness and impact, although it isn't particularly similar to wikipedia). We won't be able to control who uses our resource, and as it is community-driven, the specific direction our site will take is unknowable.

Call us naive optimists, but we're convinced that, for the most part, our startup will be used for good purposes. We're strongly against censorship, and we don't think censorship really works on the web anyway, so we'll be leaving this up to chance.

An example of a startup that might be slipping to the darkside is Reddit. I know Reddit was backed by YC, so anything perceived as a bash might not be well-received here. Nonetheless, I'm certainly not alone in thinking that the Reddit community has taken a turn for the worse. My biggest problem with Reddit today is its lameness, however, Reddit is not just lame, it is increasingly used to propagate toxic misinformation and hate speech. I wouldn't be so troubled if I didn't see so many members of the community at Reddit embracing those sentiments.

I'm pretty sure that the Reddit team doesn't condone hate speech, and I'm not proposing they censor the site (it wouldn't really be possible, anyway), but it makes me wonder:

What do they think about this segment of the community they built?
Do they wish they'd done anything differently?
Is there anything my team can or should do to minimize our site's use for what we consider to be immoral purposes?
Has anybody here spent much time thinking about this issue? Have you come to any conclusions?
I feel fortunate that I am young enough to have grown up with the influence of the Internet, yet old enough to have had a formal introduction to the card catalog and good old fashioned go-to-the-library research. I can't imagine what High School would have been like if the Internet had been taking off - I don't think I would have graduated.
Change your password :)
oh...my...god...he's a better dancer than I am :P
10 Tech Urban Legends Exposed
The world of information technology is not immune from the reaches of the urban legend. This slideshow includes some of the most notable IT urban legends that have propagated over the years.
I think that the "eyeball" model is fine, as long as you're not spending too much money to get those eyeballs, which was the problem with web 1.0.
I just can't believe that there isn't a forward thinking Angle/VC out there that wouldn't be willing to keep the servers hot for such a classic viral internet 'phenom' until, over time, a natural monetary use appears. Twitter (like youtube) maintains it's cool factor by not telegraphing how it hopes it'll make it's founders billions.
Bah, humbug. ;-)
I wonder how Google tracks it's short term outages and what it does with that to maintain it's perception of 'always on'.
Hacking the OLPC
:-(

Fischer is my hero. If you are even mildly interested in chess, you should analyze his games. His games can only be called 'outrageous'. He would sacrifice a queen and couple of steps later he would win when no one else see it coming!

I usually sit with an open mouth for a five minutes when I analyze his games. They are masterpieces.
I don't listen to anything while I'm coding. It's too distracting. Actually, I blacklisted the sound drivers on my work laptop to eliminate any possibility of a random program making noise while I'm trying to work.

Though, that does limit the utility of YouTube.
Well, in that same vein, the Directive "shall not prevent the lawful use of the database by a lawful user" (Art. 6(1)) and more fundamentally, any copyright to issue is subject to traditional limitations to copyright which allow:

-reproduction for private purposes of a non-electronic database;

-use for the sole purpose of illustration for teaching or scientific research, as long as the source is indicated and to the extent justified by the non-commercial purpose to be achieved;

-use for the purposes of public security of for the purposes of an administrative or judicial procedure.

Therefore, if these datasets have been made available for public consumption then, arguably, you may use them for personal use. However, the creation of commercial derivative works may be encumbered.

But thanks for the heads up nonetheless; I'd never heard of it before and it was a fun 10 seconds of research.

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi!celex...
List of device bandwidths
Human Body and Mind
200 Free Online Classes
How to Rip Netflix 'Watch Now' Movies
Higher wine prices boost drinking pleasure (people are sheep)
I'm not proposing they censor the site (it wouldn't really be possible, anyway

Sure it is. The problem is that censors are always idiots: They define things as "good" and "evil" rather than "true" and "false". This tends to leave them and their compadres reading nothing but falsehood.
Wrong what your trading is important.

Let's say A, B and C all have balanced trade:

If A sells soda for 1USD to B then:
A has a trade surplus of 1$.
B has a trade deficit of 1$.
C has balanced trade.

If B then sells apples for 1USD to C then:
A still has a trade surplus of 1$.
B now has balanced trade.
C has a trade deficit of 1$.

If C then sells corn for 1USD to A then:
A, B and C have balanced trade.

The problem is when B and C trade with something other than dollars. China is keeping a large quantity of USD on hand and not trading them which messes with the value of the USD.
Stop worrying. Now.

Every nanosecond you worry about this is a resource permanently lost from where it belongs: your startup.

What if Henry Ford hesitated because he worried about drunk drivers? Or Edison and Bell hesitated because they worried about drug dealers and criminals? We'd still have automobiles, lights, and phones. But you would have never heard of any of them.

You have little or no control over this. Have a little faith in others; stepping forward to confront evil is their thing. In the meantime, do yours.
"Things happen, what the hell!"
- Terry Pratchet, The Hogfather.