skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Constructing queries actually isn't one of the things ORMs do very well, so far. What they do well is provide a layer of logic for things like validation, triggers, and security.

Whatever backend your persistence system uses, you'll probably always want to take advantage of tools that are geared to that. If it happens to use flat files, there will probably be situations where you'll want to use grep, or cp, or cat. If it happens to use an RDBMS, there will probably be situations where you'll want to use SQL. I imagine this will be the case for a long time.

So far, I've been dubious of query-generating ORMs (except for basic CRUD), but I'm guessing that that's partly because they've been awkward. They've been getting better though. And I think the quality of the SQL-generating abstractions, and the languages they're written in, makes a big difference. If the abstraction is less powerful than SQL it will be annoying. If it's more powerful it won't be.

How could it be more powerful? By being written in a powerful language; by starting with a low-level, comprehensive mapping to SQL expressions and then using the power of the programming language to build up from there. I know that some Lisp packages offer such mappings, but I don't know much about working with them. It would be interesting to have a play though.
I work for a site that gets about 350,000 unique visitors a month and 22,000 visits a day. So far this month, we have 2,403,259 page impressions and 23,232 clicks, totalling about $5,200.

Could we be doing better with affiliate advertizing?
I agree with you, but many designers working in Asia are in fact Europeans (many/most of them from Latin Europe). This has been necessary at some time in history, because otherwise their products didn't get much attention in Europe.

So Asian taste and European taste are simply much different.
10 less-than-great personality traits of entrepreneurs
I've always wanted to be an Apple customer, since their products have such a nice fit and finish. The problems I have, though, are always with their excessive lock-in - and the FairPlay DRM is the least of it. As a person who likes to customize my technology, the lock-in really chafes.

Example: I [stupidly] bought an iPod without realizing how it would interface with my Windows machine. I assumed that it would work just like the cheapo $20 MP3 player I had bought for my 10 year old niece. But no, dragging files to a mounted drive is much too plebeian for Apple. Apple requires iTunes, since it's better at "organizing" my music, even though I have never bought anything from the iTunes Music Store. I tolerated iTunes as long as I could, but I eventually needed my own podcatcher software and iTunes was getting in the way of dumping files onto the MP3 player. One of the most satisfying days in my life was when I installed Rockbox on my iPod and was then able to remove iTunes from my system.

I'd like to try an iPhone as well, but I don't think that I could stand the constraints on that either.
My first "follower" on twitter was a spammer. Whoops!
This is what I came away with after working on the Netflix dataset.

Incentives, not perceptions, are what need to be changed for realizing better recommendation engines (or collaborative filtering algorithms; whatever you call them).
Negative recommendations are not a good idea. Unlike false positives, the consumer really has no way of knowing whether a negative was in reality true or false. Recommendations are also about feeding our ego , even if the engine is ultimately basing its suggestions on consumers whose tastes are very similar to yours.
It is indeed magical; consumers who think they are expanding horizons by seeking out indies or documentaries on Netflix are simply discovering latent interests that have already been explored by others in your interest cluster.
The author is right though; false positives are what weigh most heavily on our perceptive scales. Risk aversion ensures that people do not venture out beyond what are suggested to them (by an automated agent or friend), and collaborative filtering algorithms have a cold start problem. For a movie to appear on the radar, enough people need to have watched and expressed enjoyment. Digital filtering makes it even harder for random exploration that is needed to seed these. Failing that, you get middling recommendations like that of Netflix, where the average rating (~=3.6) is no better that what you would get without it.
There is one easy way to get around the risk aversion obstacle. Offer "free" movies from a different, high variance list of movies, with "free" meaning a fourth movie on a three-per-month subscription, and variance being high on the predicted ratings of the consumer. Such an offer, while being marginally more expensive for Netflix, will allow consumers to experiment without any perceived costs (which, currently is the wait for the next Wire or Deadwood DVD you could have gotten otherwise).
If I may speculate, recommendations should be about gentle, guided exploration and not avoidance.
I guess it depends on

a. What kind of functionality are you trying to expose?
b. End user constraints, much like bostonbiz raised

Tumblr has a bookmarklet, but its limited because it does not let you tag your tumblrs. I find that limiting, but I guess thats what they have settled for. On the other hand, delicious offers a toolbar with a buttload of functionality built in.

This may sound silly, but I guess you could start off with a bookmarklet, and let the users decide. Just a thought...
Customers are the most honest people you'll ever meet
I'm guilty of a few of those
That's true. May be SQL is really going to be the 100 year language.... at least for business applications.
South American Software Development
Interesting, but hardly limited only to entrepreneurs. 99% of the people I've worked with have all exhibited at least one of these traits, and most people show 2 or more.
Using GoogleMail.com
Do you use ActiveRecord with Java or .Net? It seems to me that DataMapper is more popular in Java but I don't about ActiveRecord.
Scroll wheels have also lessened the value of keeping things above the fold.
I have bought a few copies to give to some hacker friends, so I wouldn't mind a discount too :).

I think it is the only book I have bought more than one copy of, so kudos to pg's writing skills.
Both in science and in the industry things tend to progress in stages. It's very easy to sell an idea that advances one step ahead, but it's quite hard to make people buy your idea if you try to take a few steps with a single leap. That's why people with very radical ideas in science are often dismissed as crazies a priori.

On the other hand, I have seen some quite advanced car ideas in literature from as far as the late 1800s.
It's entirely not possible. The opinion leaders have to die or retire and new people thinking new thoughts have to come along.

Think "natural selection" rather than Lamarckian evolution.
Frankly, I'm getting wary of ANY abstraction layer that tries to insulate you completely from the stuff below.

You know that rule that all abstractions leak? I think it's not about fixing all leaks, it's about making them leak in a sensible manner that you won't trip over when you do "common" stuff but will still let you access the full power when you need it.
Uh...

I use Hibernate with Java at work. My AR and DM usage is with Ruby (and specifically, merb) at home. Wasn't aware that Java had anything like DM. Have a link handy?
I'm not sure what anybody expected to have happen here. There's no truly legitimate use for Hymn: if you don't want to use DRM-encumbered tracks from Apple's proprietary iTunes store, don't buy tracks from iTunes. I don't understand why people believe they have the right to force Apple to sell things on terms other than Apple's.

This is nothing at all like attempts to shut down BitTorrent. Legitimate use is a fig leaf with BitTorrent as well, but it's a real fig leaf: you can download a Linux kernel with it. You can't "rescue" any legitimate content with Hymn; you promised Apple you'd abide by their license when you downloaded the tracks.
No one will ever force you to become a permanent corporate drone, buy a McMansion, and populate it with screaming children. Not now, not at any age. If and when you make the progression, it will be on your own free will. No evil overlord will have disqualified you from startup adventures. You will have done it entirely on your own.
What do I win for all 10?

Brilliant: "most people will tell you $50 million, and you know they’re lying. I’m already discounting it because I’m a venture guy just like you are.” And they’d say, “Yeah, but $18 million just isn’t interesting.” So I changed my spreadsheet to say $50 million. And they said, “OK, that’s pretty interesting.” - James Currier, founder, Tickle
You do get into an odd legal area, though, when that license allows you to burn the music to a CD. Once the music is on a CD, can the license extend to say that you can't then rip the tracks, which is otherwise covered under fair-use? (Remember the controversial "Rip, Mix, Burn" slogan that Apple itself used to sell iMac's?)

I know that the legal system doesn't operate under mathematic principals, but if I can legally transform from A to B and from B to C, why should it be illegal to directly transform from A to C?
Damn, I only have 7 months left. :(

I better get my act together and launch something!
I concur, having faced similary problems. Scala's association with java has, so far, been more of a curse than a blessing. But it is an interesting language.

To me, scala feels like a language with headroom, to use audio parlance. It's easy to get started, since you can code in pretty conventional ways. It has sophisticated things to learn about that you can use to write more expressive code, but the key differentiator from Haskell, say, is that you don't need to know all these to get things done. With scala you can hit the ground running.
In praise of mandatory indentation for novice programmers
All clicks are not equal, says Microsoft
UK industrial designers Dick Powell and Richard Seymour had a television programme called Better By Design in which they designed products immersively. They also had some other techniques. One was to seek overlooked advances in material science. Another was to seek a "standing wave" in product design. This is an element in a design which is blindly and repeatedly copied.

You may benefit from the most widespread example of this analysis because their company, Seymour Powell, inverted the cordless kettle. The initial design worked in one orientation. Copies are omni-directional.
Get a free copy of the "Free" issue of Wired
If you met someone who didn't have at least one of these traits, I'd be willing to bet that he might be diagnosable as a sociopath. These are all just a bunch of base human emotions, really. I think the author is simply trying to point out that he thinks entrepreneurs exhibit them to higher degrees than most people.
Ask YC: Is anyone here using GTD?
David Allen's system for organizing tasks from "Getting Things Done" was fairly popular on reddit in the early days, then the name seemed to have fell into oblivion.

At first I thought it might be a fad, then I gave it a read and the system does make a lot of sense. It may be an overkill for most people, but for things like running a startup, the amount of juggling may be able to justify the system's complexity.

I was wondering if anyone else here is using some form of GTD to organize your work and/or non-work related tasks. Why and why not? How do you use your GTD system? How do you organize if you are not using it?
We've found an interesting use for it in our offices already. I tossed it on our main server and we're using it in conjunction with our version control system to keep track of who is working on what, what has been completed, and to ask questions if someone needs help with something. We are also using the voting aspect to present new ideas. If a majority of us have voted yes, it is then added to our queue of features.

Thank you very much. As most of use are used to social bookmarking sites, it integrated in to the work flow beautifully.
I can see you don't grasp the concept of humor.
Euler problems in functional Python
Avenue A Razorfish 2008 Digital Outlook Report
Writing tip: When the first paragraph of your essay is an extensive apology for the poorly worded title... your title is poorly worded.

If you're gonna linkbait do it like you mean it. Otherwise the effect is that of Darth Vader saying "I beg your pardon".
For some reason I misread "XML Turnpike"...
http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html

"There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper."
I'm working on a micropayments engine you could use to sell em.
Bookmarklet if you can, since it will instantly be compatible with most browsers (as long as you're careful).

If it only needs to act when the user clicks it then bookmarklet should be sufficient. If it needs to automatically do things in the background without user interaction then you'll need to do toolbars.
Bill Gates' presentation
What if we made them pass a test before being able to register?
The Joys of String Allocation
Ask YC: Some sites where I can buy pdf books related to programming and user interface design?
Except:
oreilly
pragprog
apress
It looks like the author has little or no acquaintance with Lisp or Scheme in teaching, based on this post:

http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/02/boolean-confusion.html
Bookmarklet!

http://tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com/2008/02/initial-bookmarkle...
the car design is more or less the same as what you'd find in the 1950s on a typical automobile except that it simply has more of what we don't need

That is a very insightful observation, and it sheds light on the reason why "visions of the future" are always so wrong: they aren't designed for the future. They're designed for the present, purposefully.

That wacky car of the 1950s doesn't represent an automotive engineer's thoughtful attempt to redesign the car. It's not even a real product! It's a marketing gimmick designed to sell the typical car of the 1950s. The idea is that Joe Consumer sees the "Car of the Future", notes that it's covered in chrome, subliminally associates chrome with Progress and Style, and then happily splurges on today's chrome-covered model down at the local Mercury dealer.

Naturally, considering it's raison d'etre, the Gimmick Car looks exactly like the cars that were for sale at the time, only more so.

The lesson to draw here is that most of the "paradigm trap" is a marketing barrier. It turns out to be generally more profitable to sell people a slight variation on what they already like than to show them something totally different and have to prove that it's better. It turns out that the real "vehicle of the future" invented around 1950 was the Land Rover, but that took a long time for people to get used to.
The value of adding vastly more memory in a server is obvious. However, could someone explain the problem that required solving by a team of 20 people?
Ask News.YC: Anyone using Adobe Flex?  Do you like it?
I've got a (potential) job offer where they're evaluating switching from ColdFusion to Flex. Seems like Flex is getting a lot of pub lately, but my sense is that it sucks. ActionScript is cumbersome and difficult to learn; there's a lot of programming through xml, which I don't really care for. Can anyone disabuse me of this notion?

For the record, I don't know anything about ColdFusion either. But my sense is that it sucks too.
Are Fat People More Extroverted?
We think with our bodies, not just our brains
Bogus.

For a recursive twist I typed in cwire.org.

"""
Your site is valued at: $4,906

Your site could sell text link advertisements at a rate of approximately $0/Link/Month.

If you sell eight links, you could earn approximately $0/Month selling text links on your site.

Your site could earn approximately $135/Month through affiliate marketing".

Your site could earn approximately $0/Month through independent advertising arrangements specific to your site's niche.
"""
It's "hard" because every SQL implementation is so different. AR pretends you can change one line in a config file to change databases (they even brag about it), but I've never seen it work that way. It also doesn't help that AR just leaves many of its own features unimplemented for various databases, and doesn't even mention them in the docs.

I'm a bit scared of SQL because it's a pain to use, and I've used object databases with great success (and no pain). For complex queries, its pseudo-English syntax is more trouble than it's worth. And one of the most common uses today is full-text search, but SQL doesn't let you search that. (Officially, it doesn't even provide INDEXes; that's probably why CREATE INDEX syntax is not the same anywhere.) I don't understand why so many otherwise-great systems (like Rails) force you to use SQL.

To take another example of a standard implemented by different companies, I've taken nontrivial Common Lisp programs from one compiler to another, and almost never had problems. I would have thought that CL would be a much harder standard to get consistent than SQL, but apparently it's not.
PHP: An Introspective Retrospective
I don't feel the need to convince anybody of that which they do not know. Also, I don't feel that having data of users is more advantageous than proving my point; there are also other pieces of info I can dig up (if you're interested) that may or may not strengthen my argument. I am VERY open to the idea that I might be wrong, which indeed might be the case. However, I will always maintain that what most concerns me about the nature of this discussion is NOT the efforts put forward to solve a perceived problem but the way in which a threat is interpreted and what we are willing to give up in exchange for dealing with the perceived threat.

Btw, I really don't want to come off as being antagonistic here. I'm sticking to my view until I see a benefit to what everybody has been advocating. In the meantime, feel free to downmod me if you disagree. I have no problem paying a penalty for disagreeing, if that is the cost associated with expressing my views, regardless of how well they are accepted.

(thanks for reading this long-ass post if you got this far!!)
Adobe AIR & Its Hybrid App Dreams
recursive twist: cwire.org valued at $4,906 - which "could earn approximately $135/Month through affiliate marketing"!
Summary: "My 18 yo daughter likes FB because her friends are there. Also, I am illiterate."
I didn't think that it is that bad

I am by no means a flash flex expert but I used it on my latest app, actionscript is pretty straightforward ( especially if you shell out for flexdevelop ). The xml is annoying but manageable. Help is easy to get on forums and #flex

You can download like a 2 month free trial of flexdevelop, make a small app and see what you think.
Happy birthday jraines!
Interesting! I especially like how you handle automatic image extraction - is it open-sourced?
Do not learn Perl
Songtapper - Tap spacebar to tune: It knows song
well in egypt sap just sells software not optimized business process methods
Since I'm forty, I'll just ignore those last three words in that title. I've now enough experience to know what works and what doesn't, and how to do things profitably and well. The only thing I don't know is if I have enough stamina to essentially work two "jobs" indefinitely until I no longer need the "day job". In my late twenties I worked full time supporting my family while studying full time at university. In the four years that I did that, I thought it was going to kill me. I probably shouldn't expect any different with my startup efforts.
You're halfway there. What you describe is genetic algorithms in their classical implementation.

Here he uses a FPGA, a kind of processor that can be rewired at will, in hardware. The gates can be programmed into the various boolean operators you know, usually to implement a specialized binary processor (say, a DSP).

Binary here means that after a set amount of time set by a clock, every cell will either be in a ON (1) or OFF (0) state.

The researcher here uses genetic algorithms to find the best configuration of gates to perform the required task.

What's new here is that the fittest "program" doesn't work in a digital fashion like classical processors. It doesn't have a clock, and acts as an extremely minified electronic analogical circuit.

I'd love to see how this could be combined with hybrots...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrot
I'm downloading the SDK now, which seems like it was released under a modified GPL.
I think there are similarities between Facebook and Twitter in that the networks that form are localized within groups of individuals that are familiar with each other. Facebook originally did not have a spam problem up until they themselves decided to spam their users in an effort to monetize their traffic.

Twitter, if it is to be profitable through advertising, will have "spam" in the form of advertisements from within Twitter the same way Facebook has various forms of spam from within (Facebook apps included!).

Nonetheless, 1 million users along with the claim of the article is impressive at this point. I don't use Twitter (how un-2007/2008 of me no doubt) so I cannot comment on getting spam.
It got Happy Birthday and the Star Spangled Banner.

Couldn't get InaGaddaDaVida.
Cheap Rails VPS options
Sun Leaks 6-core Intel Xeon, Nehalem Details
Freelance Freedom #41
(1..100).inject(&:+)
19 to get Red Bull.
I don't install toolbars unless there's something extremely compelling there. I detest them, probably because deep down I still associate them with malware.

Bookmarklets, on the other hand, are lightweight and portable across browsers.
Absolutely agreed. So much of what makes Rails "easier" than other frameworks is based on a disregard for established best-practices -- particularly with regard to encapsulation and data-hiding. Monkey-patching is but one example.

Another is rails' attitude toward private data. Every DB field on an ActiveRecord object is world-writable, whether you like it or not. That's fine for prototyping, and works adequately well when you have a small team of developers who never get rushed or sloppy, but is a terrible idea for long-term code stability.

Now, you can hack around this and make attributes private-ish, but it's not easy, and as best as I can tell, nobody in the rails community actually does it on a regular basis. This blows my mind. Yes, sometimes you want the ability to rapidly hack up a prototype, but if your framework precludes the ability to turn that prototype into a robust model with minimal effort, then I think your framework is flawed.

/flame-proof suit on/
He isn't attacking the Asian races. Clearly, by his argument, Asians who grow up in America or Europe should be just as capable at designing beautiful things as the "natives" are. His whole point, to me, is that there are cultural differences between the Asian and European countries, no surprise there, and those differences have influenced design decisions.

For all I know, the Japanese and Chinese abhor European / American designed products, such as the iPod, because it doesn't have enough features and lacks seven different equalizers.
I think the hardest part of breaking out of a paradigm is to realize that you're in one. For example, in physics, the only time physicists ever break out of an existing paradigm en masse is when stuff starts breaking so badly that you realize there must be an erroneous assumption somewhere. (e.g., the Michelson-Morley experiment that proved that there is no aether.)
hmm ... couldn't almost every point in the article (and many more not in the article) be said of Lisp/Lisp-like languages ?
Will you also consider adding an "on:" link to all other pages that let you view comments, such as /item and /x ?
Christ, Perl users are insufferable.
Why I hate ruby.